Dear Dad,

The Sunday before you died, I had this feeling in my chest. I was sitting outside working on my capstone paper and planning my video presentation of it. It was the last month of the semester and I was finally about to graduate with my Bachelors in English. I remember sitting there and there was this moment when I thought of you and I felt it in my chest. I thought it was just you crossing my mind and because we had had a falling out, I didn’t automatically pick up my phone and call you this time. Instead, I decided I would get this project out of the way and then call you to hash things out and move forward. I submitted that paper and presentation on Monday night, planning to call you Tuesday. Only, when I woke up that Tuesday morning, I had a missed call from Nana. That’s when we learned you were in the hospital and had had a heart attack on Sunday evening, right around when I had that feeling in my chest. By the time we made it there, you were gone. I didn’t get to say goodbye or I love you or I’m sorry or I forgive you. I didn’t get to say any of it because I thought we had more time. I thought we still had a chance to work things out. I thought wrong. We would never get to forgive and forget in this lifetime and I will live with the fact for the rest of my life that I didn’t speak to you for a while before you died. We had our struggles, like everyone, but in the midst of my first experience with grief after Granddaddy died, I found anger as my most readily available emotion. I wish I hadn’t been so quick to get so mad. I’m not saying I didn’t have a right to be upset, but all the grief I was feeling went into that anger and I reacted stronger than I should have. If there’s one thing I wish I could change, it’s that. It’s that I wish I could have seen through my sadness and those huge, unfamiliar feelings to understand how limited we are when it comes to time, how close we can be to doing something and still be too late, how much you can regret holding onto something for too long. I’ve learned a lot in the time since, but the lesson that stemmed from that guilt and regret is the biggest by far and will stay with me forever. If I had learned that lesson a little earlier, I might have had a chance to restore our relationship before you died. I might have had a chance to talk to you, not in anger or annoyance, before it was the last time we spoke. While that is something I’ll forever wish I could change, your death taught me what’s truly important and it was the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn — don’t assume you still have time, because you truly never know when everything will end.

I miss you Dad.

Love, Bean