Yesterday would have been my father’s 56th birthday.

I didn’t light a candle, I didn’t call my sister or answer the call she gave me, I didn’t scroll through old photos or whisper his name into the quiet, I didn’t do any of the things I’ve learned to do to honor him, those small rituals that make the dead feel less gone.

Instead, I was swallowed by the grief of a different loss.

A rejection email, clean and kind, arrived in my inbox, a few polite sentences that carried a quiet devastation. It was a job I’d prayed for, prepared for, poured myself into. And when it slipped through my fingers, something inside me collapsed. I mourned the version of myself that might’ve finally been okay to been chosen.

And so, in mourning that dream, I forgot to mourn my father. Or maybe, more truthfully, the two griefs merged until I couldn’t tell which ache belonged to which loss. The grief of not being wanted, and the grief of the one who wanted me most being gone, they share the same room in me.

My father has been gone long enough for the world to have moved on, but not long enough for me to. He was imperfect, stubborn, and tender. He loved in a way that didn’t always look like love, but always felt like it. Every year since he’s been gone, I’ve found new ways to keep him close, a playlist, a poem, a trip to chipotle. This year, I found only silence.

But maybe that’s also a kind of prayer. Maybe remembering doesn’t always look like celebration. Maybe sometimes it’s just surviving the day he didn’t get to see, carrying the absence and still making it to morning.

I’m learning that grief isn’t linear, and neither is healing. Some days I honor my father by writing his name into the world again. Other days, like yesterday, I honor him by just staying alive through the weight of it all.

Today, I remember him. And I remember myself too, the one still trying, still applying, still believing that both grief and hope can coexist.

Happy heavenly birthday, Ray Wooden, Jr. I’m still here, still reaching toward the light you left behind.