death father essay

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The Death of My Father, Essay Example

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Two years ago, just a few weeks before Christmas, my roommate, who was clearly upset, sat me down on the couch in our living room and broke the news to me that my father had died earlier that afternoon.

My father had been ill for a long time.  He had a long history of cardiac disease which was exacerbated by the fact that he was a chronic smoker, was overweight, and did not much care either or exercise or for healthy food (something which, I am sorry to say, I seem to have inherited from him!).  I knew he was in the hospital in New York, where his second wife was taking care of him as he prepared to have cardiac surgery to try to repair the damage that a lifetime’s worth of misuse had done to his heart.  He never made it through the surgery, dying right there on the operating table in spite of the surgical team’s attempts to save his life.

When my roommate first told me the news, I remember almost having difficulty putting the words together in that simple sentence to give it meaning. “Your father is dead” is not a difficult sentence to say, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. And then the sharpest pain hit me as the words drove home and I remember bursting into tears and crying on my into a pillow for a long time.  I remember being offered a glass of wine to calm my nerves down – it was a blood-red Cabernet Sauvignon – and it tasted bitter and sweet and lovely all at once.  I remember calling my brother – he was half-way across the country, going to graduate school in Michigan, and I hadn’t seen him for a while since we had both been so busy with school – and I remember him saying “This sucks”, which summed up the situation pretty nicely.  I remember we cried together, and I drank more wine, and a sick and sour sort of feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.  I also remember I went to bed and slept really heavily that night.

It was financially impossible for me to get to the funeral on such short notice, and my father had decided to be cremated and to forego any kind of memorial service, so there wouldn’t have been anything to attend even if I had been able to go.  But I took the next couple of days off and I remember, those first few days, feeling very tender, as though I had been sunburned and the skin had just peeled off.  I slept a lot those first few days, and ate very little, and took several walks out in the woods on my own.

My father and I had been estranged for a long time. He had been abusive and I was glad when he and my mother divorced and he was finally out of my life. I did not have any contact with him for a long time after the marriage broke up.  But in the last few years of his life, we had started emailing back and forth and even had had a few phone calls. He was planning to visit me next fall for  vacation, only he died before we got to see each other again.

That has been two years ago now.  I do not feel raw like I did when I first got the news, but it is not something I like to think about, either.  I do, though, have all the emails from the last few years that we sent back and forth to each other and I have a box of photographs that my mother sent me of the two of us when I was just a kid, before things went sour. Eventually, I will be brave enough to read through those emails and look through those pictures. But it is something that I know I am not ready for yet. In a way, though, I think part of me is almost looking forward to it, as I feel like it will cauterize a wound that has never quite closed up for me.  And I know that his death has given me a lot more sympathy for other people who are grieving, since I know now that it can take so many forms – some pretty conventional, some wildly inappropriate – and that even though you feel you have “gotten over it” with the passage of time, you know that it is always somewhere just below the surface of your skin.

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Home — Application Essay — Medical School — About Death of a Father: My Reflecting on Life and Loss

About Death of a Father: My Reflecting on Life and Loss

• University: Iowa State University

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Words: 691 |

Updated: Nov 30, 2023

Words: 691 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

This essay delves into the profound and transformative experience of losing a father, a pivotal event that reshaped my perspective on life and purpose. "There is goodness in everything that happens," a maxim instilled by my parents, became a beacon of resilience and hope through various challenges. Yet, the true test of this belief came with the hardest loss I've ever faced – the death of a father. His passing not only left a void but also imparted invaluable lessons about love, strength, and the importance of living fully. Herein, I explore the indelible impact of this life-altering event and the enduring lessons it taught me about overcoming adversity and finding purpose amidst grief.

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April 30, 2016 was the day I truly thought I could no longer see any good in life anymore. In every harsh situation, my dad had always been there to remind me that everything will be better- something I lost all too quickly. To be able to accept the fact that he’s no longer on earth was just too much. Pancreatic cancer cost my father his life. However, this disease managed to changed everything I ever knew. For the remainder of 2014, I was in a bubble of memories, I keep remembering every inconvenient I went through and how my father helped me get through it. But one memory, that never happened to leave my mind was the simplest and perhaps oldest memory. I remember getting my first D ever, and going back home in tears and the only person who managed to make me smile was him. He told me “Getting a D isn’t the end of the world, in fact, that D will motivate you to work harder and put more effort.” Fortunately, he was right, the second semester I changed that D to a C and I can still remember the excitement and happiness in his face telling me “I knew you could do it.” That memory woke me up, I realized that the life I was living was not the one Dad would have wanted for me. He wouldn’t want me to stay upset and give up on myself or my life in that case. He wants me to live and learn, not grieve and lose sight of everything else that I still have around me. From my birth to his dying breath, he was the perfect example of someone who loved life; he made the most out of everyday he had, even during his chemotherapy treatments. Not once have I seen my father with a frown on his face, he endured all the pain and smiled. Whether it was to keep himself stronger, or to encourage us to never stop believing, it worked. Remembering all those moments, those memories and those lessons from my father changed my perspective in life. I felt guilty that the end of his life caused me to stop living mine. Following this realization, I woke up each morning with my Dad’s simple philosophy of life in my mind: live. And so I lived.

My father’s death, undoubtedly the worst thing I have ever experiences, ultimately made me stronger. Once I was able to learn how to exist without him, life got less lonely. In fact, I was more motivated to live, to work hard, to achieve my goals and make my family proud. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, as life could always get worse - but could also get better, just like my dad taught me. His death taught me to love deeper, to appreciate what I have rather than what I had, and inspired me to make a lasting impact. His death taught me that we all have some sort of purpose on this earth, and his was to show people how to truly live. A huge lesson I learnt however, was based on the concept of last words. It’s impossible to know when you are speaking to someone for the last time. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that the last words my father ever heard me say were that I’m here if you need anything. Therefore, the last words of this essay are the most important. I will work hard, I will never stop believing in myself, I will do my best to make my father proud. I will live my life and I endure to make a difference.

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Dear Therapist Writes to Herself in Her Grief

My father died, there’s a pandemic, and I’m overcome by my feeling of loss.

Dear Therapist,

I know that everyone is going through loss during the coronavirus pandemic, but in the midst of all this, my beloved father died two weeks ago, and I’m reeling.

He was 85 years old and in great pain from complications due to congestive heart failure. After years of invasive procedures and frequent hospitalizations, he decided to go into home hospice to live out the rest of his life surrounded by family. We didn’t know whether it would be weeks or months, but we expected his death, and had prepared for it in the time leading up to it. We had the conversations we wanted to have, and the day he died, I was there to kiss his cheeks and massage his forehead, to hold his hand and say goodbye. I was at his bedside when he took his last breath.

And yet, nothing prepared me for this loss. Can you help me understand my grief?

Lori Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Readers,

This week, I decided to submit my own “Dear Therapist” letter following my father’s death. As a therapist, I’m no stranger to grief, and I’ve written about its varied manifestations in this column many times .

Even so, I wanted to write about the grief I’m now experiencing personally, because I know this is something that affects everyone. You can’t get through life without experiencing loss. The question is, how do we live with loss?

In the months before my father died, I asked him a version of that question: How will I live without you? If this sounds strange—asking a person you love to give you tips on how to grieve his death—let me offer some context.

My dad was a phenomenal father, grandfather, husband, and loyal friend to many. He had a dry sense of humor, a hearty laugh, boundless compassion, an uncanny ability to fix anything around the house, and a deep knowledge of the world (he was my Siri before there was a Siri). Mostly, though, he was known for his emotional generosity. He cared deeply about others; when we returned to my mom’s house after his burial, we were greeted by a gigantic box of paper towels on her doorstep, ordered by my father the day before he died so that she wouldn’t have to worry about going out during the pandemic.

His greatest act of emotional generosity, though, was talking me through my grief. He said many comforting things in recent months—how I’ll carry him inside me, how my memories of him will live forever, how he believes in my resilience. A few years earlier, he had taken me aside after one of my son’s basketball games and said that he’d just been to a friend’s funeral, told the friend’s adult daughter how proud her father had been of her, and was heartbroken when she said her father had never said that to her.

“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” It was the first time we’d had a conversation like that, and the subtext was clear: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.

But of all the ways my father tried to prepare me for his loss, what has stayed with me most was when he talked about what he learned from grieving his own parents’ deaths: that grief was unavoidable, and that I would grieve this loss forever.

“I can’t make this less painful for you,” he said one night when I started crying over the idea—still so theoretical to me—of his death. “But when you feel the pain, remember that it comes from a place of having loved and been loved deeply.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Beyond that—you’re the therapist. Think about how you’ve helped other people with their grief.”

So I have. Five days before he died, I developed a cough that would wake me from sleep. I didn’t have the other symptoms of COVID-19—fever, fatigue—but still, I thought: I’d better not go near Dad . I spoke with him every day, as usual, except for Saturday, when time got away from me. I called the next day—the day when suddenly he could barely talk and all we could say was “I love you” to each other before he lost consciousness. He never said another word; our family sat vigil until he died the next afternoon.

Afterward, I was racked with guilt. While I’d told myself that I hadn’t seen him in his last days because of my cough, and that I hadn’t called Saturday because of the upheaval of getting supplies for the lockdown, maybe I wasn’t there and didn’t call because I was in denial—I couldn’t tolerate the idea of him dying, so I found a way to avoid confronting it.

Soon this became all I thought about—how I wished I’d gone over with my cough and a mask; how I wished I’d called on Saturday when he was still cogent—until I remembered something I wrote in this column to a woman who felt guilty about the way she had treated her dying husband in his last week. “One way to deal with intense grief is to focus the pain elsewhere,” I had written then. “It might be easier to distract yourself from the pain of missing your husband by turning the pain inward and beating yourself up over what you did or didn’t do for him.”

Like my father, her husband had suffered for a long time, and like her, I felt I had failed him in his final days.

I wrote to her:

Grief doesn’t begin the day a person dies. We experience the loss while the person is alive, and because our energy is focused on doctor appointments and tests and treatments—and because the person is still here—we might not be aware that we’ve already begun grieving the loss of someone we love … So what happens to their feelings of helplessness, sadness, fear, or rage? It’s not uncommon for people with a terminally ill partner to push their partner away in order to protect themselves from the pain of the loss they’re already experiencing and the bigger one they’re about to endure. They might pick fights with their partner … They might avoid their partner, and busy themselves with other interests or people. They might not be as helpful as they had imagined they would be, not only because of the exhaustion that sets in during these situations, but also because of the resentment: How dare you show me so much love, even in your suffering, and then leave me .

Another “Dear Therapist” letter came to mind this week, this one from a man grieving the loss of his wife of 47 years . He wanted to know how long this would go on. I replied:

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths … It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should reach “acceptance” might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times, all these years later”) … The grief psychologist William Worden looks at grieving in this light, replacing “stages” with “tasks” of mourning. In the fourth of his tasks, the goal is to integrate the loss into our lives and create an ongoing connection with the person who died—while also finding a way to continue living.

Just like my father suggested, these columns helped. And so did my own therapist, the person I called Wendell in my recent book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone . He sat with me (from a coronavirus-safe distance, of course) as I tried to minimize my grief— look at all of these relatively young people dying from the coronavirus when my father got to live to 85 ; look at the all the people who weren’t lucky enough to have a father like mine —and he reminded me that I always tell others that there’s no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and not a contest.

And so I stopped apologizing for my pain and shared it with Wendell. I told him how, after my father died and we were waiting for his body to be taken to the mortuary, I kissed my father’s cheek, knowing that it would be the last time I would ever kiss him, and I noticed how soft and warm his cheek still was, and I tried to remember what he felt like, because I knew I would never feel my father’s skin again. I told Wendell how I stared at my father’s face and tried to memorize every detail, knowing it would be the last time I’d ever see the face I’d looked at my entire life. I told him how gutted I was by the physical markers that jolted me out of denial and made this goodbye so horribly real—seeing my father’s lifeless body being wrapped in a sheet and placed in a van ( Wait, where are you taking my dad? I silently screamed), carrying the casket to the hearse, shoveling dirt into his grave, watching the shiva candle melt for seven days until the flame was jarringly gone. Mostly, though, I cried, deep and guttural, the way my patients do when they’re in the throes of grief.

Since leaving Wendell’s office, I have cried and also laughed. I’ve felt pain and joy; I’ve felt numb and alive. I’ve lost track of the days, and found purpose in helping people through our global pandemic. I’ve hugged my son, also reeling from the loss of his grandfather, tighter than usual, and let him share his pain with me. I’ve spent some days FaceTiming with friends and family, and other days choosing not to engage.

But the thing that has helped me the most is what my father did for me and also what Wendell did for me. They couldn’t take away my pain, but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you. This is exactly what we need in grief, and what we can do for one another—now more than ever.

Related Podcast

Listen to Lori Gottlieb share her advice on dealing with grief and answer listener questions on Social Distance , The Atlantic ’s new podcast about living through a pandemic:

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

About the Author

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"My Father's Passing"

University of Michigan

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

250 - 650 words

Why This Essay Works:

• Navigates Tragedy Gracefully : Writing about a tragedy like a loss of a parent is a tricky topic for college essays. Many students feel obligated to choose that topic if it applies to them, but it can be challenging to not come across as trying to garner sympathy ("sob story"). This student does a graceful job of focusing on positive elements from their father's legacy, particularly the inspiration they draw from him.
• Compelling Motivations : This student does a great job of connecting their educational and career aspirations to their background. Admissions officers want to understand why you're pursing what you are, and by explaining the origin of your interests, you can have compelling and genuine reasons why.

What They Might Change:

• Write Only From Your Perspective : In this essay, the student writes from their hypothetical perspective as an infant. This doesn't quite work because they likely wouldn't remember these moments ("I have no conscious memories of him"), but still writes as though they do. By writing about things you haven't seen or experienced yourself, it can come across as "made up" or inauthentic.

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Lydia Polgreen

What My Father’s Death Taught Me About Living

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

We buried my dad on Friday. He asked to be interred in a pine box. He had long ago lost his once ardent interest in organized religion, but he remained committed right up to the end to the idea that burial helps the soul escape the body.

He endured a long sojourn in the twilight of dementia. Obituary-ese would call it a struggle or a battle, but that wasn’t John Polgreen ’s style. He accepted his diagnosis with equanimity and bore it with no self-pity. He died a few days short of his 73rd birthday.

Like many families around the world, mine has seen a lot of loss in the past couple of years. It started with my paternal grandmother, Beth, who died early in the pandemic, though not of Covid, at the age of 92. She lived a long life filled with adventure, surrounded by a loving family and friends.

Next came the shocking, sudden death of my father’s younger brother Bob. He died of a heart attack last year, three months before his 70th birthday. He was building, with his own hands, as was his habit, a dream house on the shores of Lake Superior for him and my aunt to retire to and enjoy their growing passel of grandchildren. And then, just like that, he was gone.

And now it was my dad’s turn. For the first time since these deaths, my family gathered to mourn. We all missed so many celebrations during the pandemic — graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs. But there is something especially cruel about not being able to gather in the aftermath of a loved one’s death.

Saul Bellow, one of my dad’s favorite writers, wrote in a letter to Martin Amis that “losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces — down to the last glassy splinter.”

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The Death of My Father

The New Yorker , June 17, 2002 P. 84

FAMILY HISTORY about the narrator’s recollection of his strained relationship with his father. After the death of his father, the narrator, Steve, is surprised by his friends’complimentary descriptions of him. All he remembers of his father was his anger. Steve recalls his father’s desire to be in show biz, the bit parts he proudly took on. Of Steve’s show biz career, however, his father was critical. After the premier of his first movie, "The Jerk," he said nothing about Steve’s performance. Steve’s friends noted his silence and were horrified. Finally, one friend said, ìWhat did you think of Steve in the movie?" His father said, "Well he’s no Charlie Chaplin." In the early eighties, after speaking with a friend whose mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day and whose father was killed crossing a street, Steve decided to work through his relationship with his parents: he’d take them to lunch every Sunday: Steve recalls one particular Sunday lunch, after his father’s quadruple-bypass operation. His father held the menu in one hand and his newly prescribed list of dietary restrictions in the other. He glanced back and forth between the standard restaurant fare on his left and the healthy suggestions on his right, looked up at the waiter, and said resignedly, "Oh, I’ll just have the fettucini Alfredo." It was their routine that after their lunches, Steve’s mother and father would walk him to the car and Steve would kiss his mother and wave at his father. One time, though, as Steve went to say goodbye, his father whispered, "I love you," in a barely audible voice. Steve convinced his father that he should see a psychologist. Steve’s mother was also enlisted to visit the psychologist in the hope of shedding some light on their relationship. "Well," she said, "I didn’t say anything bad." With the agreement to see a psychologist, Steve noticed in his father a new-found willingness to try different things. Once, a male nurse produced a bag of pot and Steve’s father, per the advice of his son, took several hits. His eyes glazed over and his leg stopped shaking. He looked around the room with dilated pupils and said, "I don’t feel anything." Only a few months after the pot-testing episode, Steve found himself back at his parent’s home to see his father who, according to Steve’s weeping sister was, "saying goodbye to everyone." Steve walked into the bedroom and the two looked into each other’s eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last his father said, "You did everything I wanted to do." Steve replied, "I did it because of you." After another pause his father said, "I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry for all the love I received and couldn’t return." Here, at his father’s deathbed, Steve realizes that his father had kept this secret, his desire to love his family, from him and his mother his whole life.

View Article

The New York Times

Opinionator | finding joy in my father’s death.

Finding Joy in My Father’s Death

The End is a series about end-of-life issues.

It was just after New Year’s in 2012 when I ran into my friend Felice at Costco. She asked me how I was doing, and I told her.

“My dad is dying,” I said. My sister and I, along with our husbands, had just spent Christmas in California with my father and stepmother, and it was clear that Dad’s Parkinson’s, diagnosed two years before, had reached a new and critical phase. My sister, stepmother and I kept slipping off to cry together, so shaken were we by the fact that he was really dying now.

In Costco, I told Felice that I would do everything I could to help my father, but that I had resolved not to feel sad.

“He’s still alive,” I said, thinking he might last a few months. “I’ve decided to wait and feel terrible once he’s dead.”

“Or not,” she said brightly, and gave me a hug.

Or not. Those two words followed me around for the next three years while my sister and I made our separate trips to California every other month, as I took on all the extra work I could find in order to pay the crushing costs of in-home care, as I made those sad, daily phone calls. When my father could no longer hold the phone, my stepmother put him on the speakerphone, and when he could barely speak, I carried on the conversation without him.

Along the way, his neurologists had decided he didn’t have Parkinson’s after all. He had a similar disease that’s often mistaken for Parkinson’s called progressive supranuclear palsy. Then they decided he probably had both Parkinson’s and P.S.P. Not that it mattered. Either way he was frozen solid, his muscles boiling beneath the surface of his skin. He liked to hold hands in the last months of his life, and holding his hand was like holding a linen sack full of bumblebees.

My father’s medical care did not contain a single heroic measure — no feeding tube, no respirator. Some of the pills he took calmed his condition for a few hours at a time, but none of them improved or slowed the progression of his degenerative neurological disease. What my father’s care lacked in heroics it made up for in bravery, especially on the part of my stepmother, who cared for him at home with unflagging love and good cheer. We had arranged for round-the-clock help, because my stepmother could no longer lift him by herself in and out of bed, on and off the toilet, in and out of the shower.

But even with help he was her full-time job, and I knew that without her he would have been my full-time job, or my sister’s. My father, strapped into his wheelchair, never stopped demanding in his vanishing whisper that he wanted to go: to the opera, to the movies, to his weekly Rotary meeting. She brushed his hair and teeth, stretched his bent limbs, kept him clean. She cut his food into smaller and smaller bites and fed it to him slowly, a perilous task as he was prone to choking.

I had been wrong when I had told Felice that I would wait until after he died to feel sad. I felt sad about my father all the time. When I closed my eyes at night I saw him lashed to a raft in a storm-tossed sea: dark rain, dark waves, my father crashing down again and again as he waited to drown.

Frank Patchett had been an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for 33 years. He was part of the group of men who brought Charles Manson in from the desert. He was the guy who took in Sirhan Sirhan the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. After his retirement he often spent three hours a day working out. When he first got his diagnosis of Parkinson’s in his late 70s, he could still do 100 chin-ups.

My father died last month at 83 when my sister and I were on the plane, coming out to say goodbye for what felt like the 57th time. There was a message on my phone from my husband when we landed. What I felt when I heard the news was joy.

I had told Felice that I would feel bad when my father died. “Or not,” she had said.

My father’s body was still at the house when we got there. My stepmother, crying in a roomful of friends, said she wanted him to be there for us. My sister and I went into the bedroom together, and there he was, his head tilted back on the pillow, his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. We kissed his lovely face and cried and held each other, then we looked at him again. There was something funny going on. “He looks like he’s about to tell a joke,” I said, peering closely. My sister, who is a more tender person than I am, quicker to cry, leaned forward. “Dad,” she said quietly. “Say something funny.”

WHEN we went to sit among the crying people in the other room, I was stunned by the explosion of happiness spreading through my chest. Of course I was glad for my father, the end of his suffering, his ticket off the raft, but it was more than that. I was glad for my stepmother even as she sat beside me in her fiery grief because she was still healthy and young. In time she would go out with her friends again, take a trip, read a book, waste an afternoon looking at shoes. I felt glad for my sister and for myself, that any bit of extra time and money we had would no longer be offered up in the name of filial devotion.

This wasn’t about whether or not I loved my father. I did love him. He was brave and funny and smart. He could also be difficult even in the full bloom of health, and he often drove me witless. I was happy for all of us that this hideous struggle, which had extended past the most unreasonable expectations, was finally over. I was trying my best not to glow.

I stayed on in California for a while to be with my stepmother. I confided my happiness to a few friends and for the most part they were quick to assure me that I would be grief-stricken soon enough. They meant it kindly. By using the words “death” and “joy” in the same sentence, I had gone far beyond the limits of the standard “He’s in a better place.” They wanted me to know that later I would have the chance to redeem myself through suffering.

“What if you’ve thrown a dinner party,” I said. “And at 11 o’clock your guests got up to leave. The dishes were still on the table, the pans were in the sink, you had to go to work in the morning, but the guests just kept standing in the open door saying good night. They tell you another story, praise your cooking, go back to look for their gloves. They do this for three years.”

I’ve often wondered why the people who seem most certain about the existence of God are the ones who want to keep the respirator plugged in. If you were sure that God was waiting for your father, wouldn’t you want him to go? Wouldn’t you want him to go even if you didn’t believe in God, because death is the completion of our purpose here? He’s finished his job and now is free to send his atoms back into the earth and stars. Isn’t that really kind of great?

Like most everyone else, I’ve had my share of grief. When my sister’s husband died unexpectedly last year at the age of 59, I fell down the open manhole cover with my sister and the rest of the people who loved him. But my father? He’d been gone for such a long time. He had told us how much he loved us, and we told him how much we loved him, again and again and again, until there was nothing left to say.

Except for this: Dad, there is joy in the place that you left.

Ann Patchett is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.”

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When My Father Died

When my father died I felt apart of me die with him, because I knew I would never see him again. Ever since that day my life has never been the same. November 9,2001 was the end, but also a new beginning. BOOM BOOM BOOM! was the sound from the guns that I heard. Suddenly my eyes were opened, I awoke from a deep sleep. I vividly remember counting seven shots, and my first thought was “Who just got killed?”. I was so terrified, because they sounded so close. I knew the shooting was very near my house, because I saw the lights from the guns reflect through my window onto my wall. I laid still in my bed and full of paranoia. As my heart pounded extremely fast, I heard a car drive off fast, the tires screeching loudly. Then I slowly looked out the window, even though I was full of fear. There he was flat on his back with his arms and legs spread away from his body. I had to catch my breath, because I felt like half of my soul left my body. I became overcome with denial “No, not my dad, he wouldn’t leave me!”. Both good and bad memories flashed in my mind. Simultaneously I heard my mother screaming downstairs “I don’t know how to tell her, how and I going to tell my baby?!”. It was amazing how thin the walls were that day. A few minutes later I heard feet walking up the steps toward my room. My godmother came into my room and sat down next to me on my bed. She was hesitant, but she eventually parted her lips to say “Your father is dead”. When she told me that my father was dead I felt extreme heartache fill me. I kept thinking “My daddy was dead”. My face was wet from my tears, my throat sore from my crying, and my head throbbed from my headache. She held me and told me it would be ok but I felt otherwise. During my dads funeral I was literally in shock. All I heard were screams and cries of sorrow. At one point in time I looked around the church, and realized that there were over two hundred people who had similar feelings. I closed my eyes and opened them back up slowly because I wanted someone to tell me that this was all a bad dream, but it was reality. I probably seemed fine externally, but internally I felt like I was dieing. My pastors wife read the poem I had written about my dad to the mourners, and when my pastor preached I was open enough to listen. That’s when the casket closed, I cried so hard I thought I was going to vomit. At that point I knew he was gone forever. My body was going through a major breakdown, and I was slipping into depression. Once everyone got to the burial site, I watched to casket go into the ground. When the dirt started to be put on top of the casket my grandmother burst into tears. She had lost one of her sons and I lost my father. I had lost my father, but I had not lost hope. Being that he was abruptly taken away from me when I was only ten years old, I realized I had to develop strength instead of developing weakness. I had to gather myself and I come out of my depression. Everything around me was changing rapidly. I was no longer daddy’s baby girl, I began to see things in a different light. I had to turn something negative into something positive. What my father wanted for me in life is what I strive for now. His death has motivated me to strive for greatness. His death helped me become the person I am today. I don’t’ have any children, I’m pretty independent, and I want enjoy the better things in life. I’m proud to be his daughter.

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Home Essay Samples Life

Essay Samples on Father

A father's legacy: reflecting on the narrative of losing my dad.

Introduction The departure of a cherished family member creates a profound impact that shapes the course of our lives. In this narrative essay, I embark on a deeply personal journey recounting the experience of losing my father. I will revisit the moments leading up to...

A Journey Through Death in Family

Introduction Death, as inevitable as it is, remains one of the most challenging aspects of human life. The passing of a family member, particularly, introduces a profound shift in the dynamics of one’s existence. In my life, the death of my father when I was...

My Role Model and My Heroes: Mother and Father

Heroes can have a massive superb have an effect on on your life. My heroes are my mother and my dad. They are heroes to me each day and I have continually seemed up to them. I have always wanted to be just like my...

• Someone Who Inspires Me

Growing Up Without a Father: How it Has Affeted My Life

Growing up without a father in the family, and being raised by an independent mother has made me grateful for the people in my life, especially my mother. The journey of how a young adolescent’s life was impacted growing up without a father will be...

Growing Up Without A Father: The Role Of A Father In Primary Socialization

In order for the human race to persist, it is essential that they reproduce and nurture new individuals. Every institute of the society has its own function and this task is taken over by the institution of ‘family’. The family, either nuclear or joint holds...

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Growing Up Without A Father And His Role In Childhood Development

There is a riches of indication on Fathers’ positive impact in early childhood development (ECD), as this has been a topic of interest to scientists working in early childhood development globally. Both children and fathers show positive effects when fathers take part in their development;...

• Parent-Child Relationship

A Tale About My Father And My Sister

My father had been going through a breakup with his girlfriend, who he'd been with for 4 years and had a daughter together; my sister. He had completely changed after they decided to end things, became very depressed and started to drink almost everyday. One...

• Family Relationships

Symbolism in Sylvia Plath's Poem "Lady Lazarus"

In brief, we can imagine Plath expresses her aggressive language and ironic tone in 'Daddy'. Plath shows her extreme rage through inequality, and male dominance. Many audiences praise for her honesty when she dares to show her anger toward men in the Victorian Age. “Daddy”...

• Lady Lazarus

The History of My Father's Military Past

In the interview I did with my father, I got the chance to learn a lot about his thoughts, opinion and what he experienced during the early 2000’s. Most of the questions I asked my father was questions based around the 20th century, the war...

• Family History

The Dependance of the Child's Wellbeing on Father's Presence

Children’s brightest future mostly depends on father’s involvement throughout their early years. Building a healthy relationship with the child is imperative for the father in child caring and rearing. While in the early years of child’s life the physical care, stimulation as well as affection...

• Family Values

Exploring Father's Involvement in Child Care: Bangladeshi Context

Father's Involvement in Global Context The exploration of fathers' involvement in child care traces back to the 1970s when sociologists began analyzing the women's movement, which occurred in the 1960s. This period witnessed a significant transformation in societal roles and family structures, and naturally, this...

The Significance of the Role of the Father Throughout Death of a Salesman

Imagine a child living only under his father’s obscurity, his ideologies, believes, traits, all but the same, a very depressing way of life isn't it? In the death of a salesman, it describes just that. A grievous play that revolves around an old man rotting...

• Death of a Salesman American Dream

Family Values I Learned From My Dad

As I grew up, my father would dependably disclose to me thing in a format that was, “ This is the most essential thing in the world…”and proceed to state what it was. I always need to blame him about how he said that in...

Review Of Jawaharlal Nehru's Letters From A Father To His Daughter

A daughter’s father is in prison, to make up for the time he wasn’t with her he wrote letters about life itself and all the morals that comes with living. The father’s only way to keep in contact with his daughter is to write letters...

• Book Review

My Papa – The Man, The Myth And The Legend Of Our Family

My Papa was born in 1921 in wyandotte michigan. His full name is Kenneth James Brighton. He grew up on a farm with his parents Bessie and Loren, and his brothers Loren Jr and Robert. Ken was raised to be a kind and caring man....

Best topics on Father

1. A Father’s Legacy: Reflecting on the Narrative of Losing My Dad

2. A Journey Through Death in Family

3. My Role Model and My Heroes: Mother and Father

4. Growing Up Without a Father: How it Has Affeted My Life

5. Growing Up Without A Father: The Role Of A Father In Primary Socialization

6. Growing Up Without A Father And His Role In Childhood Development

7. A Tale About My Father And My Sister

8. Symbolism in Sylvia Plath’s Poem “Lady Lazarus”

9. The History of My Father’s Military Past

10. The Dependance of the Child’s Wellbeing on Father’s Presence

11. Exploring Father’s Involvement in Child Care: Bangladeshi Context

12. The Significance of the Role of the Father Throughout Death of a Salesman

13. Family Values I Learned From My Dad

14. Review Of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Letters From A Father To His Daughter

15. My Papa – The Man, The Myth And The Legend Of Our Family

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Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

'The death of my father' - UF Essay - A narrative of a meaningful event in my life

acat6332 4 / 12   Sep 26, 2009   #2 i like your essay and im sorry :( but you really should expand more on the last paragraph, on how you have changed and before the last sentence you should put more of what you learned from the experience, what person are you today thanks to it.

OP kdizzle 1 / 1   Sep 26, 2009   #3 Ok thanks. They ask for it to be between 400-500 words, so I couldn't expand very much, but I'll try to make some room. Is the 400-500 word limit very strict for colleges? Or will they accept it if it runs a little over?

kl24 1 / 5   Sep 27, 2009   #4 I attended a UM orientation and they said that they didn't really mind if you went over. He claims they don't sit and count the words.

surfskateskim 2 / 6   Sep 27, 2009   #5 i agree with acat6332. expand a little more in ur last paragraph. but other than that this is well written. i am very sorry for ur loss :\ good luck!

‘Let go dad, I’m gone’: a father charts the anguish of losing a son too young

Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne

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Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Death comes at us, unswerving, immense, pressing on us its only gift, infinite absence. Mostly we face away from it. Too often we are faintly reminded of it when we deal with losses of one kind or another.

Elizabeth Bishop came at this connection in her own querulously open-hearted way when she began her famous poem of loss with, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

And when a 26-year-old Tennyson, confronting the sudden death of his close friend and soon-to-be brother-in-law, wrote , “Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O sea!” his words almost howl at the vast inhuman presence of careless death.

But it is one (sometimes profound) thing to see and respond to the immanence of death in the world, and another thing entirely when a person you love, someone you might have raised from childhood or known intimately for decades, suddenly and too early dies. This exposes each one who experiences it to almost unbearable pain and almost complete darkness in the soul.

Warwick McFadyen, a journalist and poet, has published two short books, which he calls “tidal charts”, detailing his thoughts, feelings and memories in response to the sudden death of his son , Hamish, who died at the age of 21 in 2019.

Review: The Ocean: a meditation, in prose and poetry on grief/The Centre of Zero: poems 2019-2024 – Warwick McFadyen (McFadyen Media)

As with Nick Cave’s recent discussions with Sean O’Hagan in the book Faith, Hope and Carnage , there is no escaping the raw and catastrophic despair the loss of a child presses upon a parent. Both Cave and McFadyen take to articulating this experience in directly powerful and honest prose, and also take themselves towards song, lyric and poetry.

Some, in their grief will fall into a prolonged silence, while some go to painting, some to dance, some to meditation, or renewed friendships. Almost any discipline we choose can be our negotiation between denial and acceptance, celebration and curse, between ongoing love and love stopped in its tracks.

McFadyen’s book, The Ocean , begins with

Every day I stare into the abyss, and say good morning. Before sleep, I go to it and say good night, adding, See you in the morning. The abyss sits on a shelf.

The Ocean is a series of short prose reflections ordered chronologically according to the time elapsed since his son’s death, the first at two months and the last three years later.

He calls his anguish at two months a “monstrous wave” and a dense, black, dead star in his heart. He writes of times spent with his son, their conversations, shared interests, in such a way that as a reader I wished I had known this beautiful young man.

Sometimes the writing breaks into poetry or talks about poets who have written about death in ways that carry meaning for McFadyen – Shakespeare, Rilke, TS Eliot. Sometimes there are details of ongoing life, such as his attempts to know how to answer the well-meaning question, “How are you?”

At two years, he writes,

The here and now of him is like a small boat sailing from me on an ocean too wide and too deep to hold it back. Sometimes, in the ever-widening parting of the years I think I can hear him say, let go dad, I’m gone.

The changes in feelings are tracked in these pieces of writing while the pain and unutterable loss remains in every image he reaches for as a writer working at his craft.

The need to keep feeling

Nearly two and a half years beyond Hamish’s death McFadyen uncovers a diagnosis for his state of heart in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5): prolonged grief disorder.

The diagnosis means doctors can now ask insurance companies to make compensation payments to those suffering this absolutely normal reaction to catastrophic loss. It will also mean that doctors can prescribe medications engineered to relieve such suffering. Naltrexone, a drug for heroin withdrawal, is being tested for this very purpose.

McFadyen excoriates this deafness “to the murmurings of the soul”. His act of writing, his marking of time, his feelings expressed here are nothing like an expression of illness, nor themselves a manual for recovery or even a guide to healing. If grief is taken out of the landscape that is left after you have lost someone you love, he asks, “what is left?”

“To lament is to love even when the object of that love has gone”, he writes, and somehow this assertion of the need to keep feeling is a much more important reminder than identification of this experience (so common to all of us) as a disorder.

The later pages of The Ocean are given to poems in a short-lined free-verse style that swings between specific images of how the loss of Hamish comes at him again and again, with wider poems that take in nature, its cycles, seasons, and moods.

It is as though this loss has at first forced these poems from him, then with this gate opened, the poet in him has been let loose to write about nature. McFadyen is a surfer, too, so it is not surprising he turns to the ocean, to the seasons, to waves and the “lapping of each moment” as images of what he calls “the long leaving”.

In the final passage of this fine and honest book, more than three years after the death of Hamish, he tries to lay down his reasons for writing of his loss in this way. For him, “language is the bridge for one soul to cross to another.” He wants, in doing this, to extract the right words, the precise words, while remaining true to the unplanned “tidal surge of giving voice to thoughts in prose and poetry.”

Who knew that ashes would weigh the same in your arms as when you held him as a baby.

The companion book to The Ocean, The Centre of Zero , is a series of poems broken into sections under the headings Water, Light, Earth, Voices, Time.

The opening section is a paean, a love song, a lament, and a sometimes joyous expression of his passion for the waves, currents, the movement of light on rivers and oceans.

Later, within the section on Earth he writes of the plaque prepared for Hamish and “for the sun to kiss”. The poetry is simple, the feelings direct, and within this McFadyen holds the long ache of love for a child who was so vividly on his way into life that those who loved him cannot stop keeping him alive in their love.

These books stand as tributes to that young life lost and as manifestations of grief. They might not be what you want to read now but they might be what you will be grateful to read at a certain time.

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'She wanted to live a good life': Parents of Indian doctor raped and murdered on night shift

The rape and murder of a trainee doctor in India’s Kolkata city earlier this month has sparked massive outrage in the country, with tens of thousands of people protesting on the streets, demanding justice. BBC Hindi spoke to the doctor’s parents who remember their daughter as a clever, young woman who wanted to lead a good life and take care of her family.

All names and details of the family have been removed as Indian laws prohibit identifying a rape victim or her family.

"Please make sure dad takes his medicines on time. Don't worry about me."

This was the last thing the 31-year-old doctor said to her mother, hours before she was brutally assaulted in a hospital where she worked.

“The next day, we tried reaching her but the phone kept ringing," the mother told the BBC at their family home in a narrow alley, a few kilometres from Kolkata.

The same morning, the doctor’s partially-clothed body was discovered in the seminar hall, bearing extensive injuries. A hospital volunteer worker has been arrested in connection with the crime.

The incident has sparked massive outrage across the country, with protests in several major cities. At the weekend, doctors across hospitals in India observed a nation-wide strike called by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), with only emergency services available at major hospitals.

The family say they feel hollowed out by their loss.

“At the age of 62, all my dreams have been shattered," her father told the BBC.

Since their daughter's horrific murder, their house, located in a respectable neighbourhood, has become the focus of intense media scrutiny.

Behind a police barricade stand dozens of journalists and camera crew, hoping to capture the parents in case they step out.

A group of 10 to 15 police officers perpetually stand guard to ensure the cameras do not take photos of the victim's house.

The crime took place on the night of 9 August, when the woman, who was a junior doctor at the city's RG Kar Medical College, had gone to a seminar room to rest after a gruelling 36-hour shift.

Her parents remembered how the young doctor, their only child, was a passionate student who worked extremely hard to become a doctor.

“We come from a lower middle-class background and built everything on our own. When she was little, we struggled financially," said the father, who is a tailor.

The living room where he sat was cluttered with tools from his profession - a sewing machine, spools of thread and a heavy iron. There were scraps of fabrics scattered on the floor.

There were times when the family did not have money to even buy pomegranates, their daughter's favourite fruit, he continued.

"But she could never bring herself to ask for anything for herself."

“People would say, ‘You can’t make your daughter a doctor'. But my daughter proved everyone wrong and got admission in a government-run medical college," he added, breaking down. A relative tried to console him.

The mother recalled how her daughter would write in her diary every night before going to bed.

“She wrote that she wanted to win a gold medal for her medical degree. She wanted to lead a good life and take care of us too,” she said softly.

And she did.

The father, who is a high blood-pressure patient, said their daughter always made sure he took his medicines on time.

“Once I ran out of medicine and thought I’d just buy it the next day. But she found out, and even though it was around 10 or 11pm at night, she said no-one will eat until the medicine is here,” he said.

“That’s how she was - she never let me worry about anything."

Her mother listened intently, her hands repeatedly touching a gold bangle on her wrist - a bangle she had bought with her daughter.

The parents said their daughter’s marriage had almost been finalised. "But she would tell us not to worry and say she would continue to take care of all our expenses even after marriage," the father said.

As he spoke those words, the mother began to weep, her soft sobs echoing in the background.

Occasionally, her eyes would wander to the staircase, leading up to their daughter's room.

The door has remained shut since 10 August and the parents have not set foot there since the news of her death.

They say they still can't believe that something "so barbaric" could happen to their daughter at her workplace.

"The hospital should be a safe place," the father said.

Violence against women is a major issue in India - an average of 90 rapes a day were reported in 2022, according to government data.

The parents said their daughter’s death had brought back memories of a 2012 case when a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern was gang-raped on a moving bus in capital Delhi. Her injuries were fatal.

Following the assault - which made global headlines and led to weeks of protests - India tightened laws against sexual violence.

But reported cases of sexual assault have gone up and access to justice still remains a challenge for women.

Last week, thousands participated in a Reclaim the Night march held in Kolkata to demand safety for women across the country.

The doctor’s case has also put a spotlight on challenges faced by healthcare workers, who have demanded a thorough and impartial investigation into the murder and a federal law to protect them - especially women - at work.

Federal Health Minister JP Nadda has assured doctors that he will bring in strict measures to ensure better safety in their professional environments.

But for the parents of the doctor, it's too little too late.

“We want the harshest punishment for the culprit," the father said.

“Our state, our country and the whole world is asking for justice for our daughter."

Raped Indian doctor's colleague speaks of trauma and pain

Protest at indian railway station over alleged abuse of girls, india gang rape victim's death sparks outrage, the rape victim’s mum fighting for india’s daughters, what do delhi rape hangings mean for women.