Dad Never Saw My New Version

Dad never saw my new version.

Perhaps that is one of the quietest aches of losing a parent. We think we grieve the person who is gone. But there is another grief hiding underneath—the grief of all the things they will never witness.

Dad knew me as his daughter in so many stages of my life. The little girl who believed her father could fix almost anything. The young woman finding her way. The doctor who built a life around work, family and responsibility. He knew the woman who could manage things, solve things, keep going. 

But he didn't get to meet the woman I am becoming now.

He wasn't there when I finally closed the centre I had built and nurtured for years. He didn't see me understand that beginning again isn't necessarily about starting from zero.

Sometimes, it is about finally allowing yourself to become someone you had postponed becoming. And somewhere along the way, grief changed me too.

Dad was my safe place. I didn't have to explain everything to him. His presence itself was reassuring. There was something deeply comforting about knowing that, whatever happened, there was still a father somewhere in the background of my life.

Now I have to create that safety within myself. I am learning. I am softer in some places, stronger in others. I question things I once accepted. I am learning to say no without writing an essay to justify it. I am learning that I don't have to keep everyone happy to prove that I am a good person. And perhaps I am finally allowing myself to live a little more honestly.

I often wonder what Dad would have said if he could see me now. Probably nothing dramatic.He might have looked at me for a moment and simply said, “You've changed.”

I would have smiled.“Yes, Dad. Life changed me.” Then perhaps came that familiar look—the one that didn't need many words. The look that said, I see you. That is what I miss.

Not just his voice. Not just his presence. Being seen by someone who had known me long before I became all the things the world now calls me.

Sometimes, when something good happens, I still have the instinct to tell him. For a fleeting second, I forget.Then I remember. And that little space between forgetting and remembering is where grief lives. Dad didn't get to see this chapter. But perhaps he doesn't need to. Because so much of what he gave me travelled forward.

It lives in the courage with which I begin again, in the softness I am learning to protect, and in the stubborn little voice inside me that keeps saying— Go on. You can do this.

So yes, Dad. I have changed. I am still changing. But beneath every new version of me is the same daughter who once felt safest simply because her father was there.

And perhaps that girl will always be a little bit yours. I'm still your girl, Dad. Just a little more of my own now.

Yours Chaand.