A Father: Where Presence Meets Absence

I saw him vanish long before he died.

I’ve met the absent father. Not in myth. Not in metaphor. In real life. The absence wore flesh and it had memory.

My father didn’t care about me for most of his life. Mostly because no one cared about him. The pattern repeated itself, almost naturally. Abandoned and cursed by his own father, he seemed destined to become an emotionless silhouette.

I used to wonder how presence could feel like absence. But yes, it’s possible.

Not violent. Not loud. Just… not there.

He watched me from the edges. He possessed the house. But he never entered the room. Forty-five years later, I watched him slowly pass away. The silhouette began to fill with emotion.

And then he said it:

“I’ve been thinking of you.”

Those words landed in my mind like paper over a flood.

He wasn’t seeing me.

He was seeing the end.

That’s the pressure of dying, an invisible force that some call morality, others call guilt in disguise. It wraps itself in soft language, and in defense mechanisms, trying to rewrite what can no longer be rewritten.

His whole life, he taught me how to avoid feelings. He was a one-man stone sculpture, motionless, untouchable. So when he finally tried to stir emotion in me, I had already become marble myself. There was nowhere for those feelings to land. I watched them drift by, like clouds I couldn’t touch.

I can appreciate that he tried. But it didn’t feel like awakening. It felt like negotiation, a quiet deal with God, maybe. Not redemption. Just a last-minute attempt to soften his life story. And what a story it was.

I had to go through his life after he was gone. I found letters hidden in the deepest drawer. Letters from two wives and many women after. There were traces of suicidal thoughts, depression, addiction, and emotional wreckage. I had to absorb this all. He was a virtuoso of destruction. And I witnessed all of it, and more.

His end came like a gift he wasn’t expecting: His memory began to deteriorate. Day by day, it slipped. His identity dissolved. And the part of my world he once belonged to faded with him. Until nothing remained, except my memory of him.

I forgive him.

Not because he earned it, but because the alternative would be to carry it.

In the end, I am the only one left holding the memories he once had of himself. And now, I walk that path again, not to relive it, but to rewrite it. To reincarnate my feelings through words, because that’s the only way I know to finally set myself free.