and sand to me picture idea and no copy write and no watermark

I didn’t cry at the funeral.

I watched the casket sink into the earth like it was a stone being swallowed by time, and all I could think was: He never said it. He never said he was sorry.

My father wasn’t a cruel man. Just... sharp. Like glass that had once been beautiful but now cut every time you touched it. He had a way of making silence louder than words—especially when he was disappointed. And he was disappointed often.

When I came out to him at twenty, he said nothing. Not I’m proud of you, not I still love you, not get out. Just silence. A long sip of his coffee. A nod. And then he left the room like I’d just told him the weather forecast.

That was the day the real silence began.

Years passed. Holidays came and went with stiff small talk and tight smiles. Every once in a while, he’d ask about “a friend,” meaning my partner. I’d respond with guarded politeness, as if I were a guest in my own family.

Then last fall, he got sick. The diagnosis came fast and cruel: stage four lung cancer. I visited when I could, though we rarely spoke beyond how he was feeling and what the doctors said. The things that mattered stayed lodged between us, thick and immovable. Like a dam made of things we never said.

But three weeks before he died, my mother told me he had started writing letters.

"To who?" I asked.

"To people," she said. "He didn’t say who exactly. Just that he had regrets."

I waited for mine. I checked the mail every day. I fantasized about opening an envelope and reading:

I’m sorry I didn’t know how to love you right. I’m sorry I was afraid.

I imagined it a hundred ways.

But the letter never came.

The night he passed, my mother called me. Her voice cracked like old porcelain. “He’s gone,” she said. I whispered something back—I don’t remember what—and then I hung up and stared at the wall for an hour. Not crying. Not even blinking. Just waiting for something to move inside me. It didn’t.

I kept telling myself he must have written me. Maybe the letter got lost. Maybe it was buried in a drawer somewhere. But as we cleaned out his room, sorted through his things, I never found it.

He had written to old friends. To his brother. Even to a woman he’d once dated in his twenties. But not to me.

He died before the apology came.

And somehow, that hurt more than all the things he ever said.

It took me months to understand that waiting for his apology was keeping me from healing. That I had made forgiveness into a transaction, and he’d taken the other half of the deal to the grave.

So I did something I never thought I would: I wrote him a letter.

I told him everything. That his silence bruised louder than any insult. That I hated how he never tried to understand. That I loved him anyway.

And then, at the bottom of the page, I wrote:

“I forgive you, not because you asked, but because I need to live.”

I burned the letter in a ceramic bowl and watched the smoke curl toward the ceiling like it was carrying my grief somewhere quieter.

There’s no closure in death. Just the stories we choose to tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Mine is this:

He didn’t know how to say it. But maybe, deep down, he wished he had.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.