My Love Letter to an Inevitable Death

How losing a father as a child changes you, as a husband, father and a writer.

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh

Losing a father at a young age changes you. It changes you in ways you may not understand for years to come, as your awareness of both the loss itself and its impact becomes clearer as you move further away from the event. Every time you hear of someone losing a father, the pain, the finality and the confusion returns and lingers. You fumble for words of consolation when all you can really consider is just how much it’s going to hurt, how much it’s going to matter for years to come.

I was five when it happened. I was there. I saw it happen. To the loved ones around me, it was, from what I can gather, a tragic, but inevitable conclusion to years of suffering and ill health. To me, at the time, it made little sense. There are things I remember about the evening. Some fit into a logical narrative of how these things happen. Others I think I either imagined or amended over the years, such as sitting on a policewoman’s lap, which makes no sense when there would be no police required as such a humble death transpires.

As time passed, I came to understand the gravity of the loss. It seemed to manifest in moments and periods where I came to understand, again and again: this man was your father and your father is gone. It hit me when I saw others interacting with their own dads, in discussion or debate. It hit me when I simply craved his presence in a household that tangibly lacked it, through no fault of a mother that worked tirelessly and fanatically to provide every support that I’d ever need. I was blessed with both her and a family that were present, insightful, loving and incredibly supportive. My sister, my brother-in-law were utterly faultless, caring, present and always available in ways that I’ll never be able to capably thank them for.

I was also blessed with the fathers of friends, who were supportive and present in their own ways. Some men are incredibly able to balance their insight with a cunning wit and incredible forbearance. I was welcome in their homes and given more time and patience than I ever deserved. For this, I’ll be eternally thankful.

But at the end of the day, I always returned home and carried with me that longing, that sense of absence and loss that was inevitable, having lost him at such a young age. Much of it is wanting to experience him, to know him in simple moments of everyday life. How would he fix his coffee? How would he repair that tap? How would he have responded to such an event or challenge? Then there came moments of wanting him, or needing him, when the greater of crises or challenges arose.

These were moments when the strength or authority of a father would carry me forward with a different understanding, or a directive, more than anything. I had good men in my life to guide me, to help me, but there was something tangibly absent that was no more, no less, than the man himself. His words, his way, his manner and a method that was all his own. All of us carry with us a spirit and a means particular to our being. His was lost to me.

I made my way in the world regardless, carrying a different directive, a different insight that his death gave me. It was an insight that cannot be adopted so fervently, so resolutely, without such a loss. I carry with me the undeniable, incomparable truth that I am, inevitably, going to find myself in a box buried six feet below. I watched my own father leave this earth in a cataclysm of anguish and despair. I watched the people I love pick up the pieces.

I fell apart and pulled myself back together more times than I can count, so I know it’s real. I know it’s coming. Not in a vague, theoretical sense that ‘we’re all going to die some day.’ Rather, I live with death as a presence, a tangible certainty that drives and shapes me more than any well intentioned advice or explanation that doesn’t take the form of personal experience. This doesn’t translate to some kind of state of perfection, or flippant sense of abandonment and nihilism. I don’t pretend that I’ve achieved some remarkable state of self-actualisation, by any means.

What it means, what it gives me, is the gifts of urgency and impermanence. In a creative pursuit, it drives me to continue to toil, to dream, to plan. It drives me to work on projects that in theory, require more time than I have. Why bother? Because I know in sum total, I have even less time than I may think. There are more hours in the day than we often make creative use of, and in the context of an artistic or literary pursuit, we have to understand the value and potential of these hours as being rare, critical, finite. You make the time and you find the means when you know your days are numbered.

Spiritually, the same sense of urgency and earthly impermanence drives you to push your faith and your disciplines further and deeper. Without the luxury and illusion of boundless time you tend to heed the advice ‘to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’ Our comforts can separate us from our mortality, and when compounded by the myriad of distractions and delights that our age grants us, we can become unduly separated from the spirit of urgency, conversion and fidelity with which one should pursue their spiritual growth.

As a husband and father, my attention, my intent is attuned to both the present moment and my inevitable absence. Whenever one of our kids turns five, there is a hollow pang of fear, of recognition. I was particularly struck when my first son, our third child, turned five. It was as if I was seeing myself, at the age I lost my father, for the first time. What gripped me was the depth of his awareness, his understanding and articulation. I always saw myself in the wake of it all being silent, dumbstruck. Perhaps I was, to some extent.

I felt as though I couldn’t possibly understand it at the time, but when I see Micah, I realise that I would have, absolutely, understood. I would have understood, painfully, that my father was gone. My children confront me with the cogency of my loss, my grief, when for years I’d protected the memory of that time with the notion of innocent simplicity. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t ignore it, or forget about it. I wonder, constantly, what if they lost me today? How would they remember me? What would stick? What handful of memories and experiences would they take with them from our brief time together?

I still do stupid and terrible things. Most fathers do at some point or another, lacking the forbearance and restraint of the beloved women in our lives. But there are moments when I am utterly drunk on the certainty of my mortality, my earthly impermanence and my finite presence as a father. There are moments when I abandon the false promise of tomorrow and know that I only get to look my kid in the eye so many times. These are the moments I grab my kids with both hands and delight in them in an explosion of joy, affection and delirium that I hope they'll never forget. I remember to laugh, to relax, to realise that they're children and just like me, they're doing the best they can to find their way on this earth.

I’m running out of opportunities to embrace them, to delight in them. I’m running out of time to tell them, daily, that I utterly adore them, that they are wonderfully, incredibly imperfectly perfect. I’m running out of words, out of days, out of scant moments to lie beside my wife and hold her, to tell her that she changed everything, gave me everything, beyond anything I could ever anticipate before I’d met her. I’m running out of mornings to rise early, in the silence and stillness and put words on the page, in a tangle of temerity and truth that is all my own.

You are too. Can you feel it? Each breath dying as it leaves your lips? My daughter Amira has woken first. She passes by, smiling, silent, knowing as only she can, slinking towards the dark room where my wife is sleeping. My heart breaks and I keep typing.

What will you do?