Mourning the father I never knew

Robbie Griffin
3 min readApr 8, 2021

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I met u once, by that time you couldn’t remember

Alzheimer’s is an unforgiving, cruel affliction

No memories of your life

No wisdom to pass down

Just an empty frown of a man who doesn’t remember

Losing my father

The man who seeded me into this world

Feeling numb and shock

Questioning my reaction

How to mourn a man I never knew?

For days now I’ve been sitting in this space

A space between places

Feeling a disbelief, should I be feeling more?

No fond memories of a son playing with his father

Just silence and an abyss of longing

Longing for the Father to guide me

Nothing but DNA tying us together

Nothing and Everything

I am half him

And know nothing of him

As the week passed, I’ve felt the emotions rising to the surface

I feel the years of confusion and anger melting

A softening and a tenderness emerging

A sadness that I had no relationship with this man

The loss my inner boy felt for never having this Fatherhood relationship

Not understanding why he was not around

Then left to father myself

I can feel the wishing for things to have been different

The steadfast determination to not repeat the cycle

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It saddens me how frequently this cycle plays out in society

The amount of broken homes

Children brought up without parental guidance

Disconnection, dis-ease and mental health issues

Feeling all the sons that never get to know their fathers

Feeling all the fathers that never get to know their sons

Feeling all the broken relationships

All the times when we haven’t known what to say or do

Not known how to turn up for someone we love

I feel how this childhood experience influenced my decisions

Playing out in the shadows

My father left me when I was 2

His father died when he was 2

Perhaps this is why I have chosen not to have children of my own

Terrified of repeating the cycle of abandoning my own child

There is a fear in bringing another soul into this world

Worried about not providing them with abundant love

Worried about my relationship breaking down with the Mother, splitting up the home

I have been on a journey of healing these wounds, reparenting my inner child

Holding my inner boy and giving him the love he deserves

The wounds are karmic and I feel them everyday

I have been feeling a strong parental longing

Yearning to consciously conceive a soul into this world

To birth a child and parent to the best of my ability

The longing to devote my life to their growth

To offer them guidance and support them to shine

Pass down my wisdom and to learn from their innocence

To break the pattens of the ancestral lines

I now feel ready to give myself fully to another being

RIP Anthony Negal

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Robbie Griffin
Robbie Griffin

Written by Robbie Griffin

Creating a world where we connect and relate from the depths of our raw open hearts. Stand in our truth, express from our hearts, speaking the unspoken…