The Phone Call I Kept Rehearsing
My father and I didn't speak for almost four years. Not because of one explosive fight — there wasn't a single moment you could point to and say, that's where it broke. It was quieter than that. A slow drift, the kind that happens when two stubborn men both decide the other one should call first.
I thought about calling him more times than I can count. I'd get as far as pulling up his number, thumb hovering, and then I'd think of something he said at my mother's funeral — something small, something he probably doesn't even remember saying — and I'd put the phone down again. I held onto that one sentence like it proved something. Like it gave me permission to keep waiting him out.
Here's what I didn't understand at thirty-one that I understand now at closer to fifty: grief makes people say strange things. It doesn't excuse unkindness, but it explains a lot of it. My father buried his wife of thirty-eight years and I buried my mother, and somehow in the middle of that shared loss we found a way to be angry at each other instead of just sad together. It's a strange kind of math, but grief does strange math.
The call finally happened because of a heart scare — his, not mine. A nurse at the hospital in Greenville told me he was stable, and I sat in my car in the parking lot and cried in a way I hadn't let myself cry in years. Not because I thought I was about to lose him. Because I realized how much time I'd spent protecting a wound instead of letting it close.
When I finally walked into his room, I didn't have a speech ready. All the things I'd rehearsed in the car — the explanations, the fair accounting of who owed whom an apology — just fell away. He looked smaller than I remembered. He said my name like it was the only word he had left, and I sat down next to the bed and took his hand, and neither of us said sorry out loud. We didn't need to. Some apologies don't need words; they just need you to finally show up.
We've had six good years since then. Sunday dinners. Arguments about football that don't carry any real weight behind them anymore. Normal, ordinary time — which is the thing I almost traded for pride.
I think about that parking lot a lot. How close I came to finding out too late that the sentence I'd been punishing him for was never as important as the years I was spending not punishing him. Forgiveness didn't arrive like a lightning bolt. It arrived like relief — like putting down something heavy I'd been carrying for so long I'd forgotten it was a choice to carry it at all.
My name is Scott Andrew Alpaugh, and if there's one thing I'd tell my younger self, it's this: make the call. Not someday. Now, while there's still time for someday to mean something.
More from me: scottandrewalpaugh.com · andrewalpaugh.com · scottalpaugh.com
Written by Scott Andrew Alpaugh — technology professional and entrepreneur based in Greenville, South Carolina. Also at andrewalpaugh.com and scottalpaugh.com.
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