What Letting My Dad Go Taught Me About Love

“Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go.” ~Hermann Hesse

My dad was intubated, so he couldn’t say the words back to me.

I told him I loved him anyway.

Instead, he slowly pointed to himself and then to me.

“You love me too?” I asked.

His eyes widened ever so slightly, and he nodded gently, giving me the biggest response his body could offer. I held onto that moment like it was something solid in a room where everything else was slipping away.

It was the last moment we had together before he started slipping in and out of consciousness, mostly out.

In those first few days, I asked him to fight. To hold on. Partly because I knew he wanted to fight. I knew he wasn’t done. And partly because I was far from done.

I asked about his stats and relayed them to a doctor friend, hopeful for any sign he might recover. At first, there were a few promising signs, until there weren’t.

As each day passed, his condition became a little less hopeful. The doctors had fewer ideas of what else we could try. And his body started to look tired.

Watching someone I loved so deeply, someone who had always personified strength to me and had been my safest place growing up, weaken bit by bit was heartbreaking. I felt helpless, small, and untethered, like my world was crumbling around me.

I wanted more of his warm, safe hugs. More of the steadiness I felt with him. I just wanted more time.

After some very direct conversations with the doctors, it became clear that he wasn’t going to wake up. We could keep him on life support, but he was in pain. And I wasn’t okay with keeping him in that place in an attempt to avoid my own pain.

It was probably the hardest decision I’ve ever made: to remove the life support. But his peace mattered more than my desperation to keep him here.

So the next time I spoke to him, I gently whispered in his ear, “I know you tried. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. You can go.”

I floated through that day like I was in a dream. It felt surreal to be on the subway surrounded by people, most of whom were likely moving through an ordinary day, while I had just made the decision to let my dad die.

For a long time, I carried that moment with a kind of stunned disbelief. How could life keep moving when mine had cracked open? How could there be commuters, coffee runs, small talk, and dinner plans when one of the most foundational loves of my life was gone?

In the beginning, grief felt sharp and immediate. It lived close to the surface. It was the ache of missing him, the shock of his absence, the disbelief that someone so central to my life could simply no longer be here.

With time, the grief hasn’t disappeared, but it has changed shape. For a while, it felt huge and consuming, like it took up all the air in the room. There was fear there too: How do I live in a world without him? What does that even mean?

Years later, it feels more like a quiet, familiar ache. More like, Thank you for the love. I still wish you were here.

And somewhere in that shift, I began to understand something I couldn’t see when I was in the thick of it: letting go is not always giving up. Sometimes it is the most loving thing we can do.

Before my dad died, I think some part of me equated love with holding on. With fighting harder. With not loosening my grip. Letting go felt unimaginable, almost like betrayal.

It was as if, by insisting this shouldn’t be happening, or this shouldn’t be how it ends, I could somehow change what was unfolding in front of me.

But eventually, I could feel how much of my pain was tied not only to losing him but also to how badly I wanted it not to be true. Grief has a way of revealing where we’re still fighting what has already happened.

I wanted more time. I wanted a different ending—for the story to go another way. I wanted life to be kinder than it was.

And that was its own heartbreak.

I think this is why letting go can feel so hard in so many parts of life, not only in death. We don’t just hold on to people. We hold on to hopes, plans, identities, expectations, and versions of life we thought would last longer or look different by now.

We hold on because something mattered. Because we’re not ready. Because letting go can force us to face how much has changed and how little control we really have.

Alongside the loss itself is the fear of uncertainty: How do I move forward from here? Who am I without this? What do I do now?

But sometimes, what we’re really holding onto is not the thing itself. It’s the hope that it can still be different, the wish that the ending can still change, and the refusal to meet what is because it hurts too much.

Letting go doesn’t mean what we wanted didn’t matter. It doesn’t mean we stop caring or that things suddenly feel fair.

And it isn’t the same as giving up on ourselves, other people, or our dreams. Sometimes it means loosening our grip on how something has to unfold, so we can begin to meet life as it is.

That understanding has changed the way I move through endings now, though not all at once, and not without resistance. It’s one thing to understand letting go in our minds, and another to feel it in the body when something we love is changing.

I’ve learned that before I can ask myself to reflect, I often need to first notice what’s happening in my body—the tightening in my chest, the urge to brace, the part of me that wants to grip harder.

Meeting that response with a little gentleness helps me soften enough to ask: Am I holding on because this still feels true, or because I’m struggling to accept that it is changing?

Sometimes I ask: Can I honor what this meant to me without needing it to stay exactly as it was?

And sometimes the question is even simpler: What am I afraid letting go will ask me to feel?

I still miss my dad. I still wish I could hug him. I still wish life had given us more time.

But I no longer see that final act as giving up.

I see it as love without the illusion of control. Love that could no longer fix, bargain, or keep him here. Love that could only tell the truth.

You tried. It’s okay. We’ll be okay. You can go.

I think many of us are taught to admire the parts of ourselves that hold on, persevere, and keep fighting. And sometimes those parts are deeply needed.

But there are also moments when strength looks softer than we expect. More surrendered. More tender.

Sometimes strength is loosening our grip.

Sometimes letting go is not the absence of love, hope, or meaning, but the moment we stop asking life to be something other than what it is.

And sometimes healing begins there—not when we stop caring, but when we stop believing that holding on tighter will change the truth of what is already here.