A Letter to My Father

I wrote this letter for my father's memorial. Several people asked if I would share it. I share it here with love, in the hope that it may help others reflect on their own fathers, their own silences, and the words they still long to say. 

Dad,

Your passing broke something in me that I desperately need to heal.

I have carried this letter in my heart for a long time.

I have cried with these words more times than I can count.

Today, I am finally giving you these words.

I know we, your children, Kambiz, Ramin, Kathy, and I, each knew you differently. We each carry our own memories, our own love, our own questions, and our own relationship with you. I can only speak from mine, with love, humility, and mercy.

Dad,

You were a learned man.

You loved poetry, literature, language, and ideas.

From you, I inherited that love.

That is the essence of the legacy between us.

It will endure in me forever.

For that, I am eternally thankful.

Even in your final days, we would sit together reciting poetry. At ninety-five, you still carried countless verses from memory. Your voice never lost its richness. It was the same velvety voice I had known all my life. As you recited, you would look directly into my eyes and pierce my heart.

Those moments are among the greatest gifts you ever gave me.

Dad,

You were a complex man from a generation that did not always have words for tenderness.

You carried pride.

You carried responsibility.

You carried solitude and silence.

You carried an immense history, burdens that even those closest to you could not fully understand.

Your relationship with your father was complex.

The steadiness a son hopes to receive from his father was not always there.

You had to learn too early how to stand without leaning.

Your life was marked early by responsibility.

You cared for your mother, your sister, and your younger siblings when those duties should never have fallen on someone so young.

You had to work.

You had to provide.

And along the way, parts of the young man who loved books and learning had to be set aside.

That helps me see.

That helps me know.

The man you became.

Dad,

Our family's story was marked by separation and sacrifice.

We left Iran in 1979, and you stayed behind for nearly six years.

That distance shaped each of us differently. What we carried. What we lost. What we held onto.

We each knew a different part of you.

A husband.

A father.

A grandfather.

A friend.

A man of learning.

A man of pride.

A man forever connected to poetry, to Iran, to memory, and to the world we came from.

Dad,

Our relationship, like so many between fathers and sons, was shaped by both love and by distance... by words spoken and words left unsaid.

But today, I do not measure what was lost.

I honor what was there.

You were my father.

You were my beginning.

You rooted me in words, in poetry, in thought.

You helped shape the questions I have spent a lifetime asking about love, responsibility, family, presence, and what it truly means to be a father.

And maybe this is one of the deepest truths of that legacy.

That I inherited more than I knew.

I inherited gifts.

And I inherited wounds.

I inherited strength.

And I inherited silence.

Some I recognized immediately.

Others, I only understood after becoming a father.

And from all of this, I inherited one question.

What kind of father do I want to be?

And so, every day, I try to transform what I inherited into something gentler for my sons.

Not because you failed me, but because every generation hopes to love a little more openly than the one before.

Today, I say these words to you with grace and gratitude.

Dad, my father,

Forgive me for the distances I could not cross.

Forgive me for what I could not express.

May there be peace for what we could not understand.

May there be grace for what we could not say.

And may there be rest for what lived in the silence between us.

You are now released from pain.

Whatever was heavy in you is now lifted.

And what was best in you lives on in your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren. Your love of knowledge. Your respect for learning. Your endurance. Your connection to Iran, to memory, and to family.

Dad,

Every time I open a book of poetry,

Every time I recite one of the verses we once shared,

I will hear your voice.

Not only in the words,

But in the memory of the man who first taught me to cherish them.

Dad, my father,

Rest in peace.

And may your memory be a blessing.