The Father I Knew in Fragments

Father’s Day has always felt like a holiday meant for other people.

Every June, I scroll past photos of dads smiling beside children who got to know them fully. I read captions about unconditional love and think about how grief can exist for something you never really had. I envy the people who have enough memories to complain about them. 

I knew my dad in glimpses. I knew him as an alcoholic and as a man who could be selfish and callow. I knew him through broken promises and absences that seemed to stretch for years. I knew him more as an idea than a person. 

But there are moments I cannot shake. I remember him being laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe funny. I remember moments where he loved loudly and effortlessly. I remember feeling, for a second, that I had a dad. Those memories are few and far between. Maybe that’s why they hurt so much. They are scraps of paper I’ve spent my whole life trying to turn into a person.

When my dad died by suicide, I lost any chance of ever knowing him differently. There would be no day when he got sober and told me about his childhood. No late-night conversations where I finally understood why he hurt the people he loved. No chance to ask him if he was scared, lonely or if he knew that despite everything, I adored him in the way children instinctively adore their parents. There would be no opportunity to grow into each other. 

His death made every question permanent. 

For a long time, I was angry with him. I was upset that he left and that he never became the father I needed and deserved. Beneath the emotion was something much more simple: I wanted more time. I wanted to know if he would have been proud of the person I became. 

I don’t have enough memories of my father to tell a neat story about him. I cannot write about life lessons and long talks in the car. What I have are contradictions. A man who could be loving and absent, present one moment and was gone the next. But maybe being someone’s daughter means carrying their contradictions, too. 

Everything I do is, in some way, for him. 

I became obsessed with understanding people because I never understood him. I became a journalist because I know what it feels like to have a story end before you ever learned how to read it. All that I do is an attempt to make something beautiful out of an absence. 

I still feel envious every Father’s Day. I still look at posts online and wonder what it would have been like to have a father in the ordinary sense of the word. But more than missing my dad, I miss the possibility of him. I miss the conversations we never had, the memories we never made and the version of us that never got the chance to exist.

I think that is the grief I carry. Not that my father died by suicide, but that his death took every opportunity to know him, and somehow, despite barely knowing him at all, I have spent my entire life trying to make him proud.