On Letting Go — Before It Is Time

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My father is ninety-one. He is in a care home. He is weak. He does not want to live any more. And he has become, in his own particular way, quite rude about it.

I notice that I am not devastated by this.

That observation itself used to require explanation. Now it simply is what it is.

We never had over the last 30 years what most people would call a relationship. He was there — reliably, physically present — but emotionally absent in the way that a whole generation of German men was emotionally absent. Men who lost their fathers in Stalingrad when they were still small boys, who inherited a grief they never named and a rage they could not account for. He had outbursts. Choleric, total, frightening — his face turning red, his body shaking — and then silence. And no apology. And no explanation. Just the carrying on, as if it had not happened.

He never once said I love you.

He also never once stood in my way.

Those two things coexisted in him for ninety-one years, and I have come to understand that both were, in their own limited way, gifts.

What we did, eventually, was find a kind of peace. Not reconciliation — that word implies a wound that heals. What we found was something quieter: the absence of resistance. We walked slowly together in Munich, on Marienplatz, his pace reduced to something I had to match with great deliberateness. We did not talk about the years of silence. We did not revisit the outbursts. We simply walked, and something between us settled — not into warmth, exactly, but into the kind of acceptance that comes when both people have stopped needing the other to be different.

I think of this now as I think about his dying.

There is something that happens when a parent nears the end and you realise you have already done the letting go. Not in a cold way — in a completed way. The attachment was never formed in the way it is supposed to be formed, so the loss does not arrive as rupture. It arrives as a quieter thing. A witnessing. A recognition that this, too, is part of what a life contains.

I am the next one in line. That thought sits with me, not as fear, but as fact. He will go, and then I will be the oldest generation. The question of what I will have left — what will remain after I am gone — is one I have been living with for years. Not anxiously. Curiously.

The Janwaar kids. Tim. The people I have walked alongside. The writing. The thinking. The proof that certain things can change if you stay long enough, trust enough, and leave at the right moment.

I have been practicing letting go for a long time. Of places. Of identities. Of the idea that I needed to be needed. Of the life that worked perfectly but no longer felt like mine. Each cut taught me something about what actually matters and what was simply habit dressed up as necessity.

Watching my father move toward the end — rudely, reluctantly, without grace — I find I am not angry and not sad in the way I might have expected. I am present. That is all. Just present, without needing it to be different from what it is. I am there and I see him. I am prepared to see him on a daily basis.

He gave me stability. He gave me silence. He gave me, by accident and without intention, the knowledge that love does not always arrive in the form you expect — and that you can still find your way to something true, even without it.

He is not dying well. But he is dying. And I am here, not holding on, not letting go, just watching — the way you watch a river move toward the sea. You do not stop it. You do not mourn it. You simply understand that this is what rivers do.

And then you turn back to your own life, and you live it.

And I wonder if this is how it is supposed to be? Who knows,