For a long time, I thought my feelings after my father’s death were mostly anger. He died suddenly but peacefully two years ago, and the shock left my family of origin in a state we’re still piecing back together. In therapy, I spoke about my anger. It felt easier to sit in that space—anger is straightforward. It doesn’t demand softness.
Then the anger began to shift, slipping into something harder to pin down. Grief showed up, stubborn and subtle, not content to let me stay where I was. Love crept in too, and a realization that caught me off guard: I was starting to see him more clearly. My dad was a brilliant, endlessly curious man—likely AuDHD—with a mind as sharp as his humor and a knack for following his fascinations down deep rabbit holes. The law, cattle, the Kennedy assassination—these were his special interests, and he approached them with a focus I always admired.
I miss him every day.
Grief didn’t feel like grief for a long time. It rarely announces itself with clarity, especially when you’ve been in survival mode for years. For me, the years leading up to and following his death were full of chronic illness, relentless exhaustion, and a sense of being emotionally underwater. Grief wasn’t a luxury I could afford then. It didn’t have a name, not until I began caring for my body and accommodating my needs in ways that let me finally feel what had been waiting.
And what was waiting? Grief, yes, but not the kind I expected. It was layered—grief for the father he was, for the father he wasn’t, for the conversations we had and never had and never will. It was grief tied up in love, in the memories that had been crowded out by anger, and in the ways I now see him reflected in myself.
I miss his kindness, his quiet humor, the way he lit up when something grabbed his attention. I even miss the things that used to frustrate me, though, as happens with the grieving, I’m forgetting more each day why those things ever frustrated me.
Grief is nothing if not persistent. It waits in the wings, patient but relentless, until you have the space to meet it. When it arrives, it doesn’t come alone—it brings love, regret, understanding, and even the odd moment of joy.
These days, I talk about my dad differently. The resentment still lingers occasionally, but it no longer stands alone. It’s softened by the love and the knowing, by the understanding that grief isn’t linear and love isn’t simple.
Grief has taught me something I didn’t expect: that loss doesn’t diminish connection—it deepens it, sharpens it, even in its most complex moments. My dad is gone, and yet, he’s still here, woven into the person I’m becoming.
Maybe that’s what grief offers in the end—a complicated reminder that love doesn’t end, even when it becomes more difficult to hold.