Two days ago, my father passed away.
Yesterday, I looked at my phone and saw his name still sitting there in my Favorites, right where it has always been. One tap away. The contact was still there. The number was still active. And yet everything about it had changed.
There was something about that moment that reset my sense of what’s real. The permanence I assumed revealed itself as only temporary.
My father (“SK,” as he was known) was extraordinary in ways that revealed themselves immediately. He had a thousand friends. He seemed to know everyone, and even when he didn’t quite remember a name, he remembered how to make someone feel seen. He was charming without being effusive, thoughtful without being performative, and somehow larger than life without ever trying to be. More than anything, he chose to see the good in people.. not occasionally, but as a way-of-being. He moved through life by always saying yes.
Standing there looking at his name on my phone, I realized how much of life is lived assuming there will be another moment.
And what struck me just as strongly was this: our relationship overflowed with love. We said what needed to be said. We lived it honestly and openly with each other. Even though his passing was sudden, there isn’t a backlog of unspoken things sitting on my chest. There’s immense sadness, yes… but not an once of regret. That completeness of our relationship has been sitting with me.
For the past few months I’ve been writing about identity, hesitation, alignment… about stepping more fully into what feels true with your life and your career. I didn’t realize until this week that there’s a quiet thread running through all of it. The risk isn’t only that you choose the wrong path. The deeper risk is that you postpone the right one, assuming you’ll circle back to it later.
Living “fully” doesn’t eliminate loss. But it does eliminate a different kind of loss. It’s that kind that comes from leaving things unsaid, from standing just outside the version of yourself you already know you’re meant to be, from waiting for a “better” moment that may never arrive.
Sometimes hesitation isn’t about fear at all. It’s about assuming you still have time to live more fully later.
“Your 50” is a 50-week reflection series about realigning, activating, and expressing what comes next.