Prayer For a Father (CNF)

I’m not exactly sure when I stopped praying for my father, only that it happened long before I stopped believing in God. There was a time when I’d lie in my bed like a child in a movie, whispering his name into the dark ceiling as if he slept on the roof above. Like saying it out loud might anchor him to our home and keep him from drifting into whatever private storm he’d summoned into our lives. I prayed for him to be safe, or for him to stop smoking and drinking, or to let go of whatever other vices I thought might bar him from Heaven. I was certain, in the way only a child can be, that I’d be going there myself. And I wanted him there with me. Over time those prayers shifted. First strained, then quieter, then silent. Eventually, they just stopped all together.

Years later, his eventual suicide wasn’t much of a surprise. If I’m honest, I’d already grieved him long before the call came. He’d been a ghost lodged in my heart, a silhouette stamped across my veins, a man shaped absence in the ceiling of my mind buzzing with tension and noise. What shocked me wasn’t that he was gone, it was how little it moved me. I stared out the front windows for a long time after they told me, trying to summon something: sadness, disbelief, anything. Instead, all I felt was a hollow sort of confirmation, like finishing a book whose ending you guessed in the first couple of chapters.

It took a while for any of it to touch my actual life. Not emotionally, but logistically. The bureaucracy of death is tedious and strangely cruel. How would I tell the kids when they were older? How would I explain to anyone why I never went to the funeral? I just slipped through the motions. It was easy since there were no belongings of his for me to sort, no ties to anyone in his world anymore. Nothing physical to confront, and no one left to confront me.

Now I mostly feel anger and disappointment. Anger at the way he stayed gone throughout my teens and early adulthood. Anger at how inevitable he made it all seem, like he’d been waiting for the moment that would validate how broken he already felt. And disappointment in the man I kept hoping he’d become. He was always almost someone. Always on the verge of being softer, steadier, more present. His biennial phone calls, his gentler attempts at conversation… he always seemed like a man with almost more to give than excuses. But “almost” was never enough, and eventually I stopped trying to prop up the awkwardness from his side of the line. Maybe that part was my failure.

When people talk about grief, I just nod. I let them share their memories wrapped in love or regret. I rarely shared mine, because it doesn’t fit the mold. My grief is sharp and angular. It doesn’t cry easily. It waits quietly in the back of my chest, surfacing not with tears but with questions no one is alive to answer. Sometimes I still talk to him, but never with the hope that he hears me. It’s not a prayer anymore. It’s just a sore I keep worrying with my tongue so it never fully heals.