This is Douglas Andrews, my father, with Andrew Douglas Pyper, my son. Today was Father’s Day. This cute kid in the picture is now all grown up and an amazing dad of two little girls. I feel like this picture was taken yesterday, not 17 or 18 years ago. My dad still looks like this in my head. But in reality, he is in hospice care in an assisted living center. My sister and I were able to at least see him in person for a few minutes a day these past few days. It is getting harder to engage with him for more than a few seconds at a time. Most of the time, he is looking off into the distance with a puzzled look on his face, like he isn’t really sure where or when he is, and has no idea what is actually happening. Then out of the blue, he will make a joke. He is losing his ability to speak. So they aren’t even one liners. They are one worders! But still funny.

As my sister and I were driving back to Utah this afternoon, we were listening to Dear Evan Hansen and the song “If I Could Tell Her” came on. It’s a song where Evan Hansen is telling the girl he loves all the things he wishes he could tell her, but pretending those were things her brother would have said–if he could tell her.

This is one of my biggest struggles as a human. Telling people how I feel. I have no problem saying “I love you” to friends and family, but going beyond that takes a lot of time and thought and clarification. My husband is fantastic at connecting and sharing his feelings with others, and he learned this from HIS dad, who is fantastic at expressing his emotions.

But I grew up in a house where feelings were not talked about. We just knew that “I love you” was implied by the fact that we existed and that our parents tried so hard to help us develop our potential. In other words, we had a tiger mom. And my dad could be extremely Asian in his way of dealing with us. There was no small talk in our relationship. There wasn’t enough time. Everything was about goals and learning and developing talents and skills and learning to become not just self-reliant, but having the American Dream of being more accomplished and educated and financially stable than our parents who grew up in poverty-stricken/war refugee circumstances. (My dad was just poor. My mom was actually both poverty-stricken AND a war refugee. Maybe it’s redundant to describe her as both, but early life was no cakewalk for either of them. And now I want a cupcake). Feelings were just things that I put in a kimchi pot and buried in the ground. And they stayed there for a long time. I was thinking I could just get buried with my kimchi pot.

But now that I’m starting to grow up, I’m actually learning how to talk about feelings, and I still can’t figure out how to talk to my dad.

As Evan Hansen so eloquently puts it—

If I could tell her
Tell her everything I see
If I could tell her
How she’s everything to me
But we’re a million worlds apart
And I don’t know how I would even start
If I could tell her

We ARE a million worlds apart. Dementia has stolen him. I don’t know how to tell him thank you for working so hard, and being a mental health warrior, and teaching me how to change a tire, and catch a fish with a fly rod, and gut a deer, and also how to say he loved me in a million ways without using actual words.

I remember my very first baking adventure. Chocolate cake. I was so excited to pull it out of the oven and it looked perfect! Except for the corner that was basically a mixture of chocolate and fried eggs. I obviously had not mastered the art of thoroughly mixing my cake batter. I felt crushed. I’m pretty sure there was a lot of laughing, not AT me, but my pride had taken a beating—unlike the eggs.

I was fighting back tears when my dad came over and said “I LOVE eggs with my cake!” and then he picked up a fork and ate a huge piece of the scrambled egg/chocolate fusion with a big smile.

I’m sure he went somewhere later to throw up, but all I remember is that my dad knew that I needed a reminder that I wasn’t worthless or stupid, because there were already, and always are going to be, enough voices in my head telling me the opposite.

I told him that story a few visits ago and he didn’t even remember the fried egg cake. I know there are plenty of moments he was not a perfect parent. But now that I’m a parent myself, I hope that my children will give me some grace for all of my less than stellar moments, and hopefully, remember some of the fried egg cake moments I’ve had with them.

Really, I just want to tell him that I love him. That I hate watching him die in slow motion. I want him to know that I learned a million things that I never knew I needed to know until the moment that I needed them. (I know scientific names for a ridiculous number of plants and animals) That even if he can’t really talk or even hold eye contact for very long, that I would do anything to take this disease away and just set him free. That it’s ok for him to let go. But I hate that I have to let him go. That taking care of him just a little bit these past couple of years has become a sacred thing for me—even the bum wiping and spoon feeding. That I have always noticed that he spent his whole life quietly serving others in one way or another and that I wish he knew how much that made me who I am today.

But we are at a point where I don’t think he can really hear me. So I just fed him a little pumpkin pie and tried not to cry while he was struggling to swallow. I hope he knows that pie is me telling him everything I can’t put into words. Or hugs, because we can’t touch each other. And maybe he can sense the things I can’t or haven’t yet learned to say. That I will grieve for him and then one day, when we are together again, we can unpack my kimchi pot together and laugh at all the fried egg cake memories.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. One day we won’t be a million worlds apart. And I will make you the perfect fried-egg-free cake. ❤️