Dear Luki,

Father’s Day is this Sunday. And, as it tends to happen whenever a holiday pops up on the calendar, I am missing your grandpa more than ever.

I still remember everything about the last Father’s Day we spent together. I was eight and a half months pregnant and your dad and I hosted a barbecue to celebrate some of the fathers in our lives. We bought your grandpa a hat that said #1 Grandpa and he absolutely loved it. He was so proud and excited, so ready to live up to the hat’s message.

I posted a picture of him in the hat and wrote about that day in my blog. And I said that you were a lucky baby to have the #1 Grandpa.

I still find it incredibly difficult to believe that things have changed so much in the past year. That you won’t ever get to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. That he won’t get to relish all the joys of having a grandchild. That I won’t get to buy him a present ever again.

Even though it’s been more than six months since he passed away, those truths still seem mistakable, unintelligible, surreal.

But the thing about good fathers, Luki, is that they leave indelible marks on the the people they come in contact with. Your grandpa only had two biological children, but there are countless people who bear his stamp. People whose lives he touched, people who learned something from him, people who admired his way of looking at the world.

A few days ago, the faucet in our kitchen sink broke. If it had happened a year ago, I would have called your grandpa and asked him to repair it, but instead, we had to call a friend. A friend who knew your grandpa and worked with him for some time. He fixed it right away. And when I thanked him for a job well-done, he said to me, “your dad taught me how to do this, he’s the one you should thank.”

And I do thank him. I thank him every day. But not for teaching a young man how to fix a leaky faucet…

I thank him for spreading himself out so much. For leaving bits and pieces of him all over our world so that we could stumble upon him when we least expect it. Because when you put all those traces together, they continue to form the picture of a #1 Grandpa.

You are still a lucky, lucky boy indeed.

Love,

Mom