A Father’s Day Without A Call, But Not Without Love

There was a quiet moment I shared with my husband not too long ago – one that didn’t feel dramatic, but stayed with me long after it passed. I told him, almost in passing, that I hadn’t dreamt of my father in weeks. It wasn’t alarming; just unfamiliar.

For a long time after he passed, Papa would visit me in dreams – sometimes in fragments, sometimes in full conversations that felt more real than waking life. And then, suddenly, there was nothing. No dreams, no gentle appearances. Just silence.

As I said those words out loud, I began to understand why. I had been living in survival mode. I was in Las Vegas speaking at a Health Conference, and after I returned, I had been sick, overwhelmed, moving from one responsibility to the next: grading finals, completing a manuscript, meeting with family in town, rescheduling commitments my body could not sustain. My days were productive, even outwardly successful. But they were tightly packed, leaving no room for stillness. There was no space to feel, no space to remember, no space for grief to arrive in any recognizable form.

And then, one morning, something shifted. The deadlines had been met. The body softened. The nervous system, almost imperceptibly, exhaled. It was in that quiet opening that he came back to me.

An invitation in the quiet

In my dream, Papa looked at me with the same gentle warmth I had known all my life and asked a simple question: “Halwaa-puri khaogi?” (Will you eat halwa-puri?) It was one of my favorite meals, tied to comfort, to home, to the intimacy of being cared for without needing to ask.

Then he smiled and reminded me of a trip from a few years ago, when my friends and I had visited him in Pune. “It was my favorite, beta,” he said. There was no heaviness in the dream, no sense of loss – only presence, memory, and a quiet kind of joy.

When I woke up, I realized that grief does not operate on demand. It does not follow the urgency of our schedules or the expectations we place on healing. Grief is patient. It waits. It returns when the body and mind have created enough safety to receive it. Even now, my father seemed to have waited until I was no longer holding everything together before he appeared again – not to remind me of loss, but to remind me to pause, to celebrate, to feel, and to remember.

That morning, I stepped onto my yoga mat for the first time in what felt like ages. Not as an act of discipline, but one of presence. I was simply allowing myself to be with my breath, with my body, with the quiet echo of my father’s presence lingering from the dream.

An extraordinary memory

My father had an extraordinary relationship with memory. He never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, on either side of the family. It was a quality we joked about, calling him our “human calendar.” But beneath that humor was something deeper. He made people feel remembered. He made them feel seen, valued, and held in his awareness.

I have tried to carry that trait forward. But after his passing, I began to notice something difficult to reconcile. Unless prompted by social media or a group message, very few people actually remember important moments in their lives. Grief has a way of sharpening perception. It removes the layers of polite reasoning and reveals a quieter truth. When something, or someone, matters to you, you remember, and when you don’t, that absence carries its own meaning.

In the first year after losing a parent, the grief is often described as a longing for the person who is no longer there. That longing is real and profound. Father’s Day was heart-wrenching with no one to call.

But there is another layer spoken about less often; the disappointment in others, the clarity that comes from seeing relationships as they truly are. The realization that not everyone holds the same depth of care, the same attentiveness, the same commitment to showing up.

Evolving and letting go

Yet even this realization evolves. Slowly, the grief begins to shift. It is no longer only about the person you have lost; it is also about the version of yourself that existed before that loss – the version that expected more from others, that equated love with external validation and remembrance.

Letting go of that version is its own kind of grief. But it is also an opening.

What emerges in its place is not detachment or cynicism, but a quieter form of clarity. You begin to understand where your energy belongs. You become more intentional about the relationships you nurture and the expectations you release. And you begin to advocate for yourself, not loudly or confrontationally, but in ways that are grounded and deeply self-respecting.

Grief as a teacher

Grief, in this sense, becomes a teacher. It teaches you to show up, not perfectly, but consciously. It teaches you to remember others not because you are prompted to, but because you choose to. It teaches you to extend care from a place of authenticity rather than obligation. And it teaches you to turn that same care inward.

This Father’s Day, I find myself in a different relationship with grief. It is no longer something I am trying to resolve or move beyond. It is something I carry with me, something that continues to shape my perspective in quiet, meaningful ways.

Love changing form

There will be no phone call this year, no familiar voice marking the day. But there will be a presence. There will be gratitude. There will be the steady awareness that love does not disappear with absence; it changes form. It finds new ways to reach us through memory, through the body, through moments of stillness, and sometimes through dreams that arrive when we are finally ready to receive them.

Wherever my father is, I hope he knows that I remember. Not because I was reminded, but because he taught me what it means to hold people in your awareness with care and intention. His way of being in the world continues to live through me in the way I pause, in the way I care, in the way I choose to show up.

And in that, perhaps, nothing has truly been lost.