The Conversation I'll Never Have

Fifteen years ago today, my father died.

I was nineteen, on break from my freshman year of college, working at a summer camp when the call came. Three days left, maybe four. The Episcopal church camp bought my plane ticket, a gracious act that, at the time, I couldn't quite comprehend. I flew home to say goodbye to a man who was already mostly gone, brain cancer having carved away pieces of him like an ocean's tide eroding a coastline.

He died while his sister read Bible verses aloud. I only hear his voice now in old Google Voice messages he left from his hospital bed, asking how I was doing, telling me he loved me. Digital ghosts that play back in his exact cadence, preserved in a format that will probably outlast me.

I dream of him sometimes. In sleep, he's always exactly as he was, not the diminished version cancer created, but the father who taught me how to throw a football, took me to Whataburger + Blockbuster whenever I asked, and pushed me to do more and be better.

What I wouldn't give for one conversation with him now. Man to man.

The Terrible Timing of Loss

There's something particularly cruel about losing a parent at nineteen. You're old enough to understand death's permanence, but too young to have become who you'll be. You're caught between childhood and adulthood, carrying a grief that's too sophisticated for your emotional vocabulary but too fundamental to ignore.

Nineteen is the age of becoming. You're figuring out who you are separate from your family, what you believe beyond what you were taught, how you want to move through the world. But when a parent dies during this crucial transition, part of your becoming freezes in amber. You're left to complete your formation with a crucial piece missing, not just their presence, but their witness to who you're becoming.

Friends my age were calling home to complain about professors or ask for money. I was feeling guilty about not calling my Dad enough because it was soul crushing to hear him on the phone at that time. Grief and guilt, as a combo, it turns out, can make you grow up and feel like a child simultaneously.

The Conversations That Never Were

What haunts me most isn't the conversations we had, but the ones we never got to have.

I want to tell him about the work I do now, the problems I'm trying to solve. I want his perspective on the world as it is today - would he be horrified of the politics in the US right now or would he be rocking a red cap? I want to ask him about his own father, what he was thinking about when he was my own age, his actual fears, the things he worried about that he never told me when I was too young to understand.

Most of all, I want to ask him the questions I was too young to think of then: What happended to him in Vietnam during the War? What kept him awake at night when I was small? What would he do differently if he could do it again? How does he want to be remembered?

What Losing Someone Early Teaches You

When someone dies before you're fully formed, it changes your relationship with time itself. You learn that people can vanish mid-conversation, that there's no promised progression from introduction to deep knowledge to final goodbye. Some relationships are just cut short, incomplete, hanging in the middle of a sentence you'll never get to finish.

I've learned to really listen when my mom tells stories I've heard before, knowing that someday I'll be desperate to hear her voice one more time. When I get impatient with family, it's easier to remember they won't always be around. Because I have seen the darkness, I see all the colors of the light and can bask in and be grateful for them.

It's not exactly the way I would have chosen to learn these life lessons, but once you know that love can end mid-sentence, you pay attention differently. You love with more urgency, more presence, more appreciation for the simple fact that someone is still here to love.

The Continuing Conversation

So what does a man-to-man conversation look like when one person has been gone for fifteen years? Mostly, it doesn't happen the way I thought it would. I don't sit around imagining what he'd think about my life choices - honestly, I have no idea what he'd think about most of it. The person he was when I was nineteen wouldn't recognize the world I live in now.

Instead, the conversation happens in smaller ways. I catch myself using inside jokes that only he and I shared, I hear his laugh coming out of my mouth when someone tells a bad joke. I find myself pushing my bottom lip out when I'm thinking through a problem, just like he did.

The conversation continues not in imagined advice or hypothetical discussions, but in the way his mannerisms have become mine, the way his sense of humor lives on in my voice.

He never got to see who I became, but somehow, pieces of who he was keep showing up in who I'm becoming. That's not the conversation I wanted, but it's the one I have. And maybe that's enough.