Rose Miller 
My father died last week, and I’m still trying to understand what that means to me. There’s no script for this kind of loss—the kind where grief doesn’t arrive in a clean, recognizable shape. I didn’t grow up with him. I didn’t have the kind of father people write eulogies about. I didn’t have the kind of father people cry for in movies. I had a man who was technically my father, but emotionally a stranger.
He didn’t care about my mother and me—or at least that’s how it always looked from the outside. Sometimes I wonder if it was that he didn’t care, or if he couldn’t care because he was drowning in his own internal battles. He was an alcoholic, and addiction has a way of hollowing out a person until there’s nothing left to give. My mother wasn’t willing to live in that shadow. She didn’t want that to be the example for me or for my half-siblings. So she divorced him, and she rebuilt.
And that’s the part of the story I know for sure: my mother became strong. She raised three kids on her own. No child support. She worked, she fought, she protected, she sacrificed. She became the parent I could rely on, the one who showed up, the one who stayed. When I think about family, she’s the one who fills the frame.
So now, with my father gone, I’m left with this strange emptiness—not grief exactly, not relief, not anger, not love. Just a quiet space where something should be but never was. How do you mourn someone who was never really yours? How do you process the death of a man who gave you life but not presence?
I don’t have the answers. Maybe I never will. The truth is that some losses aren’t loud or dramatic—they’re just a soft acknowledgment that a chapter has closed, even if you never really read the pages. I’m sure he had a story, one worth sharing. I’ve heard bits and parts, but never from him. That is something I lost last week- that chance to hear it. And as a writer, it pierces deep.
Lately, I’ve been comparing the two parents who shaped me in opposite ways. My mother worked her whole life to build from the ground up, to make sure we had what we needed—and even the extras. She sacrificed herself and made it her mission to make our lives easier than hers. She worried about our futures. She showed up for me through my own years of raising children, through my divorce, through every moment when I needed someone steady. She was my rock. I still cry over losing her—sometimes it hits me hard—even five years later.
My father, on the other hand, left us to fend for ourselves. He had no motivation, no direction. He lived in his married sister’s basement and never seemed to find a purpose. He wasn’t a bad man—just a man who never figured out how to live. A man who drifted through life without anchoring himself to anything or anyone.
Seeing them side by side—one extreme of relentless responsibility, the other of complete surrender—I find myself wanting to land somewhere in the middle. I don’t want to become a workaholic who forgets to live because tomorrow isn’t promised. But I also don’t want to drift so lightly through life that I never accomplish anything meaningful. Maybe that’s the message I’m taking from all of this: worry less, enjoy the day more, and still build something I can be proud of. Maybe the lesson isn’t in grieving a father I never had, but in choosing the kind of parent—and person—I want to be.
