Missing My Dad

There was a cardinal in my brother’s backyard.

Bright red, steady, moving through the branches like it had a purpose.

It appeared during my dad’s celebration of life in March.

I’ve always heard that when you see a red cardinal, a loved one who has passed is near. Maybe it is folklore. Maybe it is something we tell ourselves to soften the ache. But standing there watching that flash of red, I felt a kind of presence I did not expect.

We lost my dad last November.

He had dementia, so I started losing him long before he died. It was the slow kind of grief, the kind that arrives in pieces. A forgotten detail. A lost story. A moment where his eyes no longer landed on me the way they used to. I grieved him for years before his body finally let go.

And still, this past week, the grief has felt sharp again.

Missing him in a way that surprises me.

Wanting him back.

Wanting one more ordinary moment, one more familiar expression, one more chance to hear him say my name.

It is easy to call that selfish, but grief is not selfish.

It is love that still remembers.

So when that cardinal landed in the yard, bright against the fence, something in me softened. Not healed. Not resolved. Just softened. It felt like a reminder that love leaves traces. That even after the long goodbye of dementia and the final goodbye of death, something of him is still here.

Maybe the cardinal was not my dad.

But it reminded me of him.

It reminded me that the world still holds color even when everything inside feels gray.

It reminded me that grief does not move in a straight line. It circles back to the places where love once lived.

Today, I am letting myself miss him.

Not because I am stuck.

But because he mattered.

And because love this deep does not disappear. It simply changes shape.