How did your life change when your dad passed away?

18 comments

  2. It’s been nearly four years and I’m still kind of in denial, I suppose. We never had an amazing relationship but whenever I think of my dad I think of my own sons and how much more I want to be a part of their lives.

  3. I had to take care of my mom and sister as they were wrecks. I didn’t have that luxury at the time, and ended up breaking off an engagement and 9 year relationship. My mom eventually recovered but my sister ended up marrying the first guy she met after which was an abusive alcoholic. That eventually killed her.

    I wouldn’t exactly say his death caused anything. It was more that it left a void that was close to impossible for me to fill at 28. Now in my 40s my life is great and my mom is still with us. People don’t like to talk about death so I just kind of had to deal with it by myself which I was able to do. It just took longer. If anyone asks how it feels, the only answer I can give is it’s just weird. You grow up and expect things to run the course you see around you. And when it doesn’t, you’re caught off guard and vulnerable and not sure what to do. Eventually you’ll figure it out, and with luck, you’ll have learned some usable lessons along the way. Key is to keep moving, but remember them how you want to remember them. Not how you last saw them.

    I always saw my father wear his college ring, ever since I can remember. Now I wear it on a chain around my neck. It’s somehow comforting. *It’s weird*, but my life is pretty good and I owe a lot of that to his upbringing.

    EDIT: I wanted to add this: What I find cool though is all the little things your folks bring to the table, you’ll find yourself emulating and making your own. If I could make my dad laugh, I knew I had something. Humor was our love language. And now it’s mine with my wife and the people around me. In a way, your folks will never leave you. They will live through you, good or bad, and if you have kids, a piece of you will carry on with them. Try and make it a fun one.

  4. I suddenly had to take care of myself in every way. Mentally, physically, emotionally, etc. that’s a lot to ask out of a 12 year old.

  5. Cliche I know, but I had to grow up reeeeeaaaally fast. Was almost at adult age, and so got shot into adulthood like a rocket.

    Naturally I made it my goal to fight that development every step of the way, but it still happened. Now I’m a goddamn independent middle-aged kid that still refuses to do laundry until out of underwear. Take that, universe! Make me grow up why don’t ya!

  6. I still miss him 20 some years later. He would have loved his grandkids and they would have loved him.

  7. It made me numb to most other tribulations in life. You will never give a shit about a bad work meeting or a favorite shirt ruined in the dryer or rain on vacation, because it doesn’t even register on your newly-calibrated radar of “things worth expending emotional energy over”.

    Your SO will find you “emotionally distant” because you couldn’t give a *flying fuck* about the inane workplace drama she’s embroiled in.

    Your friends and colleagues may describe you as “even keeled” but really it’s just the realization that once you lose someone you love dearly, it puts so much else in perspective. Mountains are suddenly molehills, unworthy of the precious time you have left on this earth.

    That, and I got way closer to my mom.

  8. My dad is still around. We were not that close growing up and didn’t talk for 20 yrs. Just recently we started talking again last yr. He met my son for the first time when he was 17 and my daughter was 14. Going to the lake w him this weekend.

    I’ve spent a lot of time w my kids growing up. I gave up a lot of money and career for that time because I was buying memories. I expect a lot but tell them I love them every day.

  9. I feel the void. Dad divorced mom when I was 3, he was never around. Always odd seeing other people with family’s and mine seemed to be the odd ones out.

  10. My dad died last april and i’m still going through it. I find it much harder to enjoy myself, go out, or really develop as a person. I moved back in with my mom a few months after that and i’m still there. I feel I have arrested development, like an inability to progress. It hasn’t all been bad of course but the depression and grief clouds my mind and emotional state most of the time. Ironically, he was a therapist professionally and he would be the one person i’d like to talk to about what i’m going through. Really just wish i could pick up the phone and talk to him but i can’t.

  12. My dad just passed earlier this week, unexpectedly. I’m grown with young kids of my own.

    We would talk almost everyday. I’m going to miss being able to call him and talk to him whenever I want. I’m going to miss having my kids grow up with him around.

    We’re adopting his dog so there’s that…

  13. Oddly I was able to forgive him and began to hate him less. It was jarring to see my mom almost immediately less scared.

  16. I lost my biggest ally and confidant. I never had to question his intentions or advice, because he watched out for me first and foremost.

  17. My dad just passed away about 6 months ago and it had an interesting effect on me. My dad wasn’t a great man but her was a good man. He never achieved much but he could always be depended on to do the decent thing, even when it was to his disadvantage to do so (maybe one of the reasons he never achieved much).

    Like most people, I’ve been a nihilist for most of my life. Nihilism has quietly become the dominant philosophy of the west. I accepted that we live in a cold, dead, uncaring and unknowing universe in which we are nothing but a cosmic accident and are of no consequence. It’s not a happy perspective but it conforms to the facts and there is a certain freedom in it.

    Given my outlook, I was left with the conclusion that the life and death of this good, decent man, ultimately, meant nothing. The universe didn’t care and wasn’t even aware of his existence or passing.

    This, of course, felt bad, but the thing was, that it also felt wrong. It felt wrong as in “factually incorrect” and I couldn’t get that feeling of wrongness out of my head. It was like a sliver in my brain irritating me all the time and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

    A thought crystalized one day that my perspective had been wrong. Like most people, I had been seeing the universe as a house that we all lived in or as the stage on which we acted out our pointless plays (of sound and fury signifying nothing). However, I saw that we don’t live in the universe. We aren’t and can never be separate from it. We are an emergent property of the universe and, given it’s deterministic nature, one that was always fated to exist by initial conditions. We aren’t living in the universe, we are living as the universe. We are the mind of the universe. We are how the universe thinks. We are how it knows itself. We are how it cares about itself. We are how it knows what it is. “We are the universe contemplating itself”. We matter on a cosmic scale. In fact, we’re the only thing that matters because we’re the only thing that can matter, that can know meaning. We radiate out meaning into the universe the way stars radiate light. We are how the universe illuminates itself with meaning.

    It occurred to me that this model fits the facts of the universe just as well as the nihilistic one. Better, actually. It’s more true.

    Given this new perspective shift, what did my dad’s life mean? Look around you. Look at the safe, abundant world around you. Imagine the world that humans found themselves in 50,000 years ago. Life was short, brutal, insecure and constantly painful. You had a 50% chance of being murdered. It’s probably true that everything you see right now was built by men. Men like my father who went to work everyday and who raised the next generation. Men who could be depended on to do the next right thing for the people around them. These men spent their lives planting trees whose shade they would never enjoy.

    We enjoy the collective efforts of countless generations of such fathers. Our lives immeasurably better than the lives of our ancestors because of men like my father. That isn’t just our lives that are better. It’s the life of the universe itself that is better. Through the efforts of such men, the universe becomes better.

    I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone else but that’s how my dad’s death changed my life. It forced me to see the universe in different, more true and better way. It forced me to understand that what I do matters. That my choices matter.

    Thanks for that one last lesson, Dad.

  18. Not much. I didn’t respect my father that much, so I never wanted to ask him for favors or advice. Many years later I realized how hard life is and what he went through to provide for us, and I wished I’d respected him a bit more.

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