To the Dad That Can’t Make it to Father’s Day:
We miss you.
We are your sons and daughters. We are the ones you left behind. We know you didn’t really mean to leave us, but here we are.
We see pieces of you in our reflections, but we want more than a reflection to hold to.
We search for pictures and become disappointed when we reach the realization that we failed to capture the millions of memories inside our minds. We cringe at the thought that we could one day fail to remember.
We find you in our dreams, and it’s nice for awhile, but we always seem to wake up.
We wish we could sleep just a little longer.
We are the daughters you’ll never walk down the aisle.
We are the sons you’ll never pat on the back.
Some of us got to say goodbye, but it wasn’t quite enough.
We are the sane who talk to the wind, praying one day you’ll answer. Sometimes you do—sometimes.
We are the daughters searching for a man with a smile like yours.
We are the sons tossing baseballs to ourselves.
We are the children with children of our own. We tell them they have eyes like yours, but they’ll never have any proof.
We’ve worked hard, Dad. We wish you could tell us how proud you are. That’s all we really want—your approval.
But you aren’t here.
We got good grades for you.
We graduated for you.
We chased our dreams because it’s what you told us to do.
And when we finally catch them, we’ll look for you. But you won’t be there like we’d envisioned.
We miss you, Dad.
We miss the nicknames you called us more often than our real names. We miss your laugh and your jokes and the way you sang off key in church.
We miss that shirt you always wore on Sunday's and the way you pulled your tube socks up too high.
We miss the sound of your cough.
We miss the way you smelled.
We miss having someone to call our father, our dad, our friend.
We miss all of the things we took for granted, and we promise ourselves that if we could have you back, we’d never take you for granted again.
We miss you, Dad.
We miss you every day.
We miss the way you’d wake us up at 5:30 a.m. while you made your coffee and the way you waited by the door when we got home from school to hug us.
We miss the way you called us “kid.”
We miss the way you wrote everything in capital letters, and how you signed every letter to mom with “Love Always, Joe.”
We miss the way you said “warsh” instead of “wash.”
We miss everything that used to mean so little when you were here.
I miss everything that used to mean so little when you were here.
Everything.
We hope heaven is treating you well.
Happy Father’s Day.
Love always,
The Fatherless on Father’s Day
