I Hope My Dad Knew How Much I Loved Being His Daughter

There are so many things you think about after your dad dies.

Things you wish you'd asked.

Things you wish you'd remembered.

Things you wish you'd done one more time.

And sometimes, things you wish you'd said.

For me, one of those thoughts can be summed up in a single sentence:

I hope my dad knew how much I loved being his daughter.

Not just how much I loved him.

I hope he knew how much I loved belonging to him.

How much it meant to be able to say, That's my dad.

How much comfort there was in knowing that somewhere in the world, he was there.

How much of who I am was shaped by being his daughter.

I hope he knew.

I Hope He Knew I Was Proud to Be His Daughter

When we're young, we don't always think about our parents as people.

They're just Mom and Dad.

We don't yet understand all the things they've lived through.

The things they've sacrificed.

The things they've overcome.

The things they were carrying while they were busy taking care of us.

As we get older, sometimes we begin to see them differently.

We understand more.

We notice things we couldn't have appreciated when we were younger.

And sometimes we become proud of them in an entirely new way.

I hope my dad knew that.

I hope he knew there were things about him I admired.

Things I learned simply by watching him.

Things I carry because he gave them to me.

I hope he knew that being able to say I'm his daughter meant something to me.

I Hope He Knew the Little Things Mattered

Grief has a way of making ordinary memories feel extraordinary.

The phone calls that weren't about anything important.

The jokes.

The advice.

The stories you'd heard before.

The way he said your name.

The things he always asked you.

The little habits you could probably imitate perfectly.

The times you sat together and nothing particularly memorable happened.

Back then, it was just life.

You didn't know you were collecting pieces of him you would someday treasure.

You didn't know a voicemail could become something you couldn't bring yourself to delete.

You didn't know an old photograph could become priceless.

You didn't know you'd someday miss the very things that once seemed so ordinary.

I hope he knew those things mattered.

Maybe I didn't stop often enough to say so.

Maybe I didn't even know yet how much they mattered.

But they did.

They still do.

I Hope He Knew That Even When I Didn't Say It, I Felt It

Most of us don't walk around telling the people we love exactly what they mean to us every day.

We assume there will be another phone call.

Another visit.

Another holiday.

Another chance to say the important things.

So instead, love gets tucked into ordinary life.

Did you get home okay?

Do you need anything?

Call me when you get there.

Have you eaten?

I saw this and thought of you.

Sometimes love sounds like teasing.

Sometimes it looks like showing up.

Sometimes it's sitting beside each other without saying much at all.

Sometimes it's asking for advice when you probably already know the answer because you want to know what Dad thinks.

And sometimes it's rolling your eyes at a story you've heard a hundred times while secretly loving that you know exactly how it ends.

We don't always recognize these things as declarations of love while we're living them.

But they are.

I hope my dad knew that mine were.

I Hope He Knew I Still Needed Him

Maybe I didn't always act like it.

That's one of the strange things about growing up.

We spend so much of our younger lives trying to prove that we can do things ourselves.

Then one day, we'd give anything to be able to ask Dad one more question.

I hope he knew that needing him wasn't something I outgrew.

Even when I became independent.

Even when I built a life of my own.

Even when I was perfectly capable of making my own decisions.

There was still something comforting about knowing I could ask:

Dad, what do you think?

Sometimes I didn't need him to fix the problem.

Sometimes I just wanted his answer.

His reassurance.

His perspective.

Him.

I hope he understood the difference.

I Hope He Knew I Noticed the Ways He Loved Me

Dads don't always say everything out loud.

Sometimes their love comes disguised as practical things.

Checking the car.

Fixing something that was broken.

Calling about the weather.

Giving directions even though you have GPS.

Reminding you about something you've already remembered.

Worrying.

Showing up.

Doing the thing that needed to be done without making a big deal about it.

At the time, those things can seem so ordinary.

After they're gone, you sometimes recognize them for what they were.

Love.

Maybe not the movie version.

Maybe not always spoken perfectly.

But love nevertheless.

I hope my dad knew that I noticed.

And for the things I didn't recognize until later, I hope somehow he knew I would eventually understand.

I Hope He Knew I Loved Who I Was With Him

There are people who give us a particular version of ourselves.

With Dad, maybe you could be silly.

Maybe you could complain.

Maybe you could ask questions you wouldn't ask anyone else.

Maybe you could be completely grown and still feel, somehow, like his little girl.

There was a version of you that existed because he existed.

His daughter.

And losing him didn't only mean missing who he was.

Sometimes it meant missing who you were with him.

I hope my dad knew how much I loved that version of myself.

The one who had a dad to call.

A dad to worry about her.

A dad to annoy her.

A dad to tell stories about.

A dad whose name could still appear on her phone.

A dad she could hug.

I don't think I understood how precious that identity was while I was living inside it.

I understand now.

I Hope He Knew I Was Listening

Maybe not every time.

Let's be honest.

There were probably plenty of times I wasn't.

There may have been advice I ignored.

Warnings I dismissed.

Stories I half-listened to.

Things he repeated so many times I thought I could recite them in my sleep.

And then something strange happens after your dad dies.

His words come back.

You hear them while you're making a decision.

You repeat one of his expressions.

You tell someone something he once told you.

You find yourself handling a situation the way he would have.

And you realize:

I was listening.

Maybe more than either of us knew.

His words found somewhere to live.

They live in me.

I Hope He Knew I Would Keep Talking About Him

I hope he knew he wouldn't simply disappear from the conversation.

That there would still be sentences beginning with:

My dad used to...

My dad always said...

You know what my dad would have done...

I hope he knew his stories would survive him.

That I would laugh about him.

Remember him.

Tell people about the things he did.

Keep certain traditions because they were his.

Say his name because I still love hearing it.

I hope he knew that his life would continue to echo through mine.

Because that's one of the things daughters do.

We carry our dads forward.

Maybe He Knew More Than I Think He Did

Grief can make us revisit everything.

We replay conversations.

We remember the times we were impatient.

The visits we didn't make.

The phone calls we cut short.

The things we meant to say later.

And sometimes we begin measuring a lifetime of love by the moments we wish we could change.

But maybe love shouldn't be measured that way.

Maybe our dads knew us well enough to understand the things we didn't always say.

Maybe they saw it in the way we called them when we needed help.

The way we laughed together.

The way we asked their opinion.

The way we showed up.

The way we worried about them.

The way we hugged them goodbye.

The way we simply lived our lives as their daughters.

Maybe love was being communicated all along.

I Hope My Dad Knew

If I could tell him now, I wouldn't only say:

Dad, I love you.

I would tell him something more.

I would tell him:

I loved being your daughter.

I loved that you were the person I got to call Dad.

I loved the history that belonged only to us.

I loved the ordinary days I didn't yet understand were precious.

I loved knowing there was someone in this world who had known me from the beginning.

I loved the pieces of you that became pieces of me.

And even now, I love being your daughter.

Because death didn't take that from me.

I don't get to call you anymore.

I don't get another conversation.

I don't get to say all the things I now wish I'd said when you were standing in front of me.

But I still get to carry what it meant to belong to you.

So yes, I hope my dad knew how much I loved him.

But even more than that,

I hope he knew how much I loved being his daughter.