Today is Dad’s birthday. I have been thinking about what it means to carry someone forward after they have gone. How the years change you, and somehow also change your understanding of the person you lost. How the thing they gave you keep finding new expressions in your life, sometimes in ways neither of you could have possibly imagined.

Dad has been gone for years for now, but our relationship has not stopped changing. I hear him in the way I think, in the things I value, and in the love that I give – most of all to my wife and daughter. The older I get, the more I understand that carrying him forward does not mean becoming him. It means taking what he gave me and living it in my own way.

I wrote the following passage for a novel I have just finished drafting, The Same Son (formerly entitled No Way Out but Through). It is a work of fiction, but this passage came from somewhere deeply personal.

It is about Dad, and what I have come to understand about grief, gratitude, and love.

To celebrate Dad on what would be his 80th birthday, I would like to share.

Last song

And I’m crying now. No stopping it. As I’m writing this sentence, a tear just hit my keyboard. And it’s a mixture of grief and gratitude. Salty and sweet. And I swear the tears keep getting sweeter.

The longer the time passes.

The more I become the man I am meant to be.

And I’m crying still. I savor this moment. I have learned to appreciate my grief because when I embrace it, it always leads me back to love. And it is always Dad’s embrace I feel in this moment.

I embrace his love. Love, the only thing that survives death. And so Dad survives still. And his love will outlast me because the love I am passing to my daughter is the same love he gave. The same love I give my wife just expressed differently. All love is the same. Eternal.

Love. Love; love is the only thing in this world that I know is real.