I grew up believing my father blamed me for my mother’s death. It was an unspoken truth, something I never dared ask but always felt. I never knew my mother—she had died before I could remember—but I knew she had been beautiful. A single picture of her hung in my father’s study, a silent ghost watching over our fractured home.
My father was a sad man, distant and withdrawn. He moved through life like a shadow, always present but never truly there. I longed for his love, for some sign that he saw me, cared for me. But he was a man of few words. His conversations with me rarely went beyond the necessities—hello, goodbye, good morning, goodnight. I would have given anything for him to hold me, to tell me he loved me, but he never did.
For years, I carried the weight of his silence, convinced that he saw me as the reason for her absence. But the truth was far more heartbreaking.
It wasn’t until I was older, after he passed, that I found the letters—tucked away in the back of his desk. Letters he had written to my mother but never sent. Letters filled with grief, longing, and one painful confession:
“I can’t look at him without seeing you. He has your eyes, your smile. I love him, but every time I hold him, I break all over again.”
All those years, I thought he blamed me. But in reality, he was drowning in grief, unable to love me the way he wanted to—because loving me meant losing her all over again.
And that was the real tragedy.
