Happy 91st Birthday, Dad: What Forgiveness Taught Me About Love After Loss

Today my father would have turned 91.

He died in 2021, and in the five years since, something unexpected has happened: my relationship with him has only gotten better. Not "better" in the way we usually mean it. There have been no new conversations, no apologies. But, somehow, we are closer now than we were for most of the years he was alive.

This is the story of how that happened.

A Complicated Kind of Love

My father Ruben and I had a complicated relationship. He was equally proud of and unsettled by my independence, my stubbornness, my feminism. He was born in Mexico in 1935, and the woman he had in mind for a daughter was a wife and a mother, supportive, steady, quiet. I was outspoken and strong, just like him. I always sensed that he was secretly proud of that except when my fierce independence collided with his need to control me. Then it was just an explosion of tempers and wills.

That was the shape of us for a long time: pride and friction, love and control, tangled together so tightly I couldn't always tell one from the other.

The Question I Couldn't Ask Him

A few months ago, I was doing some work on generational trauma, reading It Didn't Start With You. One of the exercises had me sit with a question I'd carried for years: why did my father never talk about his mother?

She died when he was 12. Whenever I asked about her, he would start crying, and eventually I learned to stop asking. Because of that, my grandmother, a woman named Clementina, is almost entirely a mystery to me. I know her name and little else. I wonder, sometimes, if she was strong and independent like my father and me. If she was a nurturer. If she was creative, or artistic, or funny. I will probably never know. There's a particular kind of grief in losing someone before you ever got the chance to know them at all, a grief for a person, and for every question you'll never get to ask.

But there was one thing my father did end up communicating to me, and how it reached me is the part of this story I still find hard to fully explain.

An Answer, Delivered a Strange Way

Out of respect for my father's privacy, I won't share the specific question about my grandmother I was sitting with. What I will share is what happened after I asked it.

I did the exercise, accepted that I would probably never get an answer, and let it go.

The next day, my mother told me she'd had the strangest dream. "Your father came to me," she said, "and told me this about your grandmother." And then she gave me the answer to the exact question I had been asking myself the day before.

I was shocked! I was in disbelief. I hadn't discussed any of this with my mother. She didn't even know I was doing generational trauma work. She didn't know I'd asked my father anything at all. But somehow, the answer came through her.

I've thought a lot about why it happened that way. If my father had come to me in a dream, I probably would have dismissed it as just my own subconscious, working something out. But because the answer came through my mother, someone with no knowledge of the question, I couldn't explain it away. That's what made me believe, really believe, that my father had reached out to me from wherever he is now.

Learning to Forgive Him

Here's why that moment mattered so much to me: it helped me understand that my father, in his current form, is now pure love. He wasn't able to give me that love in his human form, not the way a child deserves to receive love from a parent. But he is able to guide me now, in a way he couldn't while he was alive.

That understanding is what let me actually forgive him. Not in an obligatory way, but a real letting go of the hurt and pain his human self caused me.

He did the best he could. He lost his mother at 12 and grew up without the guidance he needed. He wasn't emotionally prepared to be a father, so instead he poured his energy into being a provider, a husband and father defined by economic responsibility. I always had a comfortable home and plenty of food. He did that part of the job well, and I'm grateful for it.

Forgiving him for what he couldn't give me, while holding onto gratitude for what he did give me, is what allowed our relationship to keep improving even now, even after he's gone. It keeps improving, a little, every day.

Celebrating Him Today

Today, on his birthday, we'll eat some of his favorite foods and pour some of his favorite drinks in his memory.

I still have a couple of voicemails saved from him I will listen to privately and cry. I wish I could hear his voice today. But I'm grateful that he still finds ways to reach me, still finds ways to share his love with me and my children.

I love you, Dad. Happy birthday.

If you've lost someone you had a complicated relationship with, know this: the relationship doesn't have to end where the person's life did. Forgiveness, real, unforced forgiveness, can keep a relationship growing long after someone is gone. If there's someone you're still holding something against, even someone who's no longer here, it might be worth asking yourself what letting go could open up for you.