This may not be the place to remember my Dad, but I wanted to say something here to remember him by.
I still reach for the phone some days,
forgetting the quiet has learned your name.
Grief is strange like that—
it moves the furniture of memory,
leaves your chair exactly where it was,
as if you might sit down any moment
and ask how the day went.
You were a compass I didn’t know I used,
steady even when you said very little.
Now directions feel softer,
like snow covering familiar roads,
and I walk them slower,
listening for your footsteps in my own.
There are moments you return without warning:
in the way light hits the kitchen table,
in a laugh that surprises me
because it sounds like yours,
in the quiet pride I carry
when I fix something the way you taught me—
patient, careful, unspoken.
I grieve not only who you were,
but who you would have been
in the days I cannot share with you.
Birthdays pass like unanswered letters,
holidays arrive missing a voice,
and time keeps going
without asking if I’m ready.
But love, I’ve learned, doesn’t leave with the body.
It settles deeper,
becomes the weight in my chest
and the strength in my spine.
You are in the values I live by,
the kindness I try to give freely,
the courage I borrow when I feel unsure.
Losing you didn’t end our story.
It changed its shape.
You are no longer beside me,
but within me—
a quiet, guiding presence
that grief can ache around,
but never erase.
You were the best Dad I could have asked for.
