Rising and Grounded

There is a restaurant called Uri Buri that I had been waiting for years to take my father to. It sits at the edge of the old city. Through the paths and worn stones you arrive at your table. Steps from the sea wall. Overlooking the Mediterranean. Minarets visible from the window. Seated in a 400 year old Ottoman structure, the waiter brings you small plates of things you do not order and you eat them anyway. Shrimp in sauces you cannot name. Warm light. Fishing boats and sea salt. I was days away from becoming a doctor, and I wanted to give him something beautiful to hold alongside my accomplishments.

He was unimpressed. Passive-aggressive remarks about the food, the price, the blandness. Though nothing on the table was bland. He did it so often when I tried to share something I loved with him. Each time, I tried so hard not to take it personally. I became numb to it and convinced myself that it was okay. I would not expect him to change.

He made himself small his entire life. He lamented his failures. He put himself down in the same breath he used to lift me up. He wanted me to reach the stars. To soar beyond his shortcomings. To make a lasting impact on a world that had never fulfilled its promises to him.

And yet his absence feels so bizarrely hollow and heavy. The man who always made himself smaller takes up more space now than he ever did when he was alive.

I spent a long time cataloguing what he did not give me. The ease and presence of conventional father-son dialogue. The conversation that felt like an impenetrable border. I carried all this with tremendous efficiency for so long. Yet, he also gave me his restlessness. His hunger. His refusal to accept that things could not be better. The unexpressed yet real love that he offered through quiet and indirect actions still left their mark. I just had to learn to receive it. I had to stop waiting for a version of him that would never come and learn to grieve the father I wanted while honoring the father I had.

Toward the end of his life, he spent most of his days in a recliner, listening to the news, asking Siri what time it was, thanking her when she answered. His world had contracted to the size of a room. The man who once called his tenants, stayed up late with friends, asked about every new gadget on the market had become visually impaired to the extent that he needed a red sticker on the microwave to find the right button for his chai.

I watched him wither and I did not always know what to do with what I was watching. I scolded him for walking too fast. I lectured him about staying active. I shared stories of my successes and achievements when he asked, because his pride in me was one of the few things that had not changed.

I did not always get it right. I was impatient sometimes. Distant sometimes. Too busy, too late, too certain that there would be more time.

There was not more time. There never is.

What grief does, eventually, is clarify. It burns away the catalogue of grievances and leaves something simpler underneath. Love. Complicated, imperfect, indestructible love.

My father was not the father I designed for myself in the long years of wanting. He was the father I had. Ordinary in his own telling. Extraordinary in his absence.

I carry him now the way you carry anything that has become part of your body. Something that shapes how you stand, how you move, and how you absorb the force of things. A second heartbeat. A reason for reaching towards something better. Gardens inherited without a map. A language I am still earning. A reason I am still finding. In the archives of the moments and memories left behind.

Over the course of the past year, I have been on so many college tours where these memories still linger. Parking in the same lot. Walking the same walk. The admissions office. The quad. The dining hall with the awkward smell of burnt coffee and acidic cleaner. A cheerful student leading a tour while walking backwards and my mind distracted by the fear that they might trip and fall. My own child walking beside me and me watching their face looking for the flicker of excitement that might signal what they believe is possible or what they might feel still seems too impossible to reach.

A lakeside campus where the buildings sit like part of the landscape. A small liberal arts college surrounded by woods where everyone seems to be carrying the same reusable cup. A cloistered place that feels like the past and future all at once.

Tours I take as an accomplished yet unsettled parent. A man with so many letters after my name that my father could not have imagined. I have been introduced in rooms that would have made him weak with pride. Yet watching my own children navigate the world sometimes fills me with something closer to vertigo.

Paralyzed with anxiety that the path I carved was shaped by a unique form of hunger and trauma will not be enough for them. I realize that he must have also been afraid. What did he worry about? That I would somehow fail or somehow be too mediocre to make his sacrifices worthwhile? I wonder if he ever worried that I would not believe in myself or find my voice?

Imperfect parenting leaves imperfect children who become imperfect parents. Our ancestry does not dissolve in the heat of our best intentions. It must be examined and held up to the light with enough honesty to ask ourselves what parts of it are worth carrying forward and what parts have been carried long enough.

That is the work. That is the beauty. The unfulfilled promise.

To love with presence you can build from scratch. To let others see you as you are. Uncertain, becoming, shaped by a man who made himself smaller so that others could take up space. To close the distance that generations could not close by going further in the direction they were always trying to reach.

He wanted me to soar. I am still rising. To heights I could have never dreamed.

I am so grounded. Peacefully, gratefully grounded. The heat of the earth at my feet. The knowledge of who I am and where I came from and what it cost to arrive here. The warm comfort of a self-authored life.

Somewhere beyond the stars, he must be peaceful and proud.