The Complicated Father: On Grief, Healing, and Finding a Way to Still Celebrate

My dad left when I was four years old.

I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because it's where the story begins, and because I think a lot of you have a version of that sentence too. Maybe it wasn't your dad who left. Maybe it was your dad who stayed but was never really there. Maybe it was the dad who loved you in the only way he knew how, which wasn't quite the way you needed.

Father's Day has never been a simple day for me.

My father was a businessman. Driven, focused, relentless. The boardroom was where he made sense of himself. Relationships were harder terrain. I spent most of my childhood and young adulthood at a distance from him, close enough to know he existed, far enough to build a life that didn't depend on him showing up.

And then something shifted in the last five years of his life.

We found each other, in a way. Not perfectly. Not with all the conversations we'd missed along the way suddenly materialised. But we found something real. Something worth having. I got to know a version of my father that the younger version of me never did, and I am grateful for that, even now.

And then covid came, his toxic marriage ended, his sister died and then dementia.

I watched the disease take the very thing he had built his entire identity around. His mind. His sharpness. The thing he had chosen, over and over again, above everything else. There is a particular kind of grief in watching someone lose what they sacrificed so much to protect. I grieved him before he was gone. I think anyone who has loved someone through dementia knows exactly what I mean by that.

When he passed, there was more to navigate. Family dynamics that were already complicated became more so. I had to fight, alongside the people I love, to be seen and acknowledged in his estate. To be recognised as his daughter. To claim what was rightfully ours. Grief is heavy enough on its own. Grief layered with legal battles and family conflict is something else entirely.

I share this not to air grievances, but because I know I am not the only one who has lived a version of this story. The absent parent who came back, but not all the way. The lost years that no reconciliation can fully restore. The end of a life that brings up everything unfinished.

Here is what I have learned, after all of it:

Complicated love is still love.

A complicated father is still your father. The grief you feel over what wasn't, what couldn't be, what almost was, that grief is real and it deserves space. You do not have to choose between honouring what was good and acknowledging what was hard. You are allowed to hold both.

You are also allowed to be angry. Anger, when it lives alongside love, is not a character flaw. It is what happens when someone you needed wasn't available in the way you needed them. That anger has a home. You don't have to perform forgiveness before you've actually arrived there.

And here is the part that took me longer to understand: healing does not mean the story changes. It means you are no longer defined by it. It means you can look at a complicated man and see a complicated human being who was doing what he could with what he had, even when what he had wasn't enough for you. That is not minimising what happened. That is freedom.

This week I recorded a Father's Day healing meditation for YouTube. Twelve minutes. Just my voice, some gentle music, and a prayer for everyone navigating what this day brings up.

I made it for the children of the complicated fathers. For the people spending this day in grief. For anyone who has had to fight to be seen by someone who was supposed to see them automatically.

The response has been more than I expected. Comments from people sharing things they haven't said out loud before. Pain that has been held quietly for decades. And also, running through all of it, something that feels like relief. Like being seen. Like finally having somewhere to put it.

That is the thing about grief that doesn't have a name. It just needs somewhere to go.

I also want to say this, because I think it matters:

We can still celebrate.

Not in the Hallmark way, necessarily. Not with brunch and cards and performances of gratitude that don't match what's actually in our chests. But in a real way. In the way of acknowledging what was good, even inside what was hard. In the way of celebrating the fathers who showed up, even imperfectly. In the way of celebrating ourselves, for continuing to love despite everything it has cost us.

If you had a good father, celebrate him without apology.

If you had a complicated one, you are allowed to grieve him and honour what was real, all in the same breath.

If you lost yours recently, your first Father's Day without him is its own kind of sacred. Be gentle with yourself today.

And if your grandfather, your uncle, your mentor, a fictional character, or a stranger on the internet was the one who showed you what safe male presence looks like, that counts. That is worth honouring too.

My dad and I didn't get the whole story. We got the last chapter, and I have made my peace with that.

I think he understands now, wherever he is, what he couldn't understand then. I think the version of him that exists beyond the dementia and the distance and the decades of complication, that version of him sees it clearly.

I hope yours does too.

Happy Father's Day, to every complicated love. 🌹

The Father's Day Healing Meditation is on YouTube now. 11:11 minutes for whatever you're carrying today. Come find it when you need it.

If today stirred something and you want to go deeper, DM me FATHER on Instagram @christinejgold. I'm here.`,