Confession – Echoes of the fearless

I LOST MY FATHER AND THEN I LOST MY RIGHT TO FALL APART

When I lost my father, the world I knew quietly changed. Not just because of his absence, but because of everything that followed.

Grief didn’t come the way I expected. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t cinematic. It was quiet, restrained, filled with silence I didn’t choose. I cried for barely ten minutes. Not because I didn’t feel the pain but because there was no room to feel it. I had to be the one who held it all together. For my mother. For my sister. For the version of me that everyone expected “the strong one”. Even my mother, perhaps worn down by her own grief mistook my silence for indifference, not realizing that I was breaking too just quietly.

But grief taught me something I wasn’t prepared for, how lonely loss can be, even when you’re surrounded by people.

Relatives said things, cruel things. About me, about the choices I made in honoring my father. They gossiped, they judged, they clung to rituals and words instead of compassion. I gave my father his last rites with my own hands, something usually reserved for ‘Sons’ and for that, I was questioned. Whispered about. Criticized. And yet I would do it again. Because love is bigger than rules and silence is not always respect, sometimes it’s abandonment.

I also began to see people, really see them. Some of the ones who were supposed to be closest to me were the quickest to disappear. And not just physically but emotionally. Some couldn’t handle sadness, so they avoided me. Some thought one message of “stay strong” was enough. And some simply didn’t want the version of me that wasn’t smiling.

I’ve always been the one who listened. Who held space for other people’s pain, even when I had none left for myself. I never expected anyone to fix me, only to sit beside me. But even that, for some was too much.

If you’re reading this and wondering if this is about you, maybe it is. But is this a list of complaints? No, It’s a reflection. A mourning not just for my father, but for the illusions I had about people, support, love, and kindness.

Losing my father didn’t just break my heart, it opened my eyes:

To how grief makes others uncomfortable.

To how even in your most fragile moments, some will find ways to be cruel and deeply unkind.

Still, I’m grateful for what this pain revealed.

I now know who really listens. Who can hold your sorrow without running from it. I know what kind of person I never want to be, the one who disappears when someone is hurting.

To those who stood by quietly, who assumed strength means immunity: I ask only this, don’t claim closeness if you can’t sit beside someone’s grief. It’s not a weakness to be sad. But it is a kind of cruelty to ignore sadness in someone you say you care about.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because there are so many like me, carrying silent grief while the world looks away.

This is for us. This is for my father. This is for the truth.

Because in the end, it’s not about who’s there when things are good, who holds space for your sorrows without flinching it, who stays when your world is falling apart.