The Men Who Shaped Me
The people who shape us most don't always do it perfectly. Sometimes they do it in silence, in absence, in a single moment over a cheeseburger by the ocean.
My Father — The Stranger Who Became My Greatest Teacher
For most of my childhood my father was someone I visited.
Every other Sunday. A kind man who took us to do fun things, who made us laugh with his old-fashioned sense of humor, who was always helping friends and strangers, always working, always moving. But beneath the outings and the laughter there was a distance I could never quite close — a glass wall between us that I spent years pressing my hands against, trying to reach him. The relationship always felt one-sided. Me making the effort. Me staying connected. Him being kind but never quite present. Never quite mine.
He never told me he loved me until he had cancer
When his diagnosis came — terminal, three to six months — I made a decision that surprised even me. I would spend two weeks out of every month with him in those final months. Not out of obligation. Out of need. I needed to know him before he was gone. I needed my unborn daughter to know him too — this grandfather she would never get to meet, this man whose blood she would carry without ever hearing his voice.
What happened in those months was something I never expected. He apologized. For all of it. For not being present. For not understanding that parenting was something you had to choose, actively, every day. For missing so much of my growing up. For the absence that had shaped me in ways neither of us fully understood. He said he didn't know in the beginning why I would make the effort — why I would show up, again and again, for a man who had shown up so rarely for me. I told him the truth. I was doing it for me. For him. And for my daughter.
There was a day I flew him to San Diego. We sat on the boardwalk by the ocean, eating cheeseburgers, the water in front of us, the sun on our faces. I was asking him questions — the same questions I had been asking all those months — and one of them was this: What were the top moments of your life?
He looked at me and said — this one. We both cried.
There was another day when I had a list
— his bills, his accounts, his business affairs, all the practical machinery of a life winding down. I could see he was exhausted. Not in the mood. So I put the list away and said — let's forget it. Today we do only what you want to do. He said — let's go.
He directed me to a Dunkin Donuts where he bought five dozen boxes. Then he directed me through the streets of his life — to the small business owners, the tradesmen, his fellow plumbers, the people he had spent decades working alongside. At every stop he carried in a box of donuts, introduced me with unmistakable pride, and then sat outside in the sun with these people — laughing, telling old stories, being completely and entirely himself in a way I had never witnessed before.
We did it all day. Until every box was gone.
After he passed, I was working through his estate — the same kind of list, the same practical machinery, now heavier with grief. I got tired. I took a break. And I found myself at Dunkin Donuts, buying five dozen boxes, and driving to those same places. Alone this time. Sitting in those same chairs outside those same businesses, with those same people. And we shared stories about my dad.
He was deeply, genuinely loved by his community. I just hadn't known it until that day with the donuts — and then again, after he was gone, when I retraced his route alone and felt him everywhere.
I see him in myself now. His work ethic. His dedication. His instinct to help whoever needs it. His sense of humor. His love of the old days and the old stories. He gave me those things without knowing he was giving them — and I carry them without always knowing I am carrying them.
That is how identity works sometimes. Quietly. Through the people who shaped us before we knew we were being shaped.
My Papa — The Rock Who Loved in Silence
My maternal grandfather helped raise me alongside my grandmother. We called him Papa. He was very German. Strict, efficient, hardworking, practical to his core. A farmer. A factory worker during the war. A man of very few words who folded his hands on the kitchen table and listened to baseball games on the radio with the focused stillness of someone who had learned that silence was not empty — it was simply where he lived.
He was a rock. Immovable. Fearless. The kind of man you lean against when everything else is uncertain because you know with complete confidence that he will not move.
And yet — with my brother and me he was different than he had been with his own children. Softer. More playful. He would let us climb on him while he sat in his favorite reclining chair reading his newspaper. We would sit on the floor in front of him and wrap our arms around each of his legs and he would shake us — gently, rhythmically, a small private game between generations. He would chase us through the house. His presence beside me feeling like the safest thing in the world.
He had purchased an old movie camera back in the 1940s — an extraordinary and unlikely thing for a practical German farmer to do — and he filmed everything. Every vacation. Every graduation. Every birthday, Easter, Christmas. Our family treasures those films today. In choosing to document those moments he gave us something he may not have understood he was giving — the gift of being remembered. Of being seen. Of having proof that the ordinary moments of a life were worth preserving. This was him expressing his creativity.
He told me he loved me for the first time when my grandmother died
I was twenty-five years old.
I think about that sometimes — the decades of love that existed before those words. The love that expressed itself in presence rather than language. In the shaking of legs while he read his newspaper. In the movie camera he pointed at every moment worth keeping. He loved us deeply and quietly and in the only language he knew — the language of showing up, of being solid, of never leaving.
What I wish I had asked him — and this is the question that stays with me — is what he dreamed about. What his wildest thoughts were. What lived in the unreasonable, impractical, unguarded part of him that the stern German farmer never allowed out into the open. He was so practical, so contained, so committed to the virtuous and the correct — I would have loved to find the edges of him. The softer, stranger, more vulnerable place that existed beneath all that stillness.
I never got to ask. And that is its own kind of grief — the questions that outlive the people we wanted to ask them of.
What They Gave Me Without Knowing It
Two very different men. Two very different kinds of love.
One who was absent and then, in the final season of his life, showed up completely — honest, apologetic, present in a way that healed something I hadn't fully known was broken. One who was always there, solid and immovable, loving in the language of presence rather than words, documenting every moment with a camera that said — this matters, this is worth keeping — long before I understood why.
I carry both of them in me.
My father's work ethic and his humor and his instinct to help whoever is standing in front of him. My Papa's steadiness, his virtue, his quiet belief that showing up — reliably, faithfully, day after day — is its own profound form of love.
And I carry their silences too. The things they never said. The questions they never answered. The stories that existed inside them and never fully made it out.
That is partly why The Fabric of Me exists. Because I know what it is to lose someone before you have asked them everything. Because I know what it is to sit in a chair that still holds the shape of someone you loved and wish, with everything you have, that you had asked one more question.
Your Papa has a story worth telling. Your father does too.
And so do you.
The Fabric of Me was built for the stories that are still waiting to be told — before the chair is empty, before the voice is gone, before the questions have nowhere left to go.