Some Absences Are Not Problems to Be Solved but Realities to Be Carried

I keep discovering that time is not a straight line so much as a series of rooms I can still walk into, even when the doors are supposed to be closed. One of those rooms is called 2021, and it contains my father, alive, ordinary, and unaware that he is about to become irreplaceable.

Objectively, this is inconvenient.

Because if you zoom out far enough, my life has improved dramatically since that room closed. The graphs go up and to the right. Money is steadier. Decisions are calmer. My relationship, which once felt like two stubborn tectonic plates testing each other’s patience, has settled into something kinder and more durable. 2025 was, without exaggeration, the best year of my life. I generally wake up most mornings curious rather than afraid, which is not nothing. The future, improbably, looks welcoming.

And yet.

If offered a button labelled Return to Any Year When Your Father Was Alive, I would press it so fast I might sprain a finger. No hesitation. No negotiation. I would trade every spreadsheet of progress, every hard-won insight, every carefully assembled plan. I would go back to worse versions of myself without complaint. Confused me. Anxious me. Broke me. Even terrified me. I would take them all if they came bundled with him.

This is the part where my rational brain would like to object. Surely this is nostalgia, it says. Surely this is sentimentality wearing a convincing moustache. Surely one should not be willing to burn down a good life for the sake of a past that was, in many ways, messier and harder.

But the objection never gets very far, because this is not a comparison between lives. It is a comparison between worlds.

One world contains clarity, love, forward motion, and a conspicuous absence. The other world contains confusion, struggle, and a man who found joy in small things. A man who never had much money but had an alarming capacity to be delighted by a good cup of tea and the idea that his family was doing okay.

A month ago, I took my mother on a trip to Sikkim. We stayed in one of those hotels with windows that insist you look at the mountains, as if the mountains might feel neglected otherwise. We kept saying the same sentence over and over, like it was a prayer we could wear smooth with repetition: He would have loved this. He would have loved the view. He would have loved the breakfast buffet. He would have loved that we were together, that things were, improbably, fine.

This is where the guilt sneaks in. Not guilt for being happy. Guilt for being the only one left to notice.

Joy, it turns out, wants witnesses. It wants to be pointed at and shared and lightly exaggerated. And when the person who taught you how to notice the small, good things is no longer available to notice them with you, the noticing changes. It becomes heavier. Lonelier. Like applause in an empty theatre.

Sometimes I wonder if what I miss is not my father as he was, but my father as he would have been in conversation with who I am now. There is a particular pain in becoming someone your parent would have been proud of too late. In realising that the overlap between their life and your clearest self was shorter than it deserved to be.

This is not despair. Despair wants to flatten everything into meaninglessness, and this feeling does the opposite. It insists on meaning, even when the meaning hurts. It says: this mattered. This still matters. This will always matter.

I do not want to pretend that improvement compensates for loss. It doesn’t. But neither does loss negate improvement. Both can exist. They do exist. I am living proof, which is a strange thing to be.

So I live in the better world, carrying the knowledge that there was another world I would have chosen without blinking. I plan for the future while secretly wishing to show the present to someone who cannot see it. I enjoy my life and miss my father and refuse to rank these experiences in order of legitimacy.

This is, I think, one of the quieter truths of being human: some trades are unacceptable, even when they result in a better life. Some absences are not problems to be solved but realities to be carried. We move forward not because the past was expendable, but because it was not.

I do not know how to reconcile loving my life with wanting a version of reality that no longer exists. I only know that both loves feel real, and that living inside that contradiction is, apparently, part of the deal.

If that sounds unresolved, it is. But then again, so is almost everything worth caring about.