Echoes of My Father’s Voice

I still hear my father’s voice sometimes—not in the way people mean when they talk about grief, but in real, startling moments. In the rustling of trees on a wind-whipped day. In the clink of a spoon against a coffee mug. In the low hum of an old radio playing jazz on a Sunday morning.

He had a voice that filled a room without trying. Deep and steady, worn with years of storytelling and lessons, of laughter and quiet warnings. He was never one for many words, but when he spoke, you listened.

As a child, I followed that voice like a lighthouse in a fog. I remember his bedtime stories—not read from a book, but crafted from his imagination. Tales of lost travelers, brave daughters, magical forests. I believed he knew everything. That his voice could fix anything broken.

But time, as it always does, wears down even the strongest myths.


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When I turned twelve, something in him changed. His eyes, once alive with curiosity, grew tired. He stopped telling stories. He started spending long hours in the garage, radio low, cigarette smoke curling around the door. My mother said it was work stress, but I knew better.

There were days he came home silent and stiff, and nights when I’d hear him arguing softly with his own reflection in the hallway mirror. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what it meant to carry the weight of a world you can’t explain to your children.

By the time I graduated high school, we hardly spoke. I was angry and didn’t know why. He was distant and didn’t know how to come closer. College was my escape. I left without looking back.


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I didn’t return home until the call came. A heart attack. Sudden. Final.

He was gone before I could say goodbye.

Standing in his garage after the funeral, everything was exactly how he left it: the dusty radio tuned to the same old station, tools hung with military precision, his jacket still draped over the chair. It felt like walking into a paused memory. Only the man was missing.

I found a notebook beneath a pile of sandpaper. It wasn’t labeled, but inside were pages and pages of stories. Written in his careful print, just like the ones he used to tell me. Stories he never read aloud. One for each year of my life.

In the margins, he’d scribbled thoughts. Notes like: “She was so brave that summer,” or “This is when she stopped needing me.” His voice lived in every word, and for the first time in years, I cried like a child.


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Grief has a strange shape. It follows you in shadows and settles in unexpected places. It made me return to the house I swore I’d never live in again. At first, I told myself it was temporary—just until things settled. But somehow, I stayed.

I started teaching literature at the local school, the same one I once couldn’t wait to escape. I picked up his habit of listening to jazz in the mornings. And I began reading one of his stories to my students each week—not telling them who wrote them, just watching their faces light up.

One afternoon, a student said, “These feel real. Like someone loved the people in them.”

I nodded. “He did. Very much.”


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Some days I still hear his voice—when I fix the broken gate he never got around to repairing, when I pass the old fig tree where he used to sit with his coffee. He’s not gone, not really. He lingers in every corner of this life I once ran from.

I used to think I inherited only my mother’s eyes and my father’s stubbornness. But I was wrong. I carry his stories now, his voice, echoing in mine.

And I speak aloud the words he never had the chance to finish.