Tag Archives: masculine grief

The Doctor Was My Father ©️

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Good morning, Cicely.

This morning’s not about the moose trotting through Main Street or Ruth-Anne’s weather report. This morning’s about something quieter. Heavier. More sacred.

This morning’s about my dad.

He was a doctor. Not the kind you see in movies, with perfect answers and heroic music swelling in the background. No, my dad was the kind who stitched you up with fingers that shook slightly from exhaustion, the kind who worked long shifts and sometimes came home with the weight of other people’s pain still clinging to him like a second coat. The kind who carried more than he ever let on.

He made mistakes. Lord knows he did. Dads aren’t gods, and sometimes they don’t know how to say sorry. But he was there. Not always in the way I wanted, but in the way I needed. Solid. Present. And when the chips were down, when the world came crashing in, he never turned his back on me. Ever.

He was my biggest fan, even when I was fumbling my way through life like a blindfolded man in a glass shop. He never laughed at my dreams—even the crazy ones like coming up to Alaska and whispering poetry through a mic to a bunch of insomniacs and ice fishermen. He didn’t always understand it. But he never stopped believing in me.

And now he’s gone.

And I’d give just about anything for one more cup of coffee with him. One more walk around the block. One more quiet moment where I could say, “Hey, Dad. I know now. I understand. Thank you.”

But there’s no rewind button. No encore performance.

All I’ve got now are echoes.

The way I clear my throat before I speak—that was his. The way I place my hand on someone’s shoulder when they’re going through it—that was his too. His presence shows up in the most unexpected ways, like a scent on the wind, or the sound of a song I didn’t know I needed until I heard it.

And maybe that’s the secret. Maybe the people we lose never really leave us. Maybe they just become part of the air we breathe. Part of the way we live.

So if you’re listening this morning, and you miss your dad too… I’m with you.

And I think they’re with us.

In the quiet strength we carry. In the love we give. In the lives we build from the scaffolding they left behind.

This is Chris in the Morning, son of a flawed and beautiful man who did his best—and loved me the best way he knew how.

The Girl Who Never Came ©️

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I built a place in me for her—long before I knew her name. Stone by stone, silence by silence, I shaped the waiting like a cathedral and called it hope.

But she never arrived. Or maybe she did—wearing someone else’s voice, someone else’s wounds. And I missed her while trying to recognize a dream too fragile to survive translation.

I left lights on in every room of my soul. I wrote invitations in every breath. I made my anger polite, my sadness poetic, my chaos a story with structure. Still—no one came.

I listened to other men speak of women who ruined them with beauty. I envied them. To be ruined is at least to be touched. I have been weathered only by absence.

I have loved the outlines of possibility so long, I forgot how to touch something real without comparing it to what never was.

So bury it here. Bury the myth. The girl who would understand without asking, who would lean in without testing, who would see me without scanning for threats I didn’t create.

Let the dream rot back into the soil. Let the chapel collapse under its own loneliness. Let the quiet finally mean nothing except silence.

And if she ever comes—late, weathered, wrong key in hand—let her find nothing waiting. Not out of cruelty. But mercy. Because I’ve already grieved the life we never had.