Father's Day was a few days ago.
I have been thinking about dads ever since. Mine and others. The specific weight of that love, the kind that goes both ways, father to child and child to father, the kind that does not need to be explained or earned or proved. It just exists. From the very first moment and every moment after.
I have been thinking about my dad specifically.
I was nine years old the last time I saw him. Late at night, everyone asleep, I crept through a hospital corridor trying not to be seen by nurses who would send me away. Slipping past the ICU doors into a room full of machines and beeping and the particular silence of a place where people are fighting to stay. My dad was in one of those beds.
We both knew it was the last time.
Neither of us said that. We said I love you instead. Because I love you was the only thing big enough to hold everything we could not say. All the things a nine year old and her dying father cannot fit into a goodbye in an ICU in the middle of the night with the nurses about to notice.
I love you had to carry all of it.
It still does.
I think about what my dad gave me when he had nothing to give.
He was so sick that I had stopped asking him for things. Not because anyone told me to. Because I was nine and I could see that getting up cost him something. So I stopped asking to be lifted. I made myself smaller so he would not have to feel the weight of what he could not do.
He still bought me books.
I do not know what it cost him. But he knew what books would do for me and he bought them anyway. Giving what you have no business giving because you love someone that much.
In Afghanistan right now there are children who have gone silent the same way I went silent. Who have stopped asking for sweets, for shoes, for anything, because they have seen what it does to a man's face when he cannot say yes. Making themselves smaller so their father does not have to feel the weight of what he cannot do.
But their father cannot buy them books either.
In Sudan, fathers walk miles to find food and come back with almost nothing and watch their children eat while they pretend they already ate. The quiet devastation of a man who would do anything and cannot do the one thing. My father could not lift me at the end. These fathers cannot feed their children. Different weights. The same breaking.
In Syria, fathers put their children to sleep in rubble and lie next to them staring at ceilings, feeling something that ages a man decades in a single night. They grew up believing a father is the thing that stands between his child and the world. And the world got through anyway. And there is nothing left to stand between.
In Gaza, fathers and children look at each other differently now.
Every look a last look. Every hug held a second longer. Every I love you carrying everything that cannot be said because nobody knows who goes first. The father or the child. The airstrike does not announce itself. So they look at each other across a room and both of them know and neither of them says it and the love has nowhere to go except into that look.
I know that look.
I have given that look.
My father could not lift me at the end. But he snuck me into his heart every single day until it’s last beat. And I have carried him in mine ever since.
If your father is still alive, go to him today.
Tell him what he gave you even when he had nothing.
Tell him you know.
Tell him I love you and let it carry everything that does not fit into words.
And when you pull away from that hug, think about the fathers I told you about tonight.
The one pretending he already ate. The one lying next to his children in rubble. The one whose child has stopped asking. The one exchanging last looks across a room and hoping it is not the last.
They love their children the exact same way your father loves you.
They just have nothing left to give them with.
You do.
Give in his name. Give for their children. Give because the love between a father and a child is the same everywhere on earth and some of those children are running out of time to feel it.
My dad gave me books he could not afford.
Give something today that he would have been proud of.
For my dad, and every father who gave everything he had,
Hafsa