The first Father's Day after he died, I sat on the floor of my apartment and cried into a hoodie that still smelled like him. It was one of those stupid, rainy Sundays when everything felt heavy, even breathing.
Grief is weird like that. It hits hardest in the quiet, in the ugly, unshareable moments—not in the big milestones, but in the tiny gaps between them. A voicemail you can't bring yourself to delete. A cologne bottle collecting dust on a shelf. The way your heart still tightens when you hear someone else's dad laugh.
My father wasn't perfect. He was stubborn, rough around the edges, often too scared to say the things he meant. He didn’t always know how to love me out loud—especially when it came to the parts of me that didn't fit into the "son" he thought he was raising.
But he tried. God, he tried. In his fumbling, broken way, he built a kind of love that lingered even after he was gone. A kind of love that wasn't always easy to see, but that rooted itself somewhere deep inside me, stubborn as weeds breaking through concrete.
And now he's gone.
"Grieving a father while trying to become one feels like standing barefoot on a crumbling bridge, hammering together planks while the river rises."
No one prepares you for the weird loneliness of losing a parent while you're still trying to become the person they never fully knew. No one talks about grieving the conversations you never got to have, the acceptance you were still chasing, the versions of yourself you were hoping they'd eventually see.
No one warns you how heavy it is to grieve not just the person—but the possibilities.
Grief isn't poetic. It's jagged. It's rage in the checkout line when you see Father's Day cards. It's the guilt of forgetting the sound of their laugh. It's the panic that maybe you’re failing them every time you choose a future they couldn't imagine for you. It's the deep, gnawing question: Am I enough without you here to tell me?
Now, I'm stepping into something that terrifies me even more than grief: becoming my own version of a father.
I don't have a neat guidebook. There's no "how to be a good queer dad" manual. There's only this fierce, aching decision to be better—to be softer where he was hard, louder where he was silent, safer where he was unsure. To protect what he loved in me, even when he didn’t know how to name it. To build something from the scaffolding of mistakes and almosts he left behind.
Some days I wonder if I can do it—if I can build something from all this grief, all this love, all these broken pieces. If I can raise a future in a world that still sometimes feels allergic to people like me. If I can be enough without a map.
Other days, I know the answer isn't in getting it right.
It's in showing up anyway. In loving harder. In breaking every chain that tried to bind us both. In refusing to flinch when the ghosts of expectation whisper that I'm doing it wrong.
Grieving a father while trying to become one feels like standing barefoot on a crumbling bridge, hammering together planks while the river rises and the storm screams that it's too late.
But somehow—plank by plank, choice by choice, breath by breath—I'm building something new.
Not perfect.
Not painless.
But real.
"Maybe that's all fatherhood ever was—showing up when you could run. Loving in a language you were never taught."
And maybe, just maybe, that's the kind of father he would finally recognize—and be proud of, too.
