The KC Chronicles:

Ah, January…the month that’s like a rollercoaster ride through my heart. On one hand, I celebrate my middle son’s birthday, and ten days later, I’m reminded that it’s also the month my dad died. Joy and grief packed into the same stretch of days, whether I like it or not.

My dad died in 2023. He wasn’t the greatest dad, and I’ve never pretended otherwise, but he was my dad. I do have a stepdad who has been in my life for a long time, but that’s a story for another day. This one is complicated enough on its own.

Looking back, I can see that he really did try, just not in the dad department. He always wanted to be my friend, and maybe that’s where things started to go sideways.

When I was in college and my younger siblings were still in middle school, he decided to move to the Philippines. He said he was miserable in the U.S., that life there was cheaper, that he’d save money and finally pay off his debts. In reality, he spent even more. He always did. By the time he passed, he was still asking me and my siblings for money despite receiving military pay because he had no control over his finances. That never changed.

When he first started having heart issues years ago, he refused to come back to the States. He was convinced his wife, who was more than twenty years younger than him, would cheat if he left. Writing this now makes something painfully obvious. I never actually dealt with his death. Even now. And it makes me even angrier that he didn’t try and fix his heart problems when it wasn’t as bad as it was.

Just today, a video popped up in my Timehop. It was a voice message I had saved. Hearing his voice again broke my heart in a way I wasn’t prepared for, because I’ll never hear it again. He’s actually gone. It’s 2026. He died three years ago, and somehow my heart still hasn’t caught up.

As much as he annoyed me, I know deep down, that I don’t want him to be gone.

What haunts me most is how it ended. In the last few months of his life, he was constantly in and out of the hospital, but he always pulled through. So the last time he was in the hospital, I genuinely believed he would pull through, so I didn’t want to talk to him. I was angry. Angry that he never came back to the U.S. for surgery. Angry that this could have been prevented years earlier.

I told myself he’d be fine. He always was.

Even when he was on a breathing machine, tubes down his throat, I believed it. And then one night, we got the call. He coded. And he didn’t come back. I never got to say goodbye, and that regret stays with me forever.

The funeral his wife arranged was devastating in a different way. Depressing. Empty. It felt like a cruel joke. Like this was the final version of his life, his legacy. They took him out of one of those cold drawer walls and didn’t even change his garments. He was displayed in the blood-stained sheets he died in. You could see it. Dried pool of blood. They paraded him around like a trophy.

To this day, I can still see his face. Cold, frozen, expressionless. I remember thinking, this is it. This is really it.

Grief is such a weird feeling, and I hate that it’s tied to my child’s birthday. Part of the reason I never let myself fully grieve was timing. Ten days before my dad died, I became a mom to my second child. It was an extremely hard & traumatizing labor to the point I didn’t want to tell the world about my son until a week later. The worst part of it is that I didn’t even let my dad see him as he wasn’t even on the breathing tubes yet.

When my third son, Theodore, was born this past year (2025), it all resurfaced in a new way. The realization that my kids are growing up in a world where they won’t really know my dad besides memories of what me and others say about him. I still can’t believe it. I’ll never hear his laugh again. And let me tell you…its a laugh that you’ll never forget. Even my mom, despite being divorced from him, says she can’t believe there’s a world without him.

I ignored it for a long time. Out of sight, out of mind. That worked until it didn’t. Until a memory pops up. Or a voice recording. Or a random moment where I expect my phone to ring and it never does.

Duke is turning three in a few days. I’ll celebrate that. And a few days later, I’ll quietly acknowledge another year without my dad. I never imagined my 30s without him. I never imagined life without my dad.

Some days, I still expect his call. Asking for money. Asking for help. Just being there. But it never comes.

If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, even in a complicated, unfinished way, how did you deal with it? Because I’m still figuring it out.