Remembering My Father's Tears

This personal essay was originally posted to my Medium on June 15, 2025.

I have only ever seen my father cry twice. I have no doubt in my mind that, like all our parents, he must have cried more than those two times in his life, but I have only ever seen it twice. He did not cry on the days that my little brothers were born, at least not in sight of me. He did not cry at my high school or college graduation (based on the way he spoke to me, I assumed he was actually angry for me wasting his time, even though I hadn’t exactly asked him to come, but he would assert later that he was so proud of me).

No, those moments when my father shed tears were sudden to me, not because of the circumstances, but because I didn’t expect it. How could I?

I should paint a picture of my father. He’s a tall man, taller than mostly everyone I’ve ever met. He’s handsome too, I hate to admit it. He’s got a head like a cinderblock, but all the details are sculpted so carefully that you’d never think that was a detriment. He keeps his beard trimmed and neat, never allowing it to grow long. His hair is also kept very short, though sometimes, rarely, he’ll let it flow all the way down to his neck for special occasions (like spraying it blue for Autism Awareness Month). His hair is a dark brown, almost black, but that doesn’t matter because it is almost always tucked inside of one of his many Boston Red Sox caps. His beard is a much lighter brown, but the last time I saw him it had started to gain tasteful slivers of silver. He wears a lot of polyester polo shirts, in a lot of colors, it’s the most visually exciting thing about him. In that way, he’s not unlike every other custodian engineer I’ve ever met in the NYC Department of Education system (for years, maybe even now, he still called it the Board of Education, and I’ve picked up that habit). He’s got a barrel chest, a bit of a belly, but he’s got muscles and a lot of strength. He wears a lot of jeans.

The only time I can remember him ever wearing a suit was in the pictures he took of his private wedding ceremony with my stepmother. I was not invited to this ceremony, nor do I think I would have wanted to be.

Once, he tasted a special macaroni-&-cheese dish at the Hard Rock Cafe that completely changed him, he says it’s the best meal he’s ever had. They stopped serving that recipe at the end of an event. He’s spent years chasing after that recipe, trying to recreate it himself once that special item left the menu. I loved his mac-&-cheese, and his chase for that perfect recipe has been imbued into me.

My grandfather once told me, over the terrible TV audio playing during a Turner Classic Movies marathon, that I was all of the good things about my father. “Justin, you’re everything Bobby wants to be,” he told me. I didn’t understand it.

I was alone in the apartment. I had been living with my grandparents. My father had moved out of the apartment and moved into a different unit within the same building, above us on the same floor as my aunt. It was always exciting getting an excuse to “go up to 20” to spend time with him, my stepmother, and my brothers.

I was a freshman in high school, but it was summer break. My grandfather had passed away in January. My grandmother had spent most of the spring sick. This period of my life is a fog of war. Mostly, I can’t recall the major details. I remember getting into Doctor Who for the first time, because I needed to fill my free time with something, anything. My grandmother needed a walker and an oxygen tank. She hadn’t needed those things before March or April. Even now, the adjustment was strange. We were all taking care of her, but my aunt (her sister) and I were the ones taking care of her the most moment-by-moment. I remember getting into one of the only arguments I ever did with my aunt, God bless her soul, when she insisted that I needed to be there in case my grandmother got tangled up in the oxygen tubing. I shot back that I hadn’t slept at all the previous night because I was worried about that exact thing, and I’d simply overslept. I couldn’t help being tired, being exhausted. I can’t control when I fell asleep while sitting on my bed, or when I woke up. Grandma took priority, so we settled the issue and spent more time with her.

I wish I could remember any of the conversations I had with my grandmother in those last days. When I had gone through portions of this with my grandfather, those memories had stayed with me, they still do. But by the time my grandmother was sick, my brain refused to fit any more tragedy. I do remember one conversation, where I asked her if she was going to be okay. She told me “of course, Justin.” She never told me what was wrong with her. I didn’t find out until far later, and it doesn’t really matter. I think I knew at the time that she was lying, but I refused to accept it. My grandparents were the only people in my life that I knew for a fact I loved; I wouldn’t accept losing both of them in the space of a year.

I also remember, right before my grandmother’s final hospitalization, she told me that she’d left $20 on the breakfront in the kitchen for me to see Captain America: The First Avenger. I’d been really excited for that film when it was announced in 2010. I loved Captain America because it was my grandfather’s favorite superhero (even though I don’t think he’d read any Captain America comics since the 40s, but he loved that Cap had punched Hitler, that was all he needed). In retrospect, I had wanted to see the movie with my grandparents. That $20 for the movie was the last thing she ever gave me.

The last memory that sticks out in this fog is the final one. My grandmother was laying in a hospital bed, blue sheets on the bed and a yellow wall behind her. She had an oxygen mask on, tubes running into her veins. My grandfather had been comatose the last time I saw him, the kind where the doctors tell you “he can hear everything you’re saying” so that you can feel reassured that he’ll actually hear you say goodbye (no one even told me that; I’d told him I would see him again tomorrow, so my last words to my grandfather were a lie). She was completely lucid, though. She was talking to us casually, enjoying our company. I was telling her about the reading I had to do for school, about stories I wanted to write, about how much I’d liked Captain America. The conversation was easy and free-flowing. To me, it was just another hospital visit. Like the previous ones, she’d be back home by the weekend. My last words before I left her that day were that I’d see her on my next visit, and that I loved her.

Years later, my father told me (and years after this my stepmother would confirm) that some of my grandmother’s last words, in that hospital bed, were telling my father to treat me nicely. Supposedly she kept repeating “Justin’s a good boy” over and over, and she might’ve been crying. My father divulged this information to me one night, several years later, so that he could tell me that she was wrong. Though, to me, all that mattered was the confirmation that my grandmother really had known that she would die in that bed. The cruelty of my father’s words, meanwhile, was just another instance in an ever growing pile.

It was the next night after that visit, as I remember it, though it could have been two nights after. At about 2am, I was using the Playstation 3’s internet browser. Not for any real reason, I had a computer. I was just loading up websites and videos and high resolution images, trying to see what the limit of the browser was. It was an activity that I only ever did this one night, in a desperate attempt to amuse myself. It was the only other thing I could do besides stare at the single blue wall of my room while being completely immune to sleep. The Playstation was holding up very well under the strain of late 00s websites. I decided to really put it through its paces, opening up a link to a porn website that a friend had shared with me recently. It was one of those computer-destroying, unoptimized sites from that era that would just start autoplaying every video on every thumbnail that appeared, just all without audio. This was the limit. A few of the videos loaded, but not enough. I got bored waiting for it, so I pivoted to a site with a webcomic I was reading at the time.

About 40 seconds later, the door to my room opened. It was my father. He was already upset because the front door to the apartment had been unlocked, and he was angry at me for that being the case. I never got the chance to explain to him that I couldn’t sleep, had taken the garbage out at around midnight, and just forgotten to lock the door when I came back in. Suddenly, his face softened. He asked me to come out to the living room. He settled into the big chair in the corner, the one reserved for my grandfather, then my grandmother, and always special guests. I parked on the couch, as close to him as I could get, just the marbled end table separating us.

He had his Red Sox cap and jacket on. Throughout everything that followed, he never took them off. Usually, that would mean that he intended to go back out into the night. It only occurs to me now that I never knew why he was dressed like that. Maybe he’d been to the hospital, but someone would have told me if he was down there. I’d talked to my stepmother some hours earlier and as far as I knew he was with them. Perhaps he got the news and stood out in front of our building, or went for a drive. He could’ve been to hospital in the time between then and now. I’ve never thought to ask. But, at the time, it struck me more that he seemed distracted. So distracted that he wasn’t removing his cap or jacket like he often would.

He dropped the news: “Justin, Ma’s passed. She died tonight.”

That was when it happened. Here was this monolith of a man. Huge, strong, constantly angry, always seeking to antagonize everyone he ever met. He brought up a hand to his mouth, then to his eyes. The first sound that left his mouth was like the last gasp of a dying dog. Soon, it became steady, a constant, hiccuping hyperventilation. Sobbing in the darkness, illuminated only by the distant hallway light.

Here my father was reduced to his most base state: an only child now orphaned. If I’m right about my father’s age, he wasn’t even forty yet.

I reached out to take his hand. He squeezed it too tight, and I remember it hurt. His sobs filled the room, but I was silent. My tears had all come out when grandpa died. My body simply didn’t have the capacity to do it a second time, so soon. I can’t remember if I had any thoughts in that moment. Truly, I don’t think I did. I think I was just letting it wash over me. The news of the passing, the revelation that I’d seen her for the last time, the strange numbness in my palms, and the sobs of my father. More than anything, in that moment, I was worried about him. I wanted to be there for him.

I moved over to him. He hugged me tight, too tight. I had to tell him to let me go because I couldn’t breathe. Still, he held me. Either he realized what I said, or he decided to let me go. Regardless, we separated.

He pulled himself together. I was still numbly quiet.

“Do you want to come up to 20, or stay here?” he asked me.

“I’ll stay here,” I answered. He told me he loved me. I don’t remember if I said it back.

Since my senior year in high school, 2014, I had been making plans to move out. New York City is a cruel place to anyone trying to rent. Still, I was making plans or looking at apartments for as long as I could. Even though I knew escape was a long way away, I needed to be prepared. By 2018, freshly out of college, my bid for freedom was even more desperate.

My father was the driving motivator for this. I’d watched him regress rapidly since Ma passed. At his best, he was still a funny man who had decent taste in movies and shows, something we could at least agree on. At his average, he was a bigoted, racist, stereotypical conservative. At his worst, which was often with me, he was the true definition of unlivable. Talking to him was like traversing cracked ice. Any slightly wrong word or tone meant you’d be sucked into the icy abyss of his rage. He’d used to hit me when I was a kid, but that had stopped because it was now uncouth. I was still scared of him though, and he always threatened to hurt me again. My mind was always filled with images of him tightly pinching my tongue or getting his belt. If he thought I might upset him, he’d threatent to talk to my boss (his friend) and get me fired from my job. My only source of joy and freedom within the house was with the objects I would accumulate. My microphone, my books, my notebooks, my computer, my games. I’d filled my life with things that offered me escapism, while I plotted real escape. If he was upset with me, he would threaten to throw all of my stuff into the garbage.

On one occasion, in October 2017, he told me that he was going to throw out my computer desk and everything on it (my computer, my headphones, my microphone, half my book collection, several of my completely filled notebooks full of my early fiction and poetry, and more); in the process of making this threat, he threw my headphones across the room, shattering them. The reason for this infraction? I’d put my brother’s sweater on him instead of his jacket when I took him down to the bus, even though it was late October and the forecast said it would be in the high 60s-low 70s that day.

I remember breaking down into tears during this incident. Something about it just pushed me over the edge. He told me to clear off anything I cared about, because he would throw it all away as soon as he got home. I called a friend over, skipped both of my classes that day for the first and only time in my academic career, and he helped me move all of my stuff. All of the expensive electronics I packed into a duffle bag and brought to school to pass off to a friend. I only got most of it back, due to other troubles that came separately. I talked to my thesis mentor about why I didn’t have any work to show him that day. He put me in touch with a college counselor, whom I would see the rest of my senior year, in secret from my father (he said that the only people who needed therapy were “people who were weak” and “people who got their dicks touched by pedophiles”).

I stayed on campus until 8pm that day, the latest I could stay without being in a class. I came home. I went straight to bed. Rob was already asleep, and my desk was still there. Later, when I brought up this incident, both my father and stepmother would say that they had no recollection of this event. When I mentioned it to him just the day after, he told me that he had never said any of that.

It changed my relationship with Rob irreparably. For years, watching him slip into his strange new normal, I had struggled to describe what exactly it was that was wrong between us. That day, it all fell into place. To most people, Rob was a bit of a firebrand, an outrage manufacturer with an overbearingly loud enjoyment of country music (he had abandoned rock, pop, and rap for it sometime around 2015). To me, he was an abuser. Every day was filled with threats of violence, threats against my possessions. He would twist events of our shared past to manipulate me into thinking the way he thought. He asserted that his opinions were my opinions, his religion my religion, his bigotry shared. Our only refuge for safe conversation, movies and television, was encroached by his political obsessions. God forbid something starred someone who was black, he would never stop talking about how annoying he found it. He once told me that if I turned out to be gay, he would disown me.

Assuming my family ever reads this, this might be the first time they discover that I’ve been asexual and bi-romantic since I was in high school. I don’t think he will read this far, if he did find this.

Whenever I would make a minor mistake, it would be met with him insulting me, usually calling me a “retard” and, occasionally, a “pussy.”

He also hated that I wanted to be a writer for a living. I knew it would be a hard career, and I knew that I would have to work hard for it. But, no, Rob insisted that I was wasting his money on college to pursue a hobby. He wanted me to get a job in sanitation until I retired. Beyond that, he was convinced that college (which he had wanted me to go to) was going to turn me into a liberal leftist or something. Unfortunately, he was too blind and stupid to see that the only thing pushing me towards the left was him and his wanna-be redneck, city-hating, gun-obsessed, bigoted, racist rhetoric.

Sometimes, I wonder if we really were raised by the same people. My grandparents, his parents, had raised me too. They taught me to love, respect, and care for everyone. A defining memory of Ma was a neighbor coming to her when my grandpa was in the hospital.

“I’d offer you prayers, but I’m Buddhist,” the neighbor had said.

“My husband can use prayers from anyone right now, doesn’t matter who it comes from,” Ma had answered. I couldn’t imagine Rob acting the same way, not to save my life.

I could spend thousands of more words describing every day-in-day-out infraction my father committed. I could describe every time that Rob would invent a story in his own head of who I was or what I was doing and decided that it was truth, no matter how much I explained to him the details of the actual facts. I could describe every major punishment he inflicted, or threatened, over the most minor of situations. Attached to each and every one of these stories is the same repeated moment where he denies that any such thing happened.

No apology. No recompense. Never anything to make up for the things he did. The entire relationship rested on my shoulders.

That day in 2017 was the tipping point, when I finally saw the relationship laid out in swatches of black and white. This relationship was just never salvagable as long as we lived together.

Rob would read all of this and say I was a revisionist, painting myself out to be the good guy to his bad. I take no such credit. To counteract my father, I had spent years developing my trial-and-error system for interacting with him. I knew exactly which lies he would believe, and I told them as often as I needed to. My caveat to that is that he would claim I lied every time I told the truth, but he would always believe me when I told my special little lies. I made a lot of mistakes because I didn’t want to deal with Rob. Frankly, Rob’s never known the real me, only the version of my that he decided to hold onto. A figment can’t be the good guy, because the figment isn’t real.

In those eight years, I had hidden a lot from him. I had gone through entire relationships that he still doesn’t know about. I lost my virginity during a summer where he had taken the family on vacation, and I had asked to stay in NYC because I didn’t want to go with them. Though, my main memory from that period of time is actually that I got to see a concert in Manhattan that I was very excited about, with someone else that I would have an entire complicated relationship with soon after, all under my father’s nose.

My biggest sin, to my father, was that I was very open about trying to move out. In 2018, I was always visiting apartments, trying to worm my way into renting out my own place, or a room someone was offering. Comedically, because of my job at the time, I was still trying to stay in the neighborhood that my father lived in. It didn’t matter where I moved, I just needed to get out of the house. I needed to not live with him.

A few months after graduation, on the night of the worst snow storm and traffic jam I’ve ever experienced in New York City, my father broke the camel’s back. In a phone call, he told me, in a very simple and casual tone, that he and my stepmother were still looking to buy a house, and that he considered the money in my bank account to be his money. If he wanted to buy a house, and he needed an extra $10–40,000, he would make me take out the money to do it. This was, of course, all coming right after he’d found out I’d looked at another apartment and was scheduling another viewing.

I was angry. Angrier than I think I’ve ever been with him. It wasn’t until a few days later when, on a random Friday, it boiled over. I couldn’t pick the fight with my father, so I got on the train and went downtown, as far into Manhattan as I could go. I called a friend of mine. I’d been communicating with her since 2008, when we met in an online anime chatroom. We’d met a handful of times in the decade since, been together in a long-distance capacity, and done a few things too hot for TV when we had met. All of this without Rob knowing.

I was venting to her. I imagine what I must have looked like to the random people also wandering around at 10pm this deep downtown, in my heavy jacket and hat, hands white from the cold and the tight grip on my phone, as I ranted angrily about the things my father had done recently. Then and there, my friend offered me something surprising.

“My roommate is about to move out,” she said. “Do you want to move in with me?”

I remember feeling my heart going cold. She lived in Oregon. A straight line across the country as far from Rob as I could possibly get. It was the sweet temptation of real liberation, wrapped in the absolute dread of leaving the city I loved, filled with my friends, my memories, my favorite places.

At the time, I told her I needed to think about it. By mid-December, when she asked me for a concrete yes or no, I told her yes.

I would be leaving in mid-January, 2019. My departure date was the anniversary of my grandfather’s passing. I shelled out the cash for a U-Haul pod, the earliest one I could schedule was seven days before my plane ride, to deliver my stuff across the country, meaning I would have five days to pack up my stuff. I would fly by plane and arrive before my stuff did.

I had two friends come over to the apartment to help me begin my packing, mostly to clear out my closet of most of my clothes, jackets, and books. They met me at the apartment after my work shift that day. The rest of my family arrived in the middle of the packing, as I knew they would. My intention was to have witnesses present if Rob got violent. Even now, I consider the plan a success. I broke the news to him then and there that I was moving to Oregon in six days, and Rob, always self-conscious of his image, pretended to take it in stride.

The rest of the week would be filled with a remix of the familiar. Car rides to work would be a time for him to berate me and my stupid decision to move. He made me go to the bank and take out $4000, which he claimed was going to be a special fund to get me back to New York once I “failed out there and had to move back in.” More than anything, he railed against the way I was “trying to sneak” my moving process, as he simply ignored any time I mentioned to him that I wasn’t sneaking. In fact, I would insist to him, I had done everything with the intention of him finding out directly.

“Oh, come on, Justin. Enough with that shit,” was always the response, or something close to it.

It was in those final days when something changed. It was Friday, the last day I would have access to the pod. I’d invited my friend back over to help me move the final boxes, but first I had to make sure I’d fully packed everything. It was the late morning. I was folding up my clothes and talking to my little brother, who was playing on the Playstation 4. My littlest brother was watching cartoons in the living room, and my stepmother was in the shower. Rob’s voice reached me from his room, my name as a summons.

I took the tight corner into his bedroom, planted myself in the middle of the room. He was still laying across his bed in his usual morning wear, a shirt and shorts. He had his forearm draped across his eyes.

“What’s up?” I said.

A silence, uncharacteristic. Then, he started, the words somewhat strained. “It’s just that I’m thinking about the car rides. You know, talking about movies, the jokes. I’m gonna miss that.”

Then, there it was, that little choking sound. He kept on, but the words were pushing through the involuntary spasms of breath crying brings with it. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. We have fun. I love you. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t figure it out. Why are you leaving? What’s making you leave?”

He started to say something else, but a sob cut it off. Either he lacked the strength to continue or he’d decided that was all he had to say. Now, he was just crying, quietly and pathetically. Once again, I saw my father reduced. This time, I saw him for what he was: delusional. Then and now, I realized that this moment was the only time he expressed an emotion that I didn’t completely doubt. Through the years, every “I love you” he ever gave me was questionable, because he always managed to undercut it by showing me anything but love. For every opportunity, there was a punishment. For every gift, there was an emotional price. For every compliment, there were fifty insults. The threats, the antagonism, and the constant hate speech had no positive equivalent exchange.

Now? I believed every word he said. Worse, I believed that he believed it. To the very end, Rob truly thought that nothing was wrong between us. I want to live, briefly, in the awful world that Rob had constructed. What do I look like inside his head? What aspect of our relationship made him think that I would ever want to stay in the house with him? In his mind, was I just a smaller version of him? Despite all my efforts to show him otherwise? Even now, I almost wonder if maybe this was all a clever manipulation on his part, which speaks more than I could ever say about the state of our relationship.

I don’t know. I’ll never know. My father is a dreamer with no dreams. He has imagined a reality that he superimposes atop all things in his life. If it doesn’t fit what he has decided is true about himself or others, he shunts it aside. In this moment, I realized that he was never trying to change the way I remembered something or make me doubt the reality of what happened. He genuinely just believed that the events of the world around him played out the way he saw it. I shot back to that day in October 2017 and wondered if he remembered it, if at all, as him gently telling me to clear my desk and clean the house.

Rob lives in a fantasy land. He’s conjured it to protect himself from himself. The reason he was crying was because something about his fantasy was changing, and he couldn’t control it.

Rob’s sobbing washed over me, but I was quiet. Maybe I should’ve taken joy in seeing him so briefly weak. Instead, I didn’t care at all, numb to his pain. I needed to finish packing. I thought about telling him the truth, “I’m leaving because of you,” but I knew that then I’d be sucked into a conversation I didn’t have time to have. The answer would have either given him satisfaction or been something else he could reject from his fantasy, neither option desirable to me.

“Who knows?” I said, though I don’t think he heard me. Louder, I said, “I need to pack before Jake gets here.”

Wordlessly, he waved me away, a dismissal.

So, I left.

My father and I don’t talk anymore.

Once in Oregon, I did my best to maintain contact with him. I thought that, now that I was free from him, maybe our relationship would improve. The only improvement was that I no longer had to handle him every moment of my waking life. The years brought new stressors, unemployment, the pandemic, pandemic-induced unemployment, wild fires, and my new cat. Rob was no longer one of them. He still talked the same. He threatened me less, only because he couldn’t pretend like he would act on it.

I thought about him less and less, but every time I did it would bubble up all of the unresolved feelings.

During a completely random phone call, a completely normal conversation, in January 2022, the oil finally spilled over the lip. He was spouting something about COVID not being a real problem, and about teachers being stupid, all things I’d heard before. This time, I started yelling at him.

The last words I’ve said to him were: “You piece of shit. You stupid ass motherfucker.”

His last words to me were: “Okay, we’re done here.” He hung up.

I consulted with my abuelita, who advised me to call my stepmother, her daughter. The phone call with my stepmother was emotionally fraught. I described, in detail, my opinions about Rob. During this conversation, she confirmed the story about my grandmother’s death bed words. In the fog of emotion, one moment sticks to me. I was crying, at the end of a long paragraph of rant. My lungs were burning because I refused to take a breath. I screamed in my living room, “I fucking hate him!”, and my cat went scrambling away. I remember it hurt to breathe right after I said it. My throat was raw.

“I am just stunned,” was what my stepmother managed to say. When I’d asked her if Rob had even mentioned our little shouting match the day before, I was told that Rob said we’d had a “disagreement.” Nothing else.

In truth, I don’t hate Rob anymore. I barely think about him. I made one attempt to reach out, a last chance to hash out our disagreements, but I got no response. It seems he blocked my number, which I mutually returned. I imagine he goes about his days never addressing my existence to people who knew me. Maybe his fantasy land mentality has completely disappeared me from his world. All those years he paid to put me through school was actually just wire fraud stealing from his bank account. All of the photographs are just some dead boy.

Rob never seemed to realize that I lost the same people he lost, the real people who brought me up. It’s a reality he would rather erase. He’ll acknowledge that I lost my grandparents, but he believes his loss is more significant. He also doesn’t perceive that I lost something else through his choices. We never had a real relationship, he and I. I mourn a hypothetical relationship, not the one we had. I think of those car rides. When I wasn’t tempted to grab the wheel and drift us into a wall, I almost enjoyed them. It was the only thing he could conjure trying to convince me to stay, those car rides. I think about the mac-and-cheese recipes. I think about us all sitting together in the living room to watch the newest episode of whatever prestige drama we were all into at the time. I remember playing at the beach and the pool. He’d come around to my work, and I loved to watch him bullshit with the guys. Sometimes, he’d even listen to me when I bullshitted with the guys. Those are the memories of him I try to keep, but there’s very few of those moments, where I felt like we were equals, actually loving each other.

Sometimes, I see my father in the mirror, and I want to cut off my own face. Then, I remember, that Rob isn’t here anymore, and I feel better. Justin is not Rob, despite how much Rob would prefer he was.

To Rob, I only express that I hold no real ill will towards him anymore. I wish him a good, long, and happy life. Just so long as it’s a life far, far away from me.