Finding Light in Father's Day Grief
Three years ago, I lost my dad unexpectedly while I was pregnant with my son. Since then, Father's Day has become a day of beautiful contradictions — celebrating my husband as a father while missing my own. It holds both overwhelming love and profound loss, sometimes within the same breath.
Over these three years, I've written many poems for my dad — words to carry emotions too big for my heart to hold alone. What emerged is a personal collection that speaks not only to the father and person he was, but to the universal longing of missing someone who shaped you, carrying love forward, and honoring presence through absence.
I'm sharing a selection of these poems because I know I'm not alone in this complicated dance with grief around Father's Day. They're for all of us who need this day to make space for the full spectrum of love, loss, and remembrance.
Grief and celebration aren't opposites — they're companions. Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do is give voice to both.
My Father's Hands
Dirt, sweat and motor oil caked black,
outlining each knuckle wrinkle and fingernail.
No amount of Dawn dish soap could touch
a man made out of heart, metal
and the ability to fix anything.
I still think you were a celebrity —
the way you couldn’t go into the grocery store
without being cornered by someone in overalls
asking what to do about a tractor,
and the way it was nearly impossible to pry you
from that town — that shop —
from where everyone needed you, and needed
the way you made them feel
worthy of your time. God, they loved you for it.
How you gave and fixed, and gave and fixed,
and really listened.
Even as a kid I knew I was lucky,
sitting on your lap in the sugar beet harvester,
my little palms planted on the tops
of your hands on the steering wheel.
Your veins and tendons like roots and rows.
To me, you were a rare and raw element of love,
and tending to whatever needed it the most:
the busted car engines, broken toys you epoxy glued,
child who needed to hear a song,
farmers who wondered where the season
went wrong. You could soothe them all.
Even now I selfishly wish
that you could come back and fix
all of this.
I can still hear your boots
on the loose boards of the deck —
still hear your whistling
cut clean through the house,
summoned from some deeper well
than your exhaustion,
as you scrubbed at the ether stench
and grease stains on your hands,
as if you could just let the day go —
as if you could ever just let go.
Katy Funke, 2023
When I was little, my dad was a farmer and volunteer firefighter before pursuing his own mechanic business. He wasn't just a great mechanic, he was a true master of his craft. His skills were an art form, and he was incredibly generous in sharing his knowledge, mentoring many others in our community. These poems offer just a small window into how I saw him.
This photo was taken after my dad came in from working in his shop on Father’s Day 1999. I was six and had spent all day writing a song and choreographing a dance to perform for him.
My Father's Hat
On tip-toe I barely reached the shelf
to organize your hats in their dark hues
and camouflage, with names on them like
Snap-On Tools, Boston, Broncos..
all stacked precariously like well-worn chapters,
drenched then dried,
then tumbling around me like rain,
these hats you took off only for Mass or sleeping,
with their musky scent of earth, and scalp, and work
I smelled and was brought back into your arms,
or into the passenger seat of your pickup,
looking over at your hat-attached silhouette
against the mountains
where now you rest
your hat
as light
as sky.
Katy Funke, 2023
Our miniature dachshund, Scooby, loved to ride on my dad's shoulders in the pickup truck. Scooby wanted to go everywhere with my dad and lived to be 18 years old, mostly because he had a driving sense of purpose—he knew he was needed as the official shop dog.
My Father's Mustache
After Ada Limón
I find this picture
and am one of those kids who cries
when they see their father
without facial hair for the first time.
Only my weeping is not out of fear,
but of regret
for not seeing him more clearly until now.
Now, somehow, in this picture,
I am perched on a branch
of that oak tree above him,
peering into some other life
that he lived before me.
Early 80s in a skinny grey necktie,
and Mom in powder blue
with a Lady Di haircut.
Outside the church,
a purple iris in his pocket.
In this picture he is perfect,
sun-dappled, summer unfolding around him.
In this picture he is perfect,
sun-dappled, summer unfolding around him.
His smooth upper lip
becomes not as foreign
when I think about the mustache that I knew :
how it accented his voice, his smile,
how it shaped his face
to be among the first faces
I ever recognized.
I didn’t realize how attached
I was to it —
to an image of him.
How I am still that little kid
who clung to his leg,
crying as he walked
down the hallway
and had to leave for work.
And I think now
how it must have been
just as painful for him
when he said he had to go.
Katy Funke, 2022
My Father’s Memory
I open the door to memory and what comes through
is a collage of your expressions all stuck together.
Moments in the car. Wrinkles around your eyes.
Calling you to come inside: 896-4019
thumb-worn like a rosary on the cordless phone
of home. Sometimes you would answer
in your gruff adult voice
before realizing it was me,
and you could let your tenderness
be seen.
Katy Funke, 2023
My Father's Job
Above the heavy metal music
and heavy diesel engines
you asked Mom and I to go on missions
to pick up parts and pieces from greasy men
at places where things like transmissions,
alternators, and radiators go to die or be saved
by car doctors like you. Covered in a layer of
soot-like something I didn’t know the name of,
this world of yours I orbited, and sometimes tried to
avoid it. I grew accustomed to our air hugs and
sideways hugs because, God forbid, my outfit
you bought with your dirty job get blemished before
I go to my school you made possible with your
dirty job money. I too have tried to separate
home from work, but couldn’t scrub
the artist off of me. Silence my canvas,
longing my paint. Sometimes I wish
it were more selfless or self-explanatory,
more useful or messy.
Everything you touched could be claimed
by your world — even clean things:
shampoo bottles, bars of soap.
Other dads came home from their sterile
workplaces with paper, and their kids probably
didn’t know where they were,
but I could see you were here.
You were here.
You were here.
Katy Funke, 2024
My Father's Eyes
When I found out you were gone
I went and sat in the stream beneath the banyans.
My heart, cracked open like a yolk,
poured out into the water.
I didn’t know it could open so wide, and wider still:
hold both such sorrow and love.
And I thought, how pure even this stream of grief is —
how alive, and deep and churning.
Memories sharpen like shrapnel around me,
yet the cool water smooths them into river stones.
And isn’t that what grief can be,
a chaos of fragments you learn to soothe and carry?
The water cools my neck
as I lay back and look up at the trees
to see your eyes again,
so green.
Katy Funke, 2022
To Sing
Allow the inhale to come up through the soles of your feet.
It’s not just the throat
with its muscle, thin folds fluttering,
that carries the sound.
It’s the breath’s work
to tame the wilderness of expression
from the ground up and steadily until
butterfly vibrato, sostenuto and reaching blossom to blossom.
This was something I could learn to grasp and climb up like a tree.
Vowels like branches, consonants, leaves.
How with practice of endless scales
I was able to control
and make something of my own more beautiful.
Through music I discovered things: allegro, forte,
how Faure could make sorrow sound like hope,
or how my voice in a church choir could make you proud.
I look for you now in the crowded silence —
your present-like absence
unfillably deep,
yet I feel you still there
listening
in the audience of my life,
so I take my next breath
and sing.
Katy Funke, 2024
In Memory of Kevin Lootens
