One Year Later: Mourning What Never Was

A year ago today, the man whose name I carry—the man I never truly knew—passed away. And I’m still figuring out how I feel about that.

Losing someone you never had is complicated. There’s no script for it. No guide on how to process the absence of a person who was already absent. You don’t just grieve the person—you grieve the questions, the what-ifs, the version of them that only existed in your mind. And when they die, so does the possibility of ever getting answers.

For most of my life, I wondered if he thought about me as much as I thought about him. If, somewhere along the way, he ever paused and felt my absence the way I felt his. It was a quiet, lingering thing. Some days it didn’t matter. Other days, it weighed on me in ways I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t about needing a father—I had one in my life. But it was about acknowledgment, about knowing whether I existed to him beyond just being someone he helped create.

I used to imagine different versions of how we’d meet. Maybe he’d reach out one day. Maybe I’d go looking for him and he’d tell me the things I spent years wanting to hear. Maybe we’d sit down and talk—not as father and son, because we never really had that—but just as two people trying to bridge the gap between then and now.

That never happened. And now it never will.

And yet, despite the absence, I built a life. A good one. I became the father I never had, the man I needed when I was younger. I took the pieces of what I was given and made something solid for myself. Not in defiance of him, not to prove anything—just because I had to.

Grief isn’t always about closure. Sometimes, it’s just about learning to live with what will never be answered.

Today, I sit with that. And tomorrow, I keep moving. Because that’s what we do.