I tell my eight-year-old I love him roughly fifteen times a day. It slips out when he leaves for school, when he comes back, when he asks me to look at a Lego thing, when I’m not even fully paying attention. It’s not a big production. It’s just the language of our house.
I noticed, sometime last year, that this is a language I had to learn. I didn’t grow up with it. My father, who I love and who I think loves me, has never said the words to me. Not once that I can remember. And the easier it became to say them to my son, the more clearly I could see what was missing in the other direction.
I’m 44. My father is 77. About a year ago, I quietly gave up on hearing it before he died.
It took me a long time to admit he might never say it
For most of my adult life, I held the assumption that the words were coming. Not soon, necessarily. But someday. There would be a moment — a milestone, an illness, a long, quiet drive — and he would surprise me. I believed this in the way you believe a thing without examining it. It was a quiet background certainty I didn’t know I had until it started to crack.
The cracking happened slowly. There were specific moments along the way — his 70th birthday, my mother’s surgery, my own difficult year that he showed up for in his own way but didn’t speak about. Each one was a chance, and each one came and went, and I noticed the pattern accumulating. He showed up. He helped. He didn’t say it.
At some point in my early forties, I started to consider, for real, the possibility that the way he had been for the first 70 years of his life was probably the way he was going to be for the rest of it. The realization arrived slowly, the way most adult realizations do. It wasn’t a single moment. It was the slow surrender of a belief I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped knowing it was there.
For years, I rehearsed the conversation in my head
I had whole versions of it written.
Some were calm. Some were tearful. In some, I went first, and told him I loved him, and waited for him to say it back. In some, he initiated it, and I let him, and we both cried. In a few, we were in a hospital, and I was holding his hand.
I’d run these scenes when I was driving alone, or in the shower, or right before going to sleep. They were almost comforting. They were not real, but they were vivid, and the vividness functioned like a placeholder for the actual thing that wasn’t happening.
I stopped rehearsing, mostly, about a year ago. I noticed how long I’d been doing it, and I felt embarrassed, and then I felt sad, and then I let the scene fade out, and I didn’t try to call it back. I haven’t run one since.
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I used to think every birthday or holiday might be the one
For years, every Father’s Day arrived with a small flicker of held breath. So did his birthday. So did mine. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Any moment with the right amount of weight or sentimentality, where it would have made sense for him to say something, anything, that brushed up against the truth.
I would arrive at these days quietly armored. I would not bring it up. I would not pressure him. I would simply be present, let the day unfold, and watch to see if this would be the year.
It never was. And each time it wasn’t, I would absorb the absence the way I’d been absorbing it for decades, and tell myself, well, maybe next year.
The next year would arrive. I would hold my breath again. The pattern was so familiar I didn’t even notice I was in it. I just thought of myself as a person who liked holidays less than other people did.
I stopped looking for the love inside his ordinary calls
He calls me about once a week. The calls last seven or eight minutes. He tells me what he did, what my mother did, and what the neighbor did. He asks about the kids. He never asks how I am, exactly, but he sometimes asks if work is going okay. We say goodbye.
For most of my adult life, I listened to these calls in a particular way. I was scanning. I was looking for the moment when something might shift—a softer tone, a longer silence, a sentence that might tip over into something more. I would replay calls after they ended, looking for what I might have missed, parsing them for the love that had to be in there somewhere because I couldn’t bear the alternative.
I don’t do that anymore. The calls are just the calls now. He tells me about the neighbor. I tell him about the kids. A piece on emotionally unavailable parents describes the pattern as one where the person on the receiving end feels a sense of absence where there should be emotional presence and engagement.
Reading that didn’t change what my father was. But it let me stop wondering whether the absence was something I had imagined. At some point, I understood that the surface is the relationship. The surface is what he has to offer. Going on as though there’s a deeper version, one we could access if I just listened harder, was a kind of magical thinking I was finally able to let go of.
I started grieving the version of him who would never say it
This is the part that surprised me. I expected, when I stopped waiting, to feel resigned. Bitter, maybe. Cold.
What I actually felt was grief. Not for him. For the version of him I had spent my life waiting for, who, I came to understand, was never going to materialize. That version had been a constant companion in my head for forty years. He was the father who said it. The father in the hospital scene. The father in the phone call I rehearsed in the shower. He had been so present, in some ways, that letting go of him felt like a small bereavement of its own.
I started grieving him while my real father was still alive. Anticipatory grief, as the term is usually understood, happens prior to an expected loss—the grief you experience before someone dies. But it can also be the grief you feel for the version of a person who was never going to exist. Mourning a man I have not yet lost. Mourning a relationship I have not yet stopped having.
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I don’t wait anymore, but I won’t pretend the words wouldn’t matter
This isn’t acceptance in the soft, healed-up sense. I haven’t decided that his actions are his love language, and that’s enough. I haven’t reframed his silence into something noble. I have not arrived at the place where I tell other people, brightly, that he shows his love by changing my oil, and isn’t that beautiful in its own way.
It is true that he shows his love through things. He drives to my house and fixes things. He sends me articles from the newspaper. He worries about me audibly to my mother, who relays the worries.
I see all of this, and I do count it, and it does matter.
But the words would also matter. They would matter enormously. If, at some point in the next five or ten years, he turns to me in a hospital room and says them, I will cry for a long time. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
What I have is a kind of clearing. I am free to enjoy what is actually there, which is a relationship with a kind, restrained, undemonstrative man who has been my father for 44 years and may or may not ever say the thing he has never said.
If he does, it will mean something. If he doesn’t, I will have already done the harder work of grieving the version of him who would. Either way, I’m no longer carrying the weight of the wait. The weight, it turns out, was most of what was breaking me. The not knowing was heavier than the knowing.
He’s still here. He’ll come for dinner next month. I’ll watch him through the kitchen window, walking up the driveway, and I’ll love him exactly as he is, which is exactly who he has always been.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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