Hey Dad,
How’s the view from where you are? Is Jesus keeping you company, sharing stories over some cosmic equivalent of coffee? Yesterday was your birthday—eighty-one, if time even bothers to count where you are. Do you celebrate, or is that date just a faint echo of a life left behind? I wonder, sometimes, if birthdays up there mark the moment of conception, or if you’ve somehow always been—slipping through the seams of eternity. A little insider knowledge would settle so many debates down here. Though, knowing us, we’d probably just find something new to argue about, chasing our tails in the dust of our own certainty.
Can you believe it’s been twenty four years since you left? The time I knew you—only thirty-two years of my life, your laughter, your silences—feels like a book I’ve read a thousand times, its pages worn but cherished. You’ve been gone almost as long, and that truth sits heavy, like a stone smoothed by a river I can’t quite cross. Mom’s still here, carrying on, though I see you in the way her footsteps falter, her head dipping low before a sunrise or the rustle of branches lifts her gaze. It’s as if she’s searching for you in the fleeting shapes of clouds, in the whisper of wind through the trees, grasping at the ethereal because it’s the closest she can get. I think she feels you, or wants to so badly it becomes its own kind of truth.
I’ll be honest, Dad. I knew it was your birthday yesterday, but I let it slip by, tucked it away in some convenient corner of my mind. Mom probably didn’t forget, and K and J—maybe, but likely not. I didn’t make the pilgrimage to your graveside, didn’t snap a photo of that modest marble marker, flat against the earth, etched with a verse about friendship being a treasure buried deep. I can still see it: two children holding hands, carved in stone. Mom chose it in her grief, saying the figures reminded her of my girls, two and three when you left. Years later, T squinted at the engraving and asked, “Why’s my sister a boy?” We laughed, inspecting the second figure—maybe a boy, maybe not—and told her, “No, that’s your little sister.” She accepted it, but we still tease about it, a bittersweet spark that lights up our memories. The real treasure, though, is that verse about friends. It holds you, holds us, in a way I didn’t fully grasp until much later.
You were my father first—always—but in those final days, something shifted. I was a father myself by then, and you, facing the horizon of your own departure, spoke to me not just as a son, but as a friend. As a man. You confided in me, shared the weight of getting things in order, and we carried it together—shoulders squared, no complaints. You looked into my eyes and said, “I’m proud of you,” words that landed deeper than “I love you” ever could, because love, for a man born in a war camp, was a language you learned late. War is ugly, and life can be too. I’ve died a few times since you left, Dad—losing pieces of myself I thought were permanent. A wife. A business. My will. Sometimes, it feels like everything in between. I’m not complaining, just talking, because that’s what friends do, right? They listen.
I don’t imagine you as bones beneath six feet of earth, encased in the mahogany we chose at the end. That’s not you. You’re in the places you touched, the things you shaped, the whispers that linger in a million quiet moments. I miss you, but I want to believe—need to believe—you’re happier now, free in a way this world never allowed. I have to go, but before I do: Happy eighty-one, Dad. I love you. That’s how it’s said, and today, when I think of you, that’s how it feels. Like a warmth that doesn’t fade, a friendship that endures beyond the veil.
Thank you.
Love, me
BB Grey--musings 
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