For My Father, On His Birthday

April 21, 1950 – January 6, 2011

Today is your birthday.

If you were here, you would be 76. But even though you are gone, this day still belongs to you. It still asks me to stop, to remember, to reach backward and forward at the same time. Backward to the man you were. Forward to the man I am still becoming because of you.

Our relationship was not everything I wished it could have been.

I was raised with my mother, and that shaped so much of my life. It shaped my home, my values, my understanding of sacrifice, survival, and strength. There are parts of me that will always grieve what I did not get to have with you in the way I wanted. There are conversations we never had, closeness we never fully built, years that did not become what they could have been.

And yet, the truth is more complicated than loss.

Because even in the distance, you gave me something real.

You instilled in me love. Not always in the perfect form, not always in the way a son dreams of receiving it, but in a way that still took root. You gave me hard work. You gave me that instinct to keep going, to keep building, to keep figuring it out when life did not hand over easy answers. You gave me that make-it-happen energy, that refusal to sit still and wait for permission, that entrepreneurial mindset that says: create something, solve something, move something forward.

Maybe I got it twice.

From you, and from my mother too.

She was an entrepreneur before it was cool, before people turned it into branding and buzzwords. She lived it. And somehow, between the two of you, that spirit found me. The hunger. The resilience. The ability to make something out of what was there, and sometimes out of what was not there. The belief that even if the road is unclear, you can still build one with your own hands.

That is part of your legacy in me.

And maybe that is why one of the hardest truths to say is also one of the most honest:

I feel closer to you now that you aren’t here.

There is pain in that. But there is also peace.

Because death has a way of stripping away the noise and leaving the essentials. It leaves the memories, the traits, the lessons, the blood, the echoes. It leaves the deeper understanding that sometimes love is inherited in fragments, and only later in life do we learn how to assemble them. Sometimes we do not fully know our parents while they are alive. Sometimes it takes time, age, fatherhood, responsibility, and loss to finally see them clearly.

And I see you more clearly now.

I see what you passed down.
I see what survived.
I see what still speaks.

You used to write me a story on my birthday. That mattered. It still matters. Maybe more now than ever. Because stories are not small things. Stories are how we say, I see you. Stories are how we leave proof that love was here. Stories are how we keep people alive a little longer.

Now I carry that tradition with my own children.

That is one of the most beautiful inheritances you left me.

What you began with me does not end with me. It moves forward. It breathes again. It grows. Through my children, through my words, through the way I love, through the way I keep showing up, through the way I try to build a life with meaning and motion and heart. A tradition that came from your hands now continues through mine.

So today, on your birthday, I do not just mourn you. I honor you.

I honor the man you were.
I honor the parts I understood late.
I honor the love that existed, even when imperfect.
I honor the work ethic, the grit, the ingenuity, the spirit of figuring it out.
I honor the story you wrote into me, even if I am still learning how to read all of it.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Born April 21, 1950.
Passed January 6, 2011.
Still present.
Still part of me.
Still living in what I build, what I write, and what I pass down.

And today, I write a story for you.

Because once, you wrote them for me.