A Letter to My Father, Written Too Late

There is a particular grief that lives in the things we didn't say. The phone calls we put off. The apology we kept meaning to make. The thank-you that felt awkward to say out loud and so we never did.

And then a father dies, and all of that becomes — suddenly, permanently — too late.

This piece is for anyone walking around with that particular weight: the words that didn't get said in time. There is, it turns out, a way to say them anyway. Late doesn't mean lost. It just means the letter goes a different direction.

Why we write to people who can't read it

When someone has died, writing them a letter sounds, on its face, like a thing only sad people do.

But people have been writing letters to their dead for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians wrote letters to deceased relatives on bowls. Japanese families burn letters to ancestors during Obon. Soldiers in every war have written letters to fathers they lost, knowing perfectly well no one would read them.

They wrote, and write, because the letter is not actually for the person who's gone. It's for the writer. The letter is how you finish the conversation that got cut off. It's how you put the thing down that you've been carrying.

The page can hold what your throat couldn't. That is its quiet power.

What to say in a letter to a father who's gone

There is no correct list. But the families we've worked with, and the writers we've read on grief, tend to return to five things.

1. The thing you didn't get to say.

This is what most people start with, even when they meant to start with something else. The apology. The thank-you. The truth about what you were doing in 1997. The forgiveness you weren't ready to extend until now. The acknowledgment that he was right about something he was right about.

Start there. Get it out of you. The letter can be just this one paragraph, if that's all you can manage. That paragraph alone is worth the letter.

2. What's happened since.

Tell him. The grandchild he didn't meet. The promotion. The divorce. The dog. The house. The thing you finally fixed. The argument with your brother. The day you found yourself driving past his old work without meaning to, and pulled over because you couldn't see straight.

You don't have to update him on everything. Pick a few things he'd care about. He always asked about the dog. So tell him about the dog.

3. The thing he taught you that you only understand now.

Almost every adult discovers, eventually, that something their father said when they were young was actually right. Often years after he said it. Often after they argued the opposite for a decade.

Tell him. “You were right about the money.” “You were right to make me apologize.” “You were right that the job wasn't going to work out.” “I'm sorry I argued with you about that for twenty years.”

This is one of the most healing paragraphs you can write. It releases something that has been pressing on the inside of your chest, often for longer than you realized.

4. The thing about him you carry.

The way you make coffee. The way you fix things. The way you tell stories. The phrase you use that turned out to be his phrase all along. The strange way you handle conflict that you now recognize, with a small jolt, as his way of handling it.

You inherited him in pieces. Naming a few of those pieces, in writing, is a quiet way of telling him: I'm still carrying you. Some of it on purpose. Some of it without meaning to. But you're not gone.

5. Goodbye, or something like it.

You don't have to say goodbye. Some people write “until next time.” Some people end with “I love you, Dad.” Some end with a story he'd want to hear. Some just sign their name.

What matters is that the letter ends. The act of closing it — signing it, folding it, putting it somewhere — is part of how the letter does its work.

An example, in case you need one

This is not a template. It's one possible shape, from one family. Yours will sound nothing like it, and that's the point.

Dad —

I should have called you on that Tuesday. I knew you wanted to talk and I told myself I was busy. I was busy with nothing. I'm sorry. I have been carrying that Tuesday for two years.

I bought the house. The one on Walnut. You'd think it's too much porch for the money. You'd be right. I think about you every time I'm out there with a beer in the evening, which is more than I would have guessed.

You were right about Aaron. I should have ended that friendship in college. It cost me a decade. I'm sorry I argued with you about him. You saw it before any of us did.

I make coffee the way you made coffee. I never noticed until last fall. I make it the same way, in the same order, with the same exact amount of patience. I think I was watching you the whole time without knowing it.

I love you, Dad. I'll write again.

— M.

Notice what this letter doesn't do. It doesn't summarize his life. It doesn't list his qualities. It doesn't try to be poetry. It tells one Tuesday, one porch, one apology, one coffee. That's what makes it the letter.

What to do with the letter once it's written

Different people do different things. None of these is wrong.

• Keep it in a drawer. Some letters are private and stay private. Knowing it's in the drawer is enough. You can read it again next Father's Day, or never, and either is fine.
• Burn it. An old ritual. Write it, read it, light it on fire outside, watch it go. Some people find this is the part that releases something stuck.
• Bury it. At his grave, if he has one. In the garden, if he doesn't. Many families bury a letter on a death anniversary or birthday.
• Read it out loud. Alone, in the car, at the cemetery, in his old shop. Sometimes the act of saying the words finishes what the writing started.
• Save it where it can be read again. A folder in your phone. A line in your journal. On a memorial page for him, as a letter the rest of the family can read. We've seen this last one become a quiet tradition for some families — everyone writes to him, once a year, and the letters live on the page he doesn't have to read.

What if there's too much to say

Some people sit down to write a single letter and discover, halfway through, that they have ten years of letters in them.

Write them. Don't try to fit a decade of unsaid things into one page. Write the apology letter. Write the thank-you letter. Write the angry letter you'd never have sent in life and read it once and put it away. Write the “here's what's happened since” letter. Write the one to him about the grandchildren he didn't meet.

Spread them out. Not all in one night. Grief is not a sprint, and neither is the writing it asks of you.

If you didn't have a father like this

Some readers will arrive at this article from a different place — with a father who was absent, abusive, or somewhere in between. The letter form still works. It is, in some ways, more necessary.

You don't owe him a kind letter. You don't owe him a letter at all. But if you sit down to write what you wish you'd been able to say while he was alive — the truth about what it cost you, the questions he never answered, the apology you needed and didn't get — the page can hold what your mouth couldn't.

That kind of letter is not for him. It is for the part of you that's still waiting.

One final note

People often ask if it's too late to write a letter to a father who died a long time ago. Twenty years. Forty years. Their whole adult life ago.

It's not too late.

The letter does not have an expiration date. The conversation doesn't close just because the years pile up. Some of the most powerful letters we've seen on memorial pages have been written by people whose fathers died decades ago — written, finally, when the writer was old enough to know what to say.

If you've been carrying the words around, this is your reminder that you can put them down. On paper, in a phone, on a memorial page, in the dirt by his stone. The form is up to you. The fact of writing them is what matters.

Late is not lost. It's just a different kind of arriving.