In Loving Memory: Where the River Meets the Sea

— A Love Letter to My Father, and the Places Grief Cannot Reach

They say we are never truly alone.
That when someone passes, they do not disappear.
They journey to where the river meets the sea—
a place where all waters flow, where ancestors gather,
and where the ones we love become something vaster than our memory of them.

My father is now among them.

I hadn’t seen my father in ten years.

Not for lack of love. Not for lack of longing.
But because life, especially life lived far from home, doesn’t always make space for return.

There was always something that needed paying first.
Always a bill, always a reason.
Until the only thing left was a funeral.

And still, I had to scrape, borrow, rearrange my life just to go home and bury him.

I entered his room—our family home still filled with his music,
the smell of old wood, hibiscus petals left too long in the sun through the window facing the garden.
Photos.
Memories rushing in like floodwaters, faster than my chest could take.

He was a vibrant man.
Wise, musical, giving.
A man who would pull others along, help them reach higher—
whether in career or in spirit.

He would video call and say “I love you”—not just to me,
but to my children, who only ever knew their grandfather through a screen.
And I would laugh. Because he sounded cheesy.
And now I would give anything to hear him say it again.

I grieve for him.
But I also grieve for the ten years I didn’t have.
The ten years of birthdays, of spontaneous hugs,
of letting my children sit on his lap and hear stories told with elder wisdom.

Because I was in Europe—
where daily life and responsibility demanded my every breath,
where plane tickets became luxury and presence became a dream on hold.

I grieve that I didn’t connect them, my children and my father, in the way I had wanted.
But I connected them through stories. Through memory.
And now, through legacy.

There’s a stillness that comes after loss.
A silence that’s not empty, but full of everything you wish you’d said,
everything you wish you’d done.

But maybe that’s also where healing begins.
In the knowing that love doesn't end with death.
It folds into the river. It reaches the sea.

It sits with the elders, in a place where time has no dominion,
and where the spirit remembers every heartbeat that ever mattered.

And now I sit with this truth:

That grief is not linear.
That I carry it differently than others because my absence was different.
And that absence doesn’t mean I loved him less.
It just means I’m learning to love him now from a different realm.

I ask myself these days
How often do we choose jobs over connection?
What are we trading for the illusion of success?
And how many moments do we let pass, never knowing which one will be the last?

Because life isn’t always about the money.
It isn’t always about what you can build, achieve, or display.

Sometimes life is about being able to say:
“I was there.”
“I held their hand.”
“I didn’t miss the moments that truly mattered.”

To my father:
You are now among the river and the sea.
And when I whisper to the trees,
I trust you hear me.

You are the song behind the wind.
The light through the branches.
The voice that reminds me I come from strength,
and I am never alone.

In Grief,

Elizabeth Iember