Five Minutes With My Father

Some absences become part of your personality before you notice them

I’m the youngest of three siblings. While they shared some life with him, I only saw him once, for five minutes. He died when I was twelve, and despite everything, I never forgave him. I always felt like something inside me had been left incomplete.

At some point, I decided to let go of that weight. I didn’t do it for him, I did it for me. I don’t know if he ever regretted it or if he loved me, but I understood that continuing to drag that pain around was only holding me back.

He no longer has a voice to explain himself or to ask for forgiveness.

I realized that forgiveness doesn’t always come because the other person deserves it. Sometimes it shows up when you’re tired of carrying the past. Healing doesn’t always mean finding all the answers, a lot of the time it’s learning to live with the silence and make peace with it. And in that simple act, you start to feel a little more free.

The first thing I understood was that I didn’t have to blame myself for what happened. My father’s absence had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t because of something I did or something I failed to do. I was a child, and the decisions adults make were beyond my reach.

Over the years, I recognized what the absence did leave me: a strength I didn’t know I had. I learned to pick myself up on my own, to be independent, to take care of myself early on. Responsibility came before its time, and with it an awareness that every decision carried weight.

It also made me more sensitive to other people’s pain.

In forgiving my absent father, I let go of the resentment that had quietly been running my emotional world. I never received explanations, and I never will, because he’s no longer here, but I understood that I didn’t want to keep living tied to that pain. I came to see that my father was also a human being, with his mistakes and his doubts, and that he simply didn’t know how to love.