Fathering My Father

The Work That Allowed Me To Father My Father Better Than My Father Fathered Me

We live in a culture that treats grief like a problem to be solved. We try to outthink it. Outrun it. Outbuy it. Outwork it. And if none of that works, we numb it.

But grief is not a problem. It’s a passage.

A year ago, my father died. In the months leading up to that, I became my parents’ support system in ways that surprised me, especially because my dad and I weren’t historically close. This is the story of how that became possible, what it cost, and what it’s teaching me about legacy, responsibility, and the kind of love that can’t be explained by duty.

Watch or Listen

The Whole Story

On February 21, 2025, my father died.

I’m writing this one year later, with his ring on my finger and a strange kind of quiet in my chest. Not peace exactly. Not closure. More like the hush that comes after a door shuts and you realize the room has changed temperature.

That weekend has become a marker in my body.

I can still see the light in the room. I can still hear the way my name sounded when he said it. I can still feel the moment everything in me wanted to bargain with time.

And I can still feel the other thing that surprised me: the way I showed up for him in those final months was not the way our relationship had trained me to show up.

For 15 months, I kept finding myself doing something I didn’t think I had in me.

I was fathering my father.

If that phrase makes you flinch a little, good. It should. It’s upside down. It’s tender. It’s complicated. And it raises a question I’ve been carrying ever since.

Why did I do it?

The Breathwork Revelation

It was November 2023, and I was lying on a yoga mat in a room full of strangers, breathing in a rhythm that felt like it might crack my chest open.

It had been the kind of week that leaves you hollowed out. My father had called earlier that week with the word no one wants to hear: cancer.

That announcement sat on top of a pile of other hard things, each one adding weight until I could barely stand upright.

This particular breathwork practice works by triggering something primal in the body. You draw breath in a specific pattern, and it lights up the nervous system. It’s like flipping the sympathetic response into overdrive, but you’re doing it in a safe container where whatever needs to surface can come up.

And it did.

The limbic brain went wild. Old grief, present fear, fury, exhaustion, all of it came rushing to the threshold.

And then I screamed. I let it all out.

In the silence that followed, something else arrived.

It wasn’t a voice exactly. It was visceral. A knowing so clear and true that it bypassed every defense I had.

The thought, if you can even call it that, settled into my bones with absolute authority:

I need to father my father.

There was no resistance. No negotiation. Just this deep, quiet certainty.

This is what I need to do.

This is the work in front of me.

Fathering My Father

Over the course of those 15 months, I think I missed maybe three or four appointments related to my dad’s cancer treatment. Every other one, I was there.

I would drive from my house in central Denver to my parents’ home in the northwest corner of the metro area, pick them up, drive to the VA hospital on the northeast side, sit through the appointment, and then reverse the whole triangle to get them home before heading back to my place.

Every appointment was a full day affair.

And I showed up for nearly all of them.

But presence wasn’t the only thing I offered.

I kept my parents laughing. I kept the mood light. We had nurses and hospital staff literally standing outside our room during appointments because they heard the laughter spilling out from inside. Amid all the fear and uncertainty, I made space for delight. I refused to let cancer turn every moment into a funeral.

At the same time, I was paying attention. I was the one taking notes. I was tracking everything the doctors said, making sure my parents understood the next steps, clarifying medication schedules and side effects, translating medical jargon into plain language. I held the logistics so they could focus on what mattered.

And then there was the deeper work: helping my dad grieve his own life. As the months went on and the treatments stopped working, we began the hard conversation about hospice. My dad started to reckon with his own death. He was afraid. He was sad. He was facing the end, and he needed someone to walk that edge with him. So I did.

I sat with him. I honored his fear. I didn’t try to fix it or rush him past it. I let him name what he was feeling in as much as his old school masculinity would allow him to name a feeling.

And I told him something I’d never said before: I was proud of him. Proud of how he was handling all of this. He could have gotten angry. He could have gotten bitter. But instead, he got softer. He became easier to be with. He received the hard news with grace.

And I wanted him to know that I saw that. I admired it. I respected the way he was moving through this passage. It was one of the most sacred moments of my life.

If you only knew my relationship with my dad through the lens of those 15 months, you would have assumed my dad and I always had a close relationship. You would have thought this was just how we were. That we’d always laughed together like this. That I’d always been able to show up for him with this kind of tenderness and strength.

But that’s not the case.

The Truth Beneath the Surface

I want to name something plainly because it’s one of the hidden tensions in this whole story.

There are two versions of me in it.

There’s the version you would have met in the VA waiting rooms, telling jokes, carrying a notebook, making sure my mom ate lunch.

And there’s the version of me that existed for most of my life, the one who didn’t know how to be close to my dad.

The relationship I had with him for most of my life was not warm. It was not emotionally intimate. I did not go to him for advice. I did not lean on him when I needed fatherly support. The tenderness I longed for was not something I could reliably access.

So when I say I “fathered my father,” I don’t mean I suddenly discovered I was the world’s most devoted son. I mean something more specific. I mean I showed up for him in a way I didn’t receive from him.

And that raises an important question. What made that possible?

A month into this process, my parents said something that made the question unavoidable. They framed my presence as duty. They called me the good oldest son. The one doing what a good oldest son does. And I had a visceral reaction to that language.

Not because I’m above obligation. Not because I never do things out of duty. But because that wasn’t what was happening here.

This wasn’t performance. This wasn’t a box I was checking. This wasn’t me earning a gold star. This was love. This was choice.

Underneath that reaction was a clarity I didn’t have words for at the time: I wasn’t trying to become a better son. I was trying to become a freer human. And freedom required telling the truth.

The Grief Work That Made It Possible

My goal, the conviction I carried out of that breathwork session, was this: I am going to father my father better than my father ever fathered me.

That sentence holds a world of grief. Because it implies something else: I needed a father I didn’t have. Or at least, I needed a version of him I couldn’t consistently reach.

And part of the reason I was able to show up for him during his cancer journey was because I had done grief work beforehe was diagnosed. Not grief for his death. Grief for what I expected and did not receive.

It started in October on a beach in Miami.

I was taking a couple of days off, and I brought Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow with me. I’d heard about the book from someone I’d call a Soul Guide, and I knew it was time to read it.

Weller writes about five gates of grief.

Most of us are familiar with the first gate: everything we love, we will lose. That’s the grief we associate with death and separation.

But it was the fourth gate that cracked me open: what we expected and did not receive.

That gate names the grief we carry for the love, attention, safety, and belonging we needed as children but never got. It’s the grief for developmental losses. For unmet needs. For the ways we were supposed to be seen and weren’t.

I sat on that beach and wept. Because suddenly I had language for something I’d been carrying my whole life but didn’t know how to name.

When I returned I designed a ritual to move through that grief.

I started by researching the basic needs every child has. I wrote down a list of statements about what children should receive from their parents.

Things like: You should be seen for who you are. Your interests should matter. Your emotions should be welcomed. You should feel safe to be yourself.

Then I took a stack of paper and did something strange. I wrote with my left hand. This moved the exercise out of my cerebral cortex and into something more primal, more connected to the limbic brain.

It slowed me down. It made the writing feel less polished, more raw. It brought the child in me closer to the surface without fully regressing into childhood.

With my left hand, I wrote what I actually remembered receiving as a child. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, bursting with excitement about the football game at recess. That was the thing that made me feel most alive most days. And my dad would blow it off. He’d redirect the conversation to math or science. He wanted to know what I was learning, not what was making me come alive. I was not seen for who I was. I was seen for who he wanted me to be.

After I finished writing with my left hand, I switched to my right hand and wrote what should have happened. I wrote as the adult version of me speaking to the child version of me. I gave myself the affirmation I needed. The encouragement. The acknowledgment. I named what happened and said plainly: This was wrong. You deserved better.

Then I tore those pieces of paper into strips and burned them in a candle holder. I let the ashes sit there for four weeks. I didn’t clean them out. I let them rest. At the end of those four weeks, I did a ritual borrowed from Bill Plotkin’s work with the four directions.

I mixed the ashes with water and painted myself with them. I sat in the north, the south, the east, and the west, asking each direction what message it had for me. What each direction wanted and needed from me.

I don’t remember the specific messages I received. But I remember the feeling. I remember sitting in the ashes of my grief, wearing it on my skin, letting it be part of me instead of something I was trying to escape.

And then I washed it off. I stepped into the water and let it go. Not because the grief was gone forever, but because I had tended it. I had given it the attention it deserved. I had honored the loss.

That ritual changed something in me. It dissipated the anger I’d been carrying toward my parents. It created emotional capacity where there had only been resentment and self-protection. It freed me to show up differently. And a year later, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I was ready.

Not ready in the sense of “prepared for cancer.” No one is prepared for that. Ready in the sense of having already met a certain kind of grief. Ready in the sense of having already named the wound. Ready in the sense of not needing to pretend.

Love Without Earning

Here’s the conclusion I reached in the wake of that reaction to the “duty” language. When love is motivated by duty, it becomes fragile. It becomes transactional. It becomes a ledger. It becomes something you can lose if you fail.

But when love is motivated by freedom, it becomes holy. Because then it’s not a performance. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even an identity. It’s a choice.

The strange thing is that choice is more demanding than obligation.

Obligation can be done from the outside. You can fulfill a duty while staying emotionally absent. You can do the “right thing” while nursing resentment.

But love as choice requires presence. And presence costs.

That’s what I was giving my parents. Not the appearance of devotion. Not the performance of being a good son. Presence. And presence is the most countercultural thing we have.

This Is the Path Forward

We live in a culture that has no idea what to do with grief. We avoid it. We outsource it. We drown it. We swipe past it. We buy our way out of it. We numb it. We stay busy enough that it can’t catch us.

If grief is a wave, consumer culture is one of the ways we try to build a seawall. More work. More productivity. More hustle. More entertainment. More Amazon boxes on the porch. More scrolling. More “fixing.”

And when that doesn’t work, we reach for medication. Or ideology. Or the belief that if we can just think clearly enough, we can solve it.

But grief is not a math problem. Grief is not a bug in the system. Grief is not an error to be eliminated. Grief is a passage. Grief is a portal.

It’s the way we metabolize loss so that loss doesn’t calcify into bitterness, numbness, or rage. It’s the maintenance practice that keeps us human in a world that constantly assaults our humanity.

I could not have fathered my father the way I did without doing my own grief work first. The wounds I carried would have gotten in the way. The unprocessed pain would have made me reactive, defensive, distant.

I would have shown up, maybe. But not fully. Not freely. Not with love.

Grief work gave me the capacity to give what I never received. To offer tenderness where I had known harshness. To see my father in his vulnerability and honor it, even though he had never done the same for me.

That’s what grief work makes possible. It doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t undo what happened. But it transforms how we carry it.

It turns the weight of loss into something we can hold without being crushed by it. It alchemizes pain into presence, resentment into compassion, fear into courage. And it allows us to break cycles that have been running for generations.

The Ring and the Legacy I’m Choosing

By the end, my father was barely moving. He was in and out of consciousness. But the last word I clearly heard him say was my name.

And then, somehow, he managed to remove a ring from his hand.

I couldn’t believe he had the strength to do it. But he did. He took off the ring and gave it to me.

That ring has a history. My grandmother made it for my grandfather. My grandfather gave it to my father on his deathbed. And my father gave it to me on his. I wear it every day.

But here’s what I think about when I look at it. My legacy does not have to be the same as my father’s. I fathered my father differently than he fathered me. And in doing so, I began a new legacy.

At my dad’s reception, my aunt came up to me. She’s his sister. She said, “I know you didn’t want this role. I know you didn’t strive for it. But you have become the father.”

I know what she meant. She meant I was now the one who would carry something forward. She meant I was now the one who would steady the center.

Some people might name that role with older language. But my aunt would never use the word “patriarch.” And honestly, I don’t want it. Not as a label. Not as a legacy. Not as a structure. Because when I hear that word, I don’t just hear “leadership.” I hear emotional distance. I hear hierarchy. I hear power used as protection. I hear the kind of masculinity that makes tenderness feel like weakness.

So the question that’s left for me is not “How do I become the patriarch?” The question is: How do I embody responsibility in a family system that has been shaped by patriarchy, without reproducing its emotional and relational damage?

And I keep coming back to the same answer: Grief.

Grief is what allows us to name what was broken and choose something different. Grief is what gives us the emotional fluidity to be present instead of performative. Grief is what makes repair possible.

I still carry grief about my relationship with my dad. I grieve that there will never be the relationship I wanted. I grieve that I never had a father I could go to for advice. A father I could lean on when I needed relational support. A father who actually saw me for who I am.

That loss is real. And it will always be real. But because I did the grief work, I was able to show up for him at the end in a way that honored both of us.

I was able to father him through his death. And now I get to carry that forward. I get to reshape what fatherhood looks like in my family. I get to embody it differently.

That’s the gift of grief. It doesn’t erase the wound. But it allows us to live from the scar instead of the open gash. It allows us to approach the world, and the people we love, with tenderness instead of defensiveness. It allows us to break the cycles that have been running for generations and offer something new.

The ring on my finger is a reminder. The legacy is different now. Because I did the grief work. And it helped me to stay human.

The Invitation

If this story resonates with you, if you recognize yourself in the ache of unmet needs or the weight of unprocessed loss, I want you to know: this work is possible. And you don’t have to do it alone.

Grief work is not about wallowing or staying stuck in the past. It’s about metabolizing loss so you can move forward with freedom. It’s about creating the emotional capacity to show up fully in your life, to give what you didn’t receive, to reshape the legacies you’ve inherited.

I offer Life After Loss coaching for people who are ready to do this work.

If you’d like to explore what that might look like, I invite you to book a discovery call. We’ll talk about where you are, what you’re carrying, and whether working together makes sense.

You can find more information and book a call here.

This work is sacred. It’s hard. And it changes everything because it allows us to stay human.

Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Through Grief

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.