Father’s Day Between Letters and phone calls

Loving the memory while learning to live with the distance

Sneakers & Stilettos™

Father’s Day is complicated when your father is still alive… but not truly around.

Because grief isn’t reserved for death.

Sometimes, grief is loving someone who still exists in this world—breathing, living, building a life somewhere else—while carrying the ache of their absence in yours.

That kind of loss is harder to explain.

People don’t always understand it.

“How can you miss someone who still calls?”

“At least you still talk.”

“But he’s still your dad.”

And yes… all of that can be true.

He is still my father.

There were letters.

Phone calls.

Birthday wishes sent across distance.

Moments of effort, of trying, of reaching across the miles to maintain something that never had the chance to fully become what it should have been.

And yet… there was still an emptiness.

Because sometimes what you miss isn’t the person entirely.

You miss the presence.

The ordinary moments.

The small things people take for granted—rides home, random conversations at the dinner table, shared silence, knowing someone is physically there when life falls apart.

It’s strange to grow up loving someone in fragments.

A voice through a receiver.

Ink on paper.

Memories stretched thin by time and distance.

You begin to build a version of them in your mind from pieces.

Some beautiful.

Some painful.

Some unfinished.

For years, I think part of me lived in quiet resentment.

Not always anger—though there was some of that too.

More like a silent question that followed me everywhere:

Why wasn’t I enough to stay?

That question can live inside a child far longer than anyone realizes.

Even when logic grows up, the wounded heart can remain small.

But time does something funny.

It doesn’t erase hurt.

It changes your perspective.

As I got older, I started understanding something I couldn’t as a child:

Adults are complicated.

Parents are human.

And sometimes people don’t leave because they don’t love you.

Sometimes they leave because they are broken, searching, surviving, or trying to become someone they don’t yet know how to be.

That realization didn’t erase the pain.

But it softened the sharpest edges.

I stopped seeing everything in black and white.

I began making peace with the reality that love and absence can coexist.

Someone can love you… and still fail you.

Someone can care deeply… and still leave wounds.

Both can be true.

That may be one of adulthood’s hardest lessons.

So Father’s Day became less about pretending everything was perfect and more about honoring truth.

The truth that I loved my father.

The truth that I missed him.

The truth that letters and phone calls mattered.

And the truth that they were never quite the same as having him there.

Coming to terms with that has taken years.

Not because forgiveness is easy.

But because holding onto bitterness is exhausting.

I’ve learned that acceptance doesn’t mean rewriting history.

It means making peace with what was… and what wasn’t.

It means loving someone without demanding they become the version of them you needed decades ago.

It means allowing memory to be honest.

Not polished.

Not romanticized.

Just real.

This Father’s Day, I think about the father I had.

And the father I wished I had.

Both deserve acknowledgment.

Because healing began when I stopped forcing those two versions to become one.

Today, I can appreciate the effort in the letters.

The love in the phone calls.

The attempts, however imperfect, to remain connected.

And I can also honor the child in me who needed more.

Who deserved more.

Who still feels that ache sometimes.

Maybe growing up is learning to hold both tenderness and truth in the same hand.

To say:

I love you.

I missed you.

I needed you.

And I am still learning how to make peace with all of it.

Maybe that’s what healing looks like.

Not perfect closure.

Not complete understanding.

Just enough grace to stop fighting the past.

And enough love to keep your heart open despite it.

Because some relationships are not defined by neat endings.

They live in the space between presence and absence.

Between what was given… and what was longed for.

Between letters.

Between phone calls.

Between Father’s Days.

And somehow, in that complicated in-between, love still survives.