My mom called and told me to come home to see my father. I was in my twenties, living by myself in a big city. My father was hospitalized and scheduled for surgery.
It was surgery for suspected lung cancer, and my mom, who was a nurse, expected him to die soon.
“Don’t tell him. Just pretend you’re home for the holiday.”
At that time, in my home country, it was common not to tell patients they had cancer, especially if it might be terminal.
I didn’t feel sadness, anxiety, or any of the emotions considered appropriate in such a situation.
“OK,” I said, and I went home to see him in his hospital bed.
It turned out that the tumor was benign. He lost one-third of his left lung, but he would live.
My mom spent most of the day with him at the hospital. When I came home, she wanted a break and asked me to stay with him for a couple of hours. He didn’t need twenty-four-hour nursing care, and I was not the nurturing type. Still, I stayed with him to give my mom a break.
Every thirty minutes or so, he would ask, “Is Mom back yet?”
This guy is like a kid, I thought.
We didn’t have any emotional connection. I had never felt loved by him. Actually, I didn’t know what being loved felt like. I had never felt seen by him. I didn’t love him. I didn’t even care about him.
I was told to play a role, so I played it.
While we were alone in the hospital room, he said, probably more to himself than to me, “This time I thought I was gonna die.”
He had Type 2 diabetes and often had health scares. His father died from diabetes when he was very young. His older sister died, leaving behind a young son whom he helped raise. Then, when his wife was pregnant with a boy, he himself was diagnosed with diabetes.
He was afraid to die.
His entire life seemed devoted to avoiding the fate he believed awaited him.
That was the first time I saw him—not as a father, but as a frightened man facing his own mortality.
The second and last time I felt an emotional connection with him came much later.
He was in his eighties and had Alzheimer’s disease, along with complications from diabetes. Whenever I visited my mother, I went to see him in the nursing home every day, sometimes twice a day.
He no longer recognized me as his daughter.
I was simply a nice lady who visited him and gave him massages.
Oddly enough, that made it much easier for me to be with him.
He was just a frail old man.
One day, I sat beside him and told him about the dog I had recently lost.
Suddenly, he said, “Don’t tell that story. It makes me so sad…”
I saw him.
He loved dogs.
He had never expressed his feelings openly, but he was the only person in my family who truly took care of our dogs. When a dog died, the rest of us moved on without much sentiment, but he was the one who mourned.
OK.
At least we had something in common.
I didn’t visit him because I cared about him or because I loved him. I visited him and took care of him because it was the role I was expected to play: the good, caring daughter who flew all the way from the United States to see her father and visited him every day.
A loving daughter for a loving father.
I didn’t feel any love.
I didn’t know what love felt like.
After I returned to the United States, my mom called one day to tell me that he was dying.
It was clear that I wouldn’t make it back in time, and I didn’t care.
What was the point?
We had never had an emotional connection.
He died in the nursing home after my mother went home to rest.
I flew back for his funeral.
I didn’t feel grief.
I felt relief.
Finally, he was gone.
I was free.
I don’t feel guilty for not loving him.
If I don’t know what being loved feels like, how could I have loved him?
I still don’t feel love toward him, but I have learned compassion.
He did the best he could.
He simply didn’t have the emotional capacity to be present with me.
©2026 JU
Somatic Awareness 