Papa Emmanuel,
It has been 23 years since you departed this world.
I remember I was so little back then that you could lift me up with the tip of your finger. Sometimes when I think about how long you have been gone, I have to remind myself that I really was just a child. I was 11 years old. There was so much about life I hadn’t experienced yet, and somehow I was expected to understand something as permanent as death.
Tomorrow is your birthday.
It’s another year without you.
I wish I could say I don’t miss you as though you were here just yesterday. I wish I could say I have moved on, but how could I?
How do you move on from someone who helped shape the person you became?
I have lived more years without you now than I ever got to live with you, and that is one of the strangest things for me to sit with. Twenty-three years of birthdays you weren’t here to celebrate. Twenty-three years of changes you didn’t get to see. Twenty-three years of becoming versions of myself that I wish you could have met.
There have been so many milestones, Papa.
So many times I wanted to pick up a phone and tell you what happened.
I grew up.
I went to school. I earned multiple degrees. I built a career helping people through some of the hardest moments of their lives. I moved across the country. I created something of my own. I became a woman with dreams, responsibilities, fears, bills, questions, successes, failures, and stories I never could have imagined carrying when I was that little girl you could lift so easily.
Sometimes I wonder what you would think of me now.
Would you recognize me?
Would you laugh at some of the choices I’ve made?
Would you be proud?
Would you tell me I work too much?
Would you look at everything I’ve survived and somehow still see the little girl underneath all of it?
Those are the milestones people don’t always talk about when they talk about grief.
We talk about missing someone on the day they died. We talk about funerals and anniversaries. But we don’t always talk about what it means to keep reaching milestones without them.
Every accomplishment has carried a small question for me:
What would Papa say?
And sometimes the happiest moments have carried sadness right alongside them because I know there should have been someone else standing there.
I Lost You, But I Also Lost Parts of Who I Might Have Been With You
Losing you didn’t only change who was sitting at the table. It changed me.
I don’t think I understood that when I was 11.
At that age, I only knew that my Papa was gone.
As I got older, I began to understand that losing a parent that young reaches into your identity in ways you don’t always recognize immediately.
There are parts of myself I had to figure out without you.
There were questions about life I couldn’t bring to you. Decisions I couldn’t ask you about. Moments when I needed the safety of being someone’s daughter instead of being the person who had to figure everything out.
I became independent.
I learned how to survive.
I learned how to keep moving even when things hurt.
And for a long time, I thought those things meant I was strong.
Maybe they do.
But I’ve also had to learn that strength can become exhausting when you never feel like you have somewhere to put it down.
Sometimes I don’t want to be the person who knows how to survive.
Sometimes I just want to be your little girl again.
The one you could lift with the tip of your finger.
No responsibilities.
No explanation.
No grief language.
No coping tools.
Just your daughter.
I Still Long for You
There are moments when the longing catches me off guard.
Sometimes I don’t even want anything big.
I don’t need some grand conversation.
I just want to hear your voice.
I want to know what your laugh would sound like to my adult ears. I want to sit somewhere with you and tell you about my day. I want to complain about something small and hear whatever advice you would give me.
I want ordinary moments.
That’s one of the things grief has taught me.
Sometimes we don’t miss the big moments nearly as much as we miss the ordinary ones.
I miss the possibility of you.
The possibility of calling you.
The possibility of seeing your name on my phone.
The possibility of knowing that somewhere in this world, my Papa is still here.
There are days when 23 years sounds like a very long time.
And then there are moments when my body tells me it happened yesterday.
That is something I no longer try so hard to explain.
I just let myself miss you.
My Understanding of Grief Has Changed
Papa, I used to think healing meant eventually reaching a place where this wouldn’t hurt anymore.
I was told time heals all wounds. I was told things would get easier. I heard people talk about moving on as though there was somewhere I was supposed to arrive if I did grief correctly.
For years, I measured myself against those ideas.
If I still missed you, I wondered whether I was stuck.
If an anniversary hurt, I wondered why I wasn’t further along.
If something triggered me after years of being okay, I questioned all the healing I thought I had done.
My view has changed.
I don’t think moving forward requires me to stop missing you.
I don’t think healing requires me to erase the little girl who still wants her Papa.
I have built a life while grieving you.
Those two things have existed together.
I have laughed while missing you.
I have accomplished things while missing you.
I have helped other people while carrying my own pain.
I have traveled, dreamed, loved, lost again, rebuilt, questioned myself, found myself, and kept becoming.
And through all of it, you have remained part of my story.
Maybe that’s what has shifted the most.
I stopped asking grief to leave before I allowed myself to live.
I Am Learning to Be Kinder to Myself
This one has taken me a long time.
There have been days when I have judged myself for still hurting.
I have asked myself why something from so long ago can still affect me.
I have expected myself to know better because of my education, my work, my experience, and everything I’ve learned about grief.
But I keep coming back to something I say often now:
I am a human first.
Before the education.
Before the coaching.
Before the grief work.
Before the person who sits with other people’s stories.
I am someone’s daughter.
I am your daughter.
And sometimes your daughter misses you.
I’ve had to learn that I don’t need to turn that into a problem.
Being kind to myself has looked different throughout my life. Sometimes it has meant letting myself cry. Sometimes it has meant writing. Sometimes it has meant admitting that I’m not okay instead of trying to perform strength. Sometimes it has meant resting when my body is tired of carrying everything.
And sometimes kindness has simply meant saying:
Of course you miss him.
Not, Why are you still feeling this?
Not, It’s been 23 years.
Just:
Of course you miss him.
I Have Found Ways to Keep You Here
I think honoring you has changed as I’ve gotten older too.
When I was younger, remembering could feel painful because every memory reminded me that you were gone.
Now I understand memory differently.
Remembering you is one of the ways I continue loving you.
Writing this letter is one of those ways.
Saying your name is one of those ways.
Telling stories about you is one of those ways.
Remembering that I was once small enough for you to lift me with the tip of your finger is one of those ways.
Your birthday doesn’t only have to be the birthday of someone who died.
It is still the birthday of my Papa.
So tomorrow, I want to allow myself to remember that.
Not only how you died.
Not only how long you’ve been gone.
But that you lived.
You existed.
You loved.
You were my father.
And I was your little girl.
Twenty-three years cannot take that away from me.
I Don’t Carry Everything Alone Anymore
I wish I could tell you that I learned this quickly.
I didn’t.
For much of my life, survival meant carrying things quietly.
I became very good at functioning.
But functioning and being supported are not the same thing.
Over the years, I’ve learned that sometimes I need other people.
Sometimes I need someone to listen without fixing me.
Sometimes I need to tell someone, “Today is hard.”
Sometimes I need to be around people who understand grief without requiring me to make it more comfortable for them.
And sometimes support comes through the stories of complete strangers.
I experience that when I write.
Someone reads something I’ve carried privately and says, “Me too.”
And suddenly something that felt incredibly lonely becomes human.
Maybe that’s one reason I keep writing these stories.
So, How Have I Dealt With It in Life?
I don’t know if “dealt with it” is the phrase I would use anymore.
I have lived with it.
I have fought it.
I have hidden it.
I have blamed myself for it.
I have tried to understand it.
I have studied it.
I have written about it.
I have cried through it.
I have sometimes laughed in the middle of it.
And eventually, I started allowing it to exist without believing every painful moment needed to be solved.
I haven’t figured grief out.
I don’t think I ever will.
What I have learned is how to make room for both things:
The life I have now and the people I wish were still here to see it.
So tomorrow, when your birthday comes around again, I know there may be a moment when I feel that familiar ache.
I may wonder what age you would be.
I may wonder what you would look like now.
I may imagine sitting beside you.
I may wish, even for a few seconds, that 23 years could somehow disappear and I could be that little girl again.
And this time, I’m not going to tell myself I shouldn’t feel that way.
I’m going to let myself miss you.
I’m going to honor you.
I’m going to remember you.
And I’m going to continue living the life you didn’t get to see me grow into.
Papa, it’s another birthday without you.
I wish I could say I have moved on.
But how could I?
Maybe I was never supposed to move on from loving you.
Maybe I was only learning how to carry that love with me as I grew.
Happy birthday, Papa.
Your little girl is still here.
And I still miss you.
