My dad is sixty-six. He's still alive. We had brunch on Sunday. He paid. He said, when the check came, I got it. I said, thanks, Dad. He said, yep.
This is the longest unbroken conversation we had in 2026.
What follows is a list of things my dad has not said to me, ever. I have been keeping this list, off and on, since I was twenty-two and started therapy. I am thirty-four now. The list has not gotten shorter.
I am not writing it because I want him to read it. He won't. I am writing it because I want to stop carrying it alone.
1. "I'm proud of you."
Not at graduation. Not at my wedding. Not when I got the job in Cleveland. He has said that's good and well done and, once, after I bought a house, nice place. He has never used the word proud. I do not think the word is in his vocabulary for me. I think it is in his vocabulary — I have heard him use it about the Browns, twice — but it has never made the trip from his sports vocabulary to his son vocabulary, and at this point I am fairly certain it is not going to.
2. "How are you doing?"
I mean the real version. The version that waits for the answer. He says how's it going the way other men say nice weather. It is a noise that opens a conversation. It is not a question. I learned, around twelve, not to answer it as a question. I have not, since then, told my father how I was actually doing, because the venue does not exist between us.
3. "I love you."
I know. I know. Every list like this has this entry. I considered leaving it off because it is a cliché. But it is also true. He has not said it. Not at my mother's funeral. Not at the hospital after my appendix burst. Not on the phone after my divorce. Not ever. My mother said it for both of them, when she was alive. Since she died, the sentence has not been said in our family in any direction. It is, at this point, a museum piece. Behind glass.
4. "I'm sorry."
Not for the small things. Not for stepping on my foot or forgetting my birthday in 2014. Not for the big things either. Not for the time he yelled at my mother in front of me when I was nine, in a Denny's, about something I cannot remember now, but which I remember the texture of perfectly: the booth, the salt shaker, my mother's hands going still. Not for the time he didn't come to my college graduation because of a work thing that turned out, I learned years later, to have been a golf thing. Not for any of it. The word does not, as far as I can tell, exist in his throat.
5. "I was wrong."
Same as above, but worth its own line. I was wrong is, in my father's framework, what other people are. He is not other people. I have, over thirty-four years, come to believe that he sees admitting wrongness as the same as becoming a different kind of man. And he is committed, at sixty-six, to remaining the kind of man he is. The cost of not saying I was wrong is, I think, the cost of being unreachable. He has paid that cost. He has not, I do not think, fully understood that anyone else paid it with him.
6. "Tell me about her."
About my wife. About my girlfriends before her. About my friends. About anyone in my life who is not him. He has met my wife forty times. He has not asked her a question of substance about her own life. He treats her with the polite distance of a stranger at a bus stop. She is gracious about it. She has stopped expecting it. I have, only recently, stopped grieving on her behalf.
7. "What do you think?"
About anything. Politics, the Browns, the meaning of life, where we should eat. He has opinions. He has many opinions. He has, in my hearing, never asked for mine. I learned around fifteen that my opinions, if offered, would be received with a small head-nod and then immediately followed by his corrected version of the topic. I stopped offering. I have, with his complete cooperation, become a man who does not have opinions in front of his father.
8. "Do you remember when..."
This one surprises me, when I notice it. He does not reminisce with me. He does not, ever, bring up shared memory. We did go on vacations. We did go to baseball games. I have photographs that prove this. He has, in thirty-four years, never said the words do you remember when we and finished the sentence. I think he does remember. I think the venue for sharing memory between us simply was not built. It is not, at this point, going to be.
9. "I'm scared."
He has been scared. I know this because I have been there. The night my mother went into the hospital for the last time, in 2019, he sat in our kitchen at three in the morning and his hands were shaking. He drank a glass of water. He said, okay then. That was his report from the front. I would have, in that moment, traded any of my limbs for him to say the actual sentence. I would have traded most things in my life for him to say it now.
10. "I missed you."
Not after a trip. Not after my year abroad. Not after college. Not after my divorce, when I lived three states away and did not call for two months. He never mentions absence. He picks up exactly where we left off, every time, as if the gap was a thing that did not happen. I used to take this as a kindness. I now take it as the only mode he has. The mode of nothing in our relationship has texture, including the parts where you weren't here.
11. "I want to know you."
This is the one that, when I write it down, I have to stand up from my desk for a minute.
I am thirty-four. I have a job he cannot describe. I have a marriage he has not asked about. I have a small, particular interior life — books I love, a faith I am working out, a friendship with a man in Madison who has, in many ways, been more of a father to me than my actual father — and my actual father has, in thirty-four years, not asked to know any of it. He does not know who I am. He knows who I was at twelve, in a pretty rough sketch, and he has not, since then, requested an update.
I do not think this is malice. I think this is the manual he was issued. His father did not ask to know him. He is, in this respect, faithful to the silence he was raised inside.
I also think — and this is the hard part to say — that I have grieved this for a long time, and the grief is not going to resolve, and what I am trying to do now is to be the version of a father that asks. With my friends. With my wife. With, eventually, the kid we are trying to have. To say, often, the sentence my father did not say. I want to know you. Tell me what you are like. I will not interrupt. I will not correct. I will just listen, and then I will love you a little more accurately, and then we will eat dinner.
12. "Goodbye."
He says okay then. He says see you. He has never, in my hearing, used the actual word. It is the same problem as proud — a word in the dictionary that has not made the trip into the part of his vocabulary I am allowed to access.
I know this matters because, in the recurring nightmare I have had since my mother died, I am at his hospital bed at the end of his life, and the last thing he says to me is okay then, and I wake up and feel exactly like I did at nine, in a Denny's, watching my mother's hands go still.
I am writing this down because the list, written down, is smaller than the list in my chest. Twelve items. Twelve sentences he did not say. I can hold twelve things. Twelve I can carry to a therapist, to a friend in Madison, to my wife, to a journal at three in the morning. Twelve is finite.
What I have learned, slowly, is that the list does not need a happy ending. It does not need a section where I forgive him, or where he says one of these sentences before he dies, or where the cycle is broken. None of that may happen. The list may stay twelve items long until I die.
What I can do is say each of these sentences to the people in my life who are not him. I can say I'm proud of you to my wife when she finishes a hard week. I can say how are you doing to my friend in Madison and wait for the answer. I can say I love you to him before we hang up the phone. I can say I'm sorry when I'm wrong. I can say I want to know you to the kid I do not yet have, on the day he is born, in a hospital in Cleveland, while my father, if he is still alive, sits in the waiting room saying okay then to a vending machine.
The sentences my father did not say to me are not lost. They have not died with him, even though he is, in the most important sense, partly already gone from me. They live in my mouth now. I am the venue for them. I am the place where they get said, finally, to other people.
That is, maybe, the only way the list ever ends. Not with him saying any of it. With me saying all of it, to other people, until the day I die.
If your list is similar, the journal prompts tool has a section just for this — writing the unsaid. The scripts for talking to your dad are written for the small chance he becomes reachable. If you want to be the version your father was not, our page for new fathers is the one to bookmark.