Things I Didn’t Say at the Funeral

Things I Didn’t Say at the Funeral

By [Hubaib Ullah]

I stood three feet from the casket, my hands clenched so tightly in front of me they left crescent moons in my palms. The pastor was talking, something about grace and eternity and peace, but it all sounded like a foreign language. I wasn’t hearing the words, just the silence between them. The thick, suffocating silence of things unsaid.

They asked me to speak. I said no.

But God, I should have.

There are things I didn’t say at the funeral. Not because I couldn’t. Not because I didn’t want to. But because the truth felt too heavy for the polished wood room and the rows of mourners who only ever knew the version of you that smiled at church, brought potato salad to potlucks, and never missed a single Sunday.

They didn’t know the version I knew.

They didn’t know that you smoked in the garage when Mom wasn’t home. That you had a vinyl record collection hidden under the workbench with nothing but old rock albums and one Miles Davis LP you called your "rainy-day record." They didn’t know that you used to sneak me a second scoop of ice cream on summer nights and whisper, "Don’t tell your mother."

They didn’t know you cried once. Just once. In the driveway. After Grandma died. I was twelve. You thought I was asleep. But I saw you sitting on the hood of the car with your hands over your face, your body shaking with something too raw to name. It scared me at the time—seeing you fall apart like that. You were supposed to be unbreakable. But now, I think it was the most human moment we ever shared.

They don’t know how often we fought.

How your silence after an argument was more terrifying than any shouting.

How you made me feel like I was never quite enough—too soft, too strange, too much like someone you couldn’t understand.

You said once, “You’ll never make it if you don’t toughen up.”

And maybe you were right.

But all I wanted was to hear, “I’m proud of you,” even once, without it being tucked between criticisms or wrapped in a joke.

They didn’t know I left not because I hated you, but because I didn’t know how to live in a house where love felt like a test I kept failing.

They didn’t know that for years, I didn’t call because I was scared you wouldn’t answer.

Or worse—that you would.

They don’t know about the letter.

The one you wrote me two years ago. The one I never answered.

I read it so many times the paper wore thin at the creases. You said you missed me. Said you didn’t always get things right. Said you were proud, even if you didn’t say it enough.

I wanted to write back.

I even started once.

But what do you say to a man you’ve built your whole life trying to forgive?

And then came the phone call.

The one that dropped my world into silence.

They said it was quick. A heart attack.

No time for goodbyes.

But I think maybe you knew your time was short. Maybe that’s why you wrote.

And so, I stood at your funeral. Still. Silent. Watching as people told stories about your kindness, your jokes, your generosity.

No one mentioned the shadows.

No one dared.

Maybe they didn’t see them.

But I did.

And despite everything, I loved you.

I loved you in the way a broken compass still tries to find north. In the way a locked door still remembers how it used to open.

I didn’t say any of that at the funeral.

I didn’t say I forgave you.

I didn’t say I was sorry, too.

I didn’t say that I kept the letter in my coat pocket the whole day, folded like a secret I was too scared to share.

But if I could speak now, just once, I’d say this:

You were complicated. You were sometimes cruel. You were sometimes kind.

You were my father.

And I carry both the ache of your absence and the echo of your presence in every stubborn heartbeat I have.