An Ode to My dad
It’s been 19 days since Dad passed away on August 01, 2025. I still wake up in the morning thinking this is a nightmare and he is not really gone. At night I look at the sky and make a wish on the brightest star I see, and I believe it is you. Dad passed away due to complications from multiple heart attacks, struggling for his life in intensive care for 30 days. He was 84. My father was a flawed man, but he was a genuinely good man, innocent and unfailing in a way we usually only find in books or movies. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing.
As I remember him each moment after his passing, the painful image of my very sick, frail father is fading. I will always carry your pain and suffering in my heart. If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
Death is not a confrontation; it’s simply an event in nature’s ongoing rhythms. Disease, the malign force that requires confrontation, is the real enemy. Death is the respite that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
Whether my dad ever realised it or not before he died, he lived a great life. He might not have fulfilled any of his biggest goals and dreams and failed at many of the things he tried, but he changed the lives of all of the people he came into contact with. He truly made the world a brighter, kinder, more compassionate place.
Whenever I used to enter the intensive care unit to meet him, one thing was very evident: he was neither sad nor scared about his impending death. He wanted to live as much as he could in his remaining days to enjoy and share his happiness with everyone around. In his last 30 days in intensive care, I sat beside him, holding his hand, trying to be strong, but I don't understand the man who raised me and taught me to fight. Now he fades like the stars at the break of light. I'll hold his name, and one day, when I die, I'll see him again.
Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Dad's life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body. Some days I wonder if our dreams are really our own or if we are all fated to fulfil the unrealised dreams of our parents. But today, as I remember my father and celebrate his life, it strikes me that perhaps the best way to remember the life of someone who shaped and inspired you is to realise their dreams.
I read long ago in the book Tuesdays with Morrie, "Death ends a life, not a relationship." His physical presence is gone, but the emotional and spiritual connections that I have with him shall endure. The love, memories, and impact that he has on me will not disappear with his passing. Instead, it will continue to live on through my memories and stories. In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens.
“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.
