He would have been seventy-one today.

For seventeen years now, I have been learning how to live in a world where he does not physically exist. Seventeen years of birthdays that arrive quietly and leave a heaviness settled deep in my chest. Seventeen years of reaching for a voice that no longer answers back.

Life with my parents was complicated. Hard in ways I did not yet understand. But between the two of them, my father and I found each other. We were alike in a way that destabilized the house.

We would sit wherever the conversation landed and disappear into ideas. History. Religion. Politics. Conspiracy theories. Human nature. We did not skim anything. We took it apart and examined it from every angle. He did not dismiss my questions. He sharpened them. He treated my mind like it mattered.

He made thinking feel powerful. He made curiosity feel like strength instead of defiance. And she could not stand it.

Not because we were similar. But because when we talked, I was the center of his attention. His eyes were on me. His mind was engaged with mine. She could not compete with that depth. And she punished me for it every chance she got.

I looked like him. Sounded like him. Thought like him. But I did not just inherit his mind. I inherited his heart.

He is the reason I care the way I do. The reason I show up for people the way I do. I learned from him that strength is not loud. That leadership does not have to dominate. That giving back is not weakness. It is character.

He had what people call a servant’s heart. He gave without keeping score. He helped without needing applause. He taught me that you take care of people when you can. That you show up. That you build something steadier than yourself. That is where my heart came from.

He had hopes for me. Not rigid demands, but steady hopes. He wanted me educated. He wanted me capable. He wanted me to stand on my own two feet. He wanted to know that if life ever turned hard, I would not collapse into bitterness. He wanted better for me than resentment. Better than entitlement. Better than the kind of anger that corrodes a person from the inside out.

For a short time, I tried to follow the path he imagined. I went to nursing school. It was not my calling. I worried I was disappointing him. But even in that season, something beautiful emerged. I met my best friend there. A friendship so deep she became like a daughter to him too.

I was thirty-three when he died. A month and a half from turning thirty-four. Halfway through my undergrad. After years of detours, I had finally gone back to school. He was proud. I can still hear the pride in his voice when we talked about it. There was relief in him. A quiet satisfaction that I was stepping into my own future.

He never got to see the finish line.

When he died, I did not just lose a father. I lost the one steady presence in the house. The buffer. The stabilizer. The person who absorbed tension before it exploded.

The first year without him felt like walking without skin. The silence was loud. Every decision felt heavier. I wanted to call him constantly. I wanted his voice on the other end telling me I was going to be okay.

Instead, I grieved in a house where grief felt competitive. As though being his wife made her loss more legitimate. She bristled when anyone said I favored him. When anyone acknowledged how close we were. She became angry if people put my grief ahead of hers. For the first year after he was gone, I was not allowed to grieve. When I finally did start grieving, it made her mad, even though she was on the hunt for a new man at that point.

But the truth is, he did not disappear entirely.

I am his genetic legacy. The only child he chose to have. His mind is stitched into mine. The way I analyze. The way I question. The way I refuse easy answers. That is him. And the way I care. The way I serve. The way I give back. That is him too.

And when I trace my life back to its earliest sense of safety, it always leads me to the same place.

Some of my earliest memories where I felt safest are on his motorcycle.

When I was small, he sat me in front of him, between his arms, his hands steady on the handlebars. I could see the road unfolding. I could feel the wind before it hit him. I felt protected without even knowing that word.

Later, when I was older, I rode behind him. My arms around his waist. My helmet against his back. I did not have to think about where we were going. I just held on and trusted him to get us there.

A motorcycle was the first thing he taught me to drive. I could not hold it up. My feet barely touched the ground. But he trusted me anyway.

The first time I laid one down, it was a dirt bike in the sand. I cut the wheel wrong and we went down. I remember the embarrassment more than the fall. I remember looking at him, bracing for disappointment.

He was not disappointed.

He laughed. Checked that I was not hurt. Said all that mattered was that I was okay. Then he helped me back on the bike. That was who he was. My safety mattered more than my mistakes.

Ironically, it was a motorcycle accident that took him from me in 2009. I have not been on one since.

Not because I am afraid. Not because it hurts too much. I just have not met anyone I trust enough to sit behind and hold onto like that. No one whose back feels steady enough. No one whose hands on the handlebars feel like certainty.

Seventeen years later, I still talk to him. In my car. In quiet rooms. Before big decisions. I tell him what I have accomplished. I tell him when I am exhausted. I tell him when I am proud.

Some days I try to remember the exact sound of his voice and it slips away from me. And that loss hurts in a way I cannot fully explain.

I wish he had seen the degrees. The finished undergrad. The graduate work. The letters behind my name. I wish he had watched me cross the stage. I wish he had seen the life I built from the foundation he gave me. The strength it took. The discipline. The survival.

I did not become bitterness. I did not become hate. I did not become entitlement. I became capable.

I hope he would be proud of me. I hope he would look at me now and say, “You did it.”

He would have been seventy-one today.

And I am still his daughter. Still carrying his mind. Still carrying his heart. Still missing his voice. Still wishing I could sit with him one more time and let him tell me I am going to be alright.

© 2026 Wynter Rayne. All rights reserved.

It was a Monday — a beautiful September day. The morning was cool, the afternoon warm — perfect weather for bike riding. My father loved days like that. He hated driving a car, always said he was born to be on his bike, and that’s where you’d usually find him. People don’t understand unless it’s in their blood, he’d say. Some of my favorite memories are of riding with him, the world flying past, nothing between us and the air but speed and trust.

That Monday had been good to me, too. I remember laughing at work, joking around as the phones rang off the hook. My boss answered one call, then handed me the receiver. She said it was my dad’s best friend’s wife. I remember being puzzled — why would she be calling me?

I remember saying hello, and when I heard her voice, I felt a flicker of relief. Oh, it’s you, I said. I thought something was wrong.

Then the silence. Just a few seconds, but heavy enough to change everything.

She finally said there had been an accident. No one had called my mother yet — they were afraid she’d have a seizure if she heard it directly. She told me my dad was being life-flighted to the hospital in Dothan, but that I needed to drive all the way to Andalusia first, to pick up my mother and bring her back. At that moment, he was still alive.

I have always wondered: if I had gone straight to the hospital instead, if I had sent someone else after her, would I have been able to see him one last time? But instead, I drove. Forty-five minutes there, forty-five minutes back. Angry even then that once again the burden of taking care of her fell on me.

This was back when cell phone service was still patchy in rural Alabama. There were long stretches of road where calls just didn’t come through. Somewhere in one of those dead zones, they had tried to reach me — to tell me not to waste the drive, to go straight to the local hospital.

By the time the voicemail finally came through, I already knew. I didn’t need to hear the words. The moment the message clicked off, I felt it — an emptiness inside me I had never known before. And one that, in truth, has never really left.

I picked my mother up and we drove in silence back to the hospital. Neither of us said much — the weight of what we didn’t know pressed heavier than words could.

When we pulled up, my dad’s best friend was there, along with a few of the guys he worked with. My boss and her husband were waiting, too. They ushered us inside, into a small room off the ER.

I remember the doctor’s words: “Mrs. Ezell, I am so sorry.” That was it. That was the line that split my life into before and after. I went numb. My body was there, but everything inside me was gone.

We all sat together, crying, stunned into silence. My dad had been an organ donor, and they had kept him on a vent in hopes of honoring that. But when they asked, my mother refused. It was on his license, it was his wish, but she refused. Even in death, it was still all about her.

They kept us waiting until he was off the vent, and then they let us see him. I can still recall every detail of that room — the color of the walls, the harsh fluorescent light, the sterile smell that never leaves no matter how many times they remodel the ER. I will always remember that room: the place I learned my father had died, and the place I last saw him.

Sometimes, I wish I had skipped that part. He didn’t look like himself anymore — swollen, cold, lifeless. That’s not the man I wanted to remember. And yet, when I close my eyes, it’s still that image that comes back to me. The last one. The one that haunts me.

Sixteen years ago, my entire world turned upside down. It would take another eleven years before I could finally allow myself to grieve — but by then, I was grieving not just one parent, but two. I’ve learned the hard way that the old saying — a bad parent is better than no parent — carries a painful kind of truth. Even when the relationship is broken, the absence carves out something deeper.

And this was only the beginning.

© Wynter Rayne, 2025. All Rights Reserved.