“My Father’s Unfinished Song”

My Father’s Unfinished Song

By [Ali Rehman]

When I was a child, mornings began not with the sun — but with my father’s humming.

It wasn’t a tune I ever recognized. It had no clear beginning, no chorus, and no end. Just a soft, steady rhythm that floated through our small home like a gentle promise. He would hum it while shaving, while making tea, while tying the same navy-blue tie he’d worn for years.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. It was simply his sound, the background music of my growing up. But now, years later, I realize — it was the closest thing he ever gave me to “I love you.”

My father was not a man of words.

He spoke like someone counting each syllable before letting it go — careful, measured, reserved. Where my mother was warmth and laughter, he was silence and order. The kind of man who fixed broken doors before anyone noticed they were loose. The kind of man who said more with his hands than his mouth ever could.

We weren’t close, not in the way stories like to romanticize fathers and children. I loved him, yes, but from a distance — the way you love a mountain: constant, immovable, beautiful, and unreachable.

When I turned sixteen, music became my rebellion. I bought a cheap guitar from a pawn shop and started writing songs. My lyrics were everything my father wasn’t — loud, emotional, clumsy, messy.

One evening, I played one of my songs for him. I remember standing in the doorway of the living room, the strings of my guitar trembling as much as my hands.

“Want to hear something I wrote?” I asked.

He looked up from his newspaper, his face unreadable. “Sure.”

I played. I poured every word I had into that song — every teenage ache, every loneliness, every dream. When I finished, there was a long pause. He folded his newspaper neatly, looked at me, and said quietly,

“You’ve got a good ear.”

Then he went back to reading.

At the time, I took it as indifference. I stormed into my room, furious that he couldn’t feel what I felt. But years later, I realized: for him, that was high praise.

When my mother passed away, our house grew quieter than ever.

He stopped humming.

The silence was unbearable. Every sound — the ticking clock, the kettle, my own heartbeat — felt hollow. I thought grief had taken everything from us, but it wasn’t until his humming vanished that I truly felt the absence.

One night, I asked him why he stopped. He didn’t look up from his chair.

“I forgot how it goes,” he said.

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t true — that songs don’t disappear, they just hide in the heart until someone remembers them. But the words caught in my throat, the same way his always had.

So I went to my room and wrote a song instead. I called it “The Unfinished Tune.” It had no lyrics, only the rhythm I remembered from his mornings — the hum that meant love, safety, and everything he never said.

I recorded it on my phone and left the speaker outside his door before bed. The next morning, when I woke up, I heard something I hadn’t in months.

He was humming again.

Time passed, and the years folded into one another like worn sheets. I moved to the city for work. He stayed behind, in the same house, surrounded by the same quiet. We called every Sunday, and though our conversations were short — weather, bills, neighbors — I could always hear a faint humming in the background.

It was his way of saying, I’m still here.

Then, one day, the humming stopped again — this time for good.

He passed away peacefully in his sleep. The doctor said his heart simply slowed down, as if it had decided it had kept rhythm long enough.

When I came back home to sort through his things, the silence felt heavier than before. But as I was packing up his desk, I found an old cassette tape inside a drawer. On the label, in his careful handwriting, were the words: “For You — My Song.”

My hands trembled as I placed it in the player.

A crackle. Then — his humming.

That same melody.

Soft, uneven, but unmistakably his.

And then, faintly, for the first time ever, I heard his voice whisper — almost shyly:

“I never learned the words, but this was always for you.”

I sat there for hours, replaying the tape, tears slipping down my face in quiet rhythm. It felt like he had finally spoken, finally filled the silence with all the love he couldn’t say out loud.

Now, every morning, I hum that same tune while making coffee or driving to work. My own daughter laughs when she hears me and asks, “Dad, what’s that song?”

I smile and tell her, “It’s a song my father never finished.”

Because in truth, he didn’t need to.

Some songs don’t end — they just pass on.

Moral:

Love doesn’t always need words. Sometimes, it hides in small, quiet gestures — a song, a habit, a silence. What we think is unfinished might simply be love continuing in another voice.