What Dies With Us
How do you summarize someone you haven't known for nearly a decade? How do you honor the man you remember without pretending those missing years never happened?
At the end of August, my father passed away. I hadn't spoken with most of my family in nearly as long, but I wanted to contribute something meaningful and show some deference to the man whose name I carry. There'd be no memorial service, so I wrote his obituary and offered it to my aunt as some sort of way to reconcile the helplessness.
I'd long since stopped carrying that bitterness I'd wrestled with when I desperately needed my father and he wasn't there.
My father hadn't. He'd spent much of his life looking through a lens of bitterness. He had reasons for it, but it colored his closest relationships. There was a cruel irony in a man who seemed to resent the very world he'd willingly give the shirt off his back to help.
I recognize that disposition in myself. Whether through nature or nurture, I know how easily disappointment becomes resentment, then a way of interpreting everything around us. I have to resist it consciously and daily: to give out of love rather than obligation, and to remember that the heart doing the giving needs care, too. Perhaps we both became the people we'd once needed. But I think my father forgot to become that person for himself, and I'm only beginning to recognize that difference between us as I type these words.
I needed things from him no one else could provide: a father's recognition, affirmation, and presence (to only name a few). He'd needed many of those same things and likely never received them, or maybe in the ways he yearned for them. You'd think knowing that absence would make someone determined not to pass it on. Yet pain doesn't necessarily produce that understanding. Sometimes it becomes another inheritance. I'd spent years learning to live without what I needed from him; his death made the absence permanent. And it isn't lost on me that there's still time for me to follow in his footsteps.
The photograph I chose for his obituary shows him holding my oldest son, his first grandchild, in the hospital shortly after his birth. I was behind the camera. Three generations in a singular moment when none of us could've imagined what followed.
Three generations of estrangement, in front of and behind a camera.
Looking at it, I wondered about everything I'd never know about my father. I found myself asking why, even about things I thought I knew; because I knew the things, rarely his heart underneath the reactions to his wounds. There were conversations we'd never have and questions that would remain unanswered, not because I'd accepted their answers, but because the opportunity to ask was gone.
Then I thought about my children. What would they write about me? What could they write? And, perhaps most troubling, what would they believe they knew?
An obituary asks us to summarize an entire life into a couple paragraphs, to live on in their absence. It asks us to confront something this world growingly is missing the point of: your identity isn’t yours, it’s for everyone else to have of you. When put that way, no wonder so many people are obsessed with their identity; because they’re unwilling to live the lives that would define them beyond their projections. For those of us separated from our children, these perspectives raise uncomfortable questions.
Through Fathers Anonymous, we encounter men at nearly every stage of estrangement. Some are struggling to comprehend the initial separation. Others have lived with absence for years, sometimes decades. Their circumstances differ, but many recognize the same strange relationship with time.
At first, everything feels immediate and severe. Every hearing, allegation, and missed birthday carries an urgency that's nearly impossible to reconcile with ordinary life. We're fighting to reclaim the future while desperate to return to the past, or sometimes to outrun it just to survive the day. Eventually, for some, the fighting ends. Legal avenues are exhausted, orders become final despite the appeals, the costs become unbearable, or continuing seems to inflict more harm than stepping away.
Whatever the circumstances, that decision can leave extraordinary guilt. We replay it, searching for another path, another argument, another sacrifice we should've made. Meanwhile, our children grow older, as do we. Years that seemed like temporary obstacles become substantial portions of our lives. We're suspended between a past we can't change and a future we can't see, while the present slips through our fingers.
It's a terrible place to grow accustomed to. There's a difference between accepting our circumstances and letting them become our entire existence. A father can spend years preserving himself for a reconciliation that never comes, withdrawing from the life he still has. Or he can make his suffering so impenetrable that, should his children return, they find someone almost impossible to reach. Neither is much of a life, especially when time may be running out.
I've wrestled with these contradictions for years: finding purpose in serving other families while remaining separated from my own; becoming so practiced at surviving that I risk losing access to my humanity; fearing my children may have inherited a story about me bearing little resemblance to who I am. These thoughts consume me. Understanding doesn't erase them, but changes how I carry them. I can remain immersed in my life without fixating on that immersion, directing my heart beyond the suffering even when it follows me there.
Writing my father's obituary brought them into focus from another angle. Death doesn't wait for estranged families to resolve their differences. It doesn't care whether someone's ready to apologize or a child has just begun questioning the story they've been told. It arrives, leaving us to assemble whatever understanding we can from what remains. Many of us already know this. It's what makes every passing year hurt.
Children living through estrangement may spend years hearing an account of their absent parent that's incomplete, distorted, or deliberately malicious. They may come to understand the separation as abandonment, indifference, or proof of a parent's character. Over time, these accounts can become part of how children understand themselves and their families. The frightening possibility isn't merely that they've been told something untrue. It's that questioning it might mean questioning much of what they've come to believe about their own lives.
The absent parent may have little opportunity to offer another perspective. And becoming a better person doesn't, by itself, solve that problem. A man may build a life marked by patience, generosity, and love, yet his children may know nothing of him. Worse, his actions may be interpreted through a story that gives them opposite meanings: stepping away from conflict becomes indifference; a decision he believed protected a child becomes abandonment; years of grieving quietly become years of forgetting.
We might spend our lives becoming someone our children could be proud of, only to discover that the person they believe we are never existed. That's devastating. But it clarifies a responsibility we still have.
We can't control what our children believe, insist they accept our account, or guarantee they'll ever want to hear it. We can, however, make sure there's something for them to discover. Not a curated defense of every decision, an archive of accusations, or a record meant to force them toward our conclusions.
Something more human: the story of a person.
I want you, the person reading this, ask yourself these next questions and sit with them for a moment. Whether now or come back and read the question one at a time, sit with it, answer it, sit with it again.
Who were you before the separation? What did you love? What did you struggle with? What did you believe, and how did those beliefs change when life challenged them? What mistakes did you make? What did you learn? What did you do with the years you were given, including those you never imagined spending without your children?
A court order, a collection of photographs, or a declaration of love can't answer all that. It requires a life, one that's more than an elaborate response to what wounded you.
We can become so concerned with demonstrating what happened to us that we forget to demonstrate who we are. We explain ourselves through battles, injustices, and sacrifices. Those things matter; they may be essential to understanding how our lives unfolded. But they're not the whole story. Our children deserve the chance to discover who we were before the separation, who struggled through it, and who we became afterward.
That requires us to keep becoming someone. Not someone flawless, who's conquered grief or devoted his existence to proving he was right. Someone who continues living with purpose, curiosity, humility, and the capacity to love. Someone who can acknowledge mistakes without allowing them to become the final judgment on his life.
For many fathers, this means extending ourselves some forgiveness. We can spend years taking responsibility for outcomes we never wanted, as though the magnitude of our suffering must match the magnitude of our failures. But a terrible outcome doesn't prove a decision was careless or loveless. Sometimes we made the best choice we understood; sometimes we were wrong; sometimes every available choice hurt. We have to examine those decisions without sentencing ourselves to relitigate them forever.
And we must watch what we become in the process. There's a temptation to turn every wound into a lesson, every vulnerability into discipline, every expression of grief into something productive. Sometimes that's how we survive. But the goal can't be to become so strong that nothing can hurt us. Our children don't need monuments to suffering or impenetrable symbols of perseverance. They need human beings capable of loving them. If the chance to restore those relationships comes, we should hope the intervening years haven't made us incapable of receiving it.
We have to build lives worth living even though the people we most want to share them with may never participate. We have to keep grief from consuming our humanity, and guilt from becoming our identity, without making our children's recognition the condition on which our lives have meaning. There's no simple formula, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have bad days, more than I care to admit. Sometimes participating in the world is an achievement. Sometimes joy itself hurts because our children aren't there to share it.
We may never escape that contradiction. But we can learn to live within it without abandoning ourselves. Perhaps then we'll create something our children might someday recognize: a life that speaks beyond any single decision or accusation.
That's the perspective I searched for while writing my father's obituary. I wanted to understand him as more than the father who hadn't been there when I needed him. I remembered his interests, his skills, our moments of affection, and the parts of him I carry, for better or worse. But there were enormous gaps.
Perhaps some of what I wanted wasn't an explanation at all, but an apology. Not that I'd presume myself entitled to one. Acknowledging hurt, though, can tell us more than a whole history of reasons for causing it. Perhaps he carried regrets he couldn't express, or experiences that might've helped me understand him differently. I can wonder, but speculation is all it'll ever be.
There are questions about my father that will never be answered. I must live with that, as he no longer can. And I find myself carrying something of his burdens alongside my own, wondering what burdens my children are carrying in the meantime.
I don't want them to inherit the same silence.
I can't guarantee they'll want my story, understand it as I do, or recognize the man I've become. But I can live in a way that makes the truth of my life available. I can preserve memories, reflections, mistakes, and experiences that might help them see the man they knew only in part. I can build a life that gives those things meaning, not one devoted to winning an argument with the past.
Someday, whether reconciliation comes or not, our children may confront questions they never asked while we were alive, or never had the courage to ask. They may search photographs, read our words, or speak with people who knew us. Perhaps they'll find something that challenges the story they've carried. Perhaps they'll remember qualities they'd forgotten. Perhaps they'll learn things that disappoint them. Whatever they find, they should encounter more than an absence. They should have the opportunity to know us.
As fathers, these are our duties that we must never relinquish, estrangement or not…
If that opportunity comes only when they're writing our obituaries, I hope we've left them more than the questions I was left asking about my father. We can't ensure they'll be proud of us, but we can leave them a life to consider, a humanity still intact, and a story they can discover. From that thirty-thousand-foot view, perhaps they'll find a father they never had the chance to know.
I hope they find a man they can be proud of. More than that, I hope they never have to wonder whether the man they were told about was the only man there was. I hope they never have to search for answers that died with us.
Because now I know what that feels like. And I never want my children to feel it.
-David Wayne Bugg Jr.
Fathers Anonymous
https://www.white-ranson.com/obituaries/David-Bugg?obId=49629888
