Dear Dad,
I wish we had more time.
Not just in days or years, but in the kind of time that mends. The kind that sits in silence and says, “Let’s try again.” The kind that doesn’t wait until sickness forces our hands.
We were estranged. I won’t rewrite that. There were years where distance grew like ivy between us—tangled, stubborn, full of things unsaid. And when you got ill, the walls didn’t fall so much as crack. Enough for me to step through. Enough to hold your hand again before it was too late.
But oh, Dad… it was hard.
Hard to reconcile the man I missed with the man who sometimes felt far away even when he was in the room.
Hard to know how to grieve someone you’re only just learning to forgive.
Hard to carry love and hurt in the same heart and not drown in the weight of it.
I think you’d be proud of me now.
I hope you’d see what I’m building—this quiet life full of words, of love, of trying.
I’m in love with someone good, someone kind, and it terrifies me sometimes because when you know loss young, you can’t help but brace for it.
But I’m learning. I’m trying to believe that not all love is meant to leave.
Sometimes I wonder what you’d say to me now, if we had just one more quiet morning. No tension. No years between us. Just you, just me.
Maybe you’d say, “I did love you, even when I didn’t know how to show it.”
Maybe you’d say, “I’m sorry we didn’t get more time.”
Or maybe you’d say nothing, just reach out, and I’d know.
I carry you with me. Not always gently, but honestly.
And today, I let go of the version of you I never got to meet—the healed one, the whole one.
And I keep the one I knew, and the love we found in the end.
Wherever you are, Dad,
I hope you know… I love you still.
I always did.
Your daughter,
Jo
