Three months ago I said goodbye to my father for the last time. When someone you love is dying, and you know the end is near, you try to conceptualise what life without them could look like. It was incomprehensible to me then and it still is today. This is not grief as I thought I’d understood it before… the grief that I’d experienced through previous losses in my personal life or through my work as a therapist sitting with clients through their own mourning. As father’s day approaches, I’m feeling emotions of an entirely different magnitude. It isn’t something that I can make sense of with words, or theoretical frameworks. It’s the unravelling of a complex story. One that spanned decades of love, misunderstanding, closeness and distance.
The relationship between a father and daughter is rarely simple. But one thing that I see now, perhaps even more clearly than when he was alive is that there was always so much love between him and I. We never really did understand each other very well, but we certainly did try! He was a force of nature. His world was full of challenges and risks, and with these he thrived. While my life took a very different shape— more rooted in exploring emotional landscapes than in external ventures, our lives were and are intrinsically connected. The values he taught informed my path, even as I chose one so different from his.
I see clearly today how his influence has always echoed in my work as a psychotherapist, though now it does so in a new way. I find myself more attuned to the complexity of loss, to the nuance of relationship, to the fragility of the things we think we understand.
Legacy is something I’m thinking about daily now. Someone once said that the greatest measure of leader is how well their people carry on without them. I think about how we are managing that and how to best continue to do so.
My father’s passing has broken my heart, but it has also deepened my capacity to sit with grief. It’s reinforced for me the importance of honoring those who shape us in both their presence and their absence. He taught me, in his life and in his leaving, about resilience, and the ways we carry our stories forward.
