What I Still Carry From My Father

Father’s Day arrives every year with the usual greetings, photographs and tributes. For those of us whose fathers are no longer here, it also arrives with an empty chair.

I miss my father. The sentence is simple because grief usually is. The explanations around it may change over time, but the absence does not.

When someone dies, people speak about memories as though they are neatly stored photographs. Mine are less orderly. They appear without warning. A familiar expression. A tone of voice. A decision that makes me wonder what he would have done. Sometimes it is not a memory at all, just the sudden urge to tell him something before remembering that I cannot.

What remains

As I have grown older, I have come to understand that a father does not leave only memories. He leaves habits, values and ways of seeing the world. Some are taught deliberately. Others are absorbed simply by watching.

Only after becoming a father myself did I begin to recognise how much of parenting happens without applause. The worrying that children never see. The decisions made quietly. The effort to appear certain when you are anything but.

Children often understand their parents in reverse. When we are young, we see the rules and the restrictions. Later, when responsibility reaches our own doorstep, we begin to see the fear, sacrifice and love that sat behind them.

I wish I had understood more while my father was still here. Perhaps every child eventually says that.

The father I hope to be

His absence also makes me think about what my own children will carry from me.

Not the speeches. Children are remarkably skilled at forgetting those. They will remember whether I was present, whether I listened and whether the values I spoke about were visible in the way I lived.

That is a more demanding measure of fatherhood than any greeting card can hold.

So today I remember my father with gratitude and doa. I remember what he gave me, what I understood too late and what I am still trying to pass forward.

May Allah forgive him, have mercy upon him and grant him the highest place in Jannah. Al-Fatihah.