My dad would have turned 81 on June 8th.
He passed unexpectedly in late April from a stroke. I had just turned 40 two weeks before he died.
There’s something about that timing that still sits with me.
My father was born in Oslo in 1945, one month after the war ended. His childhood was shaped by scarcity, survival, and the weight of post-war Europe. Mine was shaped by very different things. When he was 40, I was born into a world of material safety. His needs were about surviving. Mine were about being seen and held in ways he didn’t always know how to give. For a long time, I carried that gap. The things he couldn’t always meet me with. And that’s not a reflection of him not loving me or not trying. He was doing the best he could with what he knew, with what his own upbringing had given him. That’s true for any parent, myself included as a dad to my son.
A lot of people have a tendency to blame their parents, but the real shift happens when we recognize they did the best they could with what they knew. The healing work starts when we stop waiting for them to give us what we didn’t get, and we start giving it to ourselves instead. That applies to all our relationships. Romantic, friendships, everything. The people we love can only meet us as deeply as they’ve met themselves. So the invitation is this: do your own work. Meet yourself. Because that’s where everything changes.
But here’s what’s been remarkable since his passing.
Without the limitations of his physical mind, without his human constraints, I’ve felt his soul come to me. And the love he always had for me. It’s been awe-inspiring to say the least. The love he couldn’t always express with words has reached me now in a way that’s completely healed something in me. I don’t have a shadow of a doubt that he loved me. It’s woven into the fabric of my being.
That’s the gift of sitting in silence, closing your eyes, and finally feeling. When we get quiet enough, when we stop filling every moment with distraction, that’s when Spirit can actually reach us.
If you’ve lost a parent or someone you love, I want to ask you: have you allowed yourself to sit in that silence? Have you given yourself the space to feel their presence without any noise or distractions?
If you’d like guidance on how to do this, here’s a free meditation for exactly that purpose.
As I honor my father’s life, I want to leave you with this: take the time to value and cherish your loved ones while they’re still here. I’m so grateful we took that trip to Northern Norway last year to celebrate his eightieth birthday together. Those moments matter more than we realize in the day to day, and we had a fabulous trip we get to look back on now. The time we have with the people we love is the most precious thing we get.
