An Open Letter To My Father

I don’t even know where to begin.

I’ve started and stopped this letter more times than I can count. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because the truth is complicated. You and I didn’t have a perfect relationship. We never did. Sometimes that makes the grief harder to explain. It is hard to explain to someone that even though I never truly had you in my life, the pain of losing you is still incredibly strong.

You left when I was two. After that, you were around, but not really. Moments here and there. Long stretches of absence. A relationship built more on wondering than knowing.

It wasn’t until my high school years that we started to find our way back to each other. Conversations got longer. The distance felt smaller. I thought we had time to fix what was broken, time to say what we hadn’t, time to grow into something steadier.

I didn’t know how wrong I was.

Often, I find myself replaying conversations we had, or maybe it is more accurate to say the moments of silence we sat in together. I know we were both trying. Still, we rarely knew what to talk about because you had missed so much of my life.

I have always struggled to find the right way to heal. The right way to say that I was hurt.

I spoke briefly with a therapist after you died, and we talked about the many ways I grieved you long before you were gone. Baseball games you never showed up to. Wrestling tournaments you never showed up to. And most importantly, my high school graduation, where you promised you would be there, and you never showed up.

Those moments taught me how to expect absence before I ever learned how to expect love.

I am angry.
Angry at you for leaving in the ways you did.
Angry at myself for still hoping it would all work itself out.

I replay our conversations constantly. I hear the words I should have said. The I love yous I often swallowed when hanging up the phone. The questions I did not know how to ask and instead replaced with silence. The apologies I thought I could save for later. Now they echo in the emptiest places of me.

Your struggles with drugs did not stay with you alone. They followed me quietly into adulthood, shaping parts of me I did not understand for a long time. Your chaos became my fear of commitment. Your inconsistency became my confusion around love. I learned how to brace for loss before I ever learned how to trust stability.

Some days, I convince myself I am okay. I laugh. I work. I scroll through life like I have moved on. But the truth is that every quiet moment brings me back to you. Every empty chair feels like it belongs to you.

And it hurts in a way that feels hard to justify, because how do you grieve someone who was both there and not there? How do you miss someone who did not always know how to stay?

When people say, “time heals,” I want to scream. Time has not healed anything. Time has only made the silence longer.

I miss you.
I truly miss you.

I miss the version of us that was still becoming. I miss the conversations we were finally having. I miss the chance to ask you who you were when you were not struggling, and to tell you who I was becoming despite it all.

I hate that grief makes me forget sometimes. That I have to close my eyes and force myself to hear your voice because it does not come easily anymore. Forgetting feels like losing you all over again.

I hate that even through all of this pain, I still think of you every single day. Sometimes when I laugh a certain way and hear your voice. Sometimes when Uncle Kracker’s Follow Me plays on my playlist. Sometimes it is the simplest things that remind me of you, like the black ice car scent that brings me peace while driving, because you never steered away from that one scent. Sometimes I think of you simply because I know how much you would have loved the song playing on the radio.

I hate that there are still days when I think it would be so cool to call you and tell you about my life.

Even though I hate so many things about you being gone, I can still say that I love knowing you are looking over me.

I love that even though you missed one of the greatest days of my life, my husband was gracious enough to allow a small piece of you into our ceremony.

So this letter is my lifeline. It is my way of holding onto what we did have while learning how to release what we never will. I do not know if you can hear me. I do not know if these words reach wherever you are. But if they do, I hope you know this:

I loved you, even when it was hard.
I still love you.

And even though I am still untangling what your absence left behind, I am here. Still trying. Still learning how to love without bracing for disappearance.

This is my letter to you.
The one I never got to give.
The one that lived in my chest, unfinished and heavy.

Now it lives here instead.