The Dad Project

Fourteen years ago, my father died on Father’s Day. He was one of the great loves of my life, and I have missed him every day since.

When my mother died last year, the grief was a different kind — complicated, layered with the weight of everything she couldn’t give me and everything I had spent a lifetime hoping for. Her death felt like the closing of a door that had never really been open. My father understood. She had left him too, and he had found his peace with it. I was left with something harder: grieving the mother she was incapable of being.

The rage and darkness that followed threatened to swallow me whole.

Around that same time, a friend showed me a handmade book she had spent years creating — a long, slow, intentional act of making. I knew I needed something like that. A project with weight and purpose. It was my creative mentors who helped me see what it had to be: my father.

That night, I sat down and wrote him a letter telling him his wife had died.

What followed was a year of writing, making, and remembering. The Dad Project is the result — a handmade book that is part letter collection, part poetry, part scrapbook, part reckoning. Organized into tabbed sections, it moves through the landscape of the fourteen years he missed: the world as it changed, the work I did that I wish he could have seen, the art I’ve made, the friends who have held me, the miles I’ve run, the places I’ve traveled. It holds the things we shared — our Cubs fandom, our humor, our way of being in the world — alongside the things I simply needed him to know.

The Dad Project is not about loss, exactly. It’s about the ongoing conversation I am still having with my father — the one that didn’t end when he did. It is a love letter, a thank you, and proof that the most important things he taught me are still alive in how I move through the world.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing the finished book here on The Oodlearium, along with some of the pieces from inside it — poems, letters, and the stories behind them. I hope you’ll come back for it. Some of it is tender. Some of it is hard-won. All of it is true.