1.

The summer my father died, I was lost in St. Louis. The city pulsed with fragments of other people’s lives—white laughter cracking over cackling Black barbecues, Uber drivers cursing at pedestrians, hot air balloons bloating against the sky. I wandered Forest Park on those endless afternoons, colliding with sweet-faced old ladies who clutched their purses tighter when I passed. At night, I let the basslines in crowded clubs thump against my ribs. Nigerian boys spun their older American wives under strobe lights; Latino men, bellies full of beer, swayed with their partners like ships in a storm. The city was generous with its chaos, anger, surprise, joy. But none of it was him.

2.

Nightclubs are the happiest places in the world. Not the pretentious ones with velvet ropes and bottle service, but the sticky-floored holes where strangers grind against each other, where sweat and perfume and spilled drinks blur the lines between bodies. In St. Louis, it was the only space where people smiled without hesitation. Here, you could trade names, trade partners, trade truths. The night wouldn’t remember. The city itself wore two faces—one for the sunlight, one for the shadows—but it didn’t bother to keep them separate. The underground leaked into the streets, a film of grime over everything. You’d step over broken glass, dodge reckless drivers, feel the city’s complicity in its own decay. It was beautiful because it was broken, and there was no shame in either.

3.

I met Mariana on Isla Verde, two years before my father died. It was a windy Thursday, the eve of his birthday in August. I had worked myself sick that year, and I came to the island chasing a peace I didn’t think really existed. My mind kept circling a conversation from decades earlier, when he’d confessed, then retracted, that he hadn’t wanted me at first. It had been my mother’s idea to keep me when I arrived as a fetus. I had brought it up again and again, like picking at a scab, waiting for a resolution that never came. That night, he tried to clarify, but the words rang hollow. The hurt outlasted the apology. By La Laguna, Mariana smoked beside me, her gaze fixed on some distant point in the water. “What brought you here?” she asked.

“Adventure,” I said. She smirked, as if she’d heard that lie before. She told me about the tourists, how they gawked at the women, fucked the local boys, left their empty bottles in the sand. “So,” she exhaled, “you here to fuck or talk?”

“Can I do both?”

“Yes,” she said. The next day, after wandering the narrow streets, salt air clinging to my skin, I called her. I wanted to see her again.

“That won’t be possible,” she said. “My husband is back.”

And just like that, she was gone.

4.

A year is long enough for everything to change. Your team wins the Super Bowl. Your father dies. You meet your soulmate; they reject you. You write two books; both are unpublishable. A friend falls in love, another wins a literary prize another overdoses. Another marries a stranger, gets divorced and has a baby. The city shifts, people vanish, but the losses grow teeth. They bite when you least expect it.

One day, I’ll vanish too, dissolve into someone else’s background noise. When it happens, I hope it is gentle. A quiet exit, barely a ripple.

5.

But, fuck, I made no photographs with my father.

6.

I thought writing this would help. That it would sand down the edges of grief, give me something solid to hold. Instead, it’s only shown me how memory frays, how what was once sharp now blurs at the edges. It doesn’t help that I haven’t gone back. That “home” is a moving target, split between Abeokuta and St. Louis. That I’m stuck negotiating between what was and what’s gone forever. That I still can’t grasp the finality of his death, how it hovers outside time, a stone skipping water before it sinks.

7.

The rest of my family watched him take his last breath. All I got was a phone call, my mother holding the receiver to his ear as he lay dying. And this guilt, vast and layered, unfolding like an origami nightmare. Every time I write about it, I find another crease.

8.

Guilt is a waste of time unless you learn how to turn it to good use, Anne Carson wrote. Maybe. But guilt speaks a language only the guilty understand. For months, while my father was sick, I ached to talk to him—and yet I let every call go to voicemail. When his name flashed on my screen, I’d mute it, convince myself I was right to. The rage I nursed could have been extinguished with one conversation. Instead, I exiled myself. On the rare occasions I answered, I lied: Too busy with school. His sighs, staticky and slow, told me he knew. Now, I carry that silence like a stone. Its edges cut deeper every year.

9.

Grief is relentless. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready. Victoria Chang called it multiple deaths, and she was right: it’s not one loss, but a thousand. A song. A stranger’s laugh. A professor’s offhand remark. Grief doesn’t ask permission. It feeds on your attempts to outrun it. People say, Let it in, but how? How do you surrender to something that threatens to swallow you whole? After he died, I buried myself in work. Classes, research, a second degree. I treated productivity like a shield. I argued in seminars, presented papers, as if rigor could glue me back together. My classmates side-eyed me. Take a break, they said. I nodded and kept going. A friend drove from Iowa to drag me out. He took me to a nightclub, hoping I’d unravel. On the dance floor, I was reckless, grabbing at people on the dancefloor. They recoiled. My friend apologized for me. On the walk home, he asked again: Are you okay?

“Peachy,” I said. My girlfriend flew in from Berlin. For the first time, her love felt suffocating. I wanted to be alone with my grief, to let it rot me in peace. But I couldn’t even cry. My tear ducts had sealed shut, as if my body refused to acknowledge the wound. We planned the funeral long-distance. My sister called: Dad didn’t want anyone to see his body. I agreed—what’s the point of staring at the shell of a person? But the next day, my brother video-called. The funeral was already happening. Onscreen, a white coffin. A shrill brass band. A wail of voices. I watched from thousands of miles away, my father’s burial reduced to pixels. A bizarre goodbye.

10.

What do you really know about your father? a friend asked recently. He’d noticed me pulling away—my short fuse, my exhaustion. He told me to write about him. He believed the essay form with its ceaseless meanderings might anchor me. When I began writing, the question gutted me. I’d never asked who my father was outside of being mine. I was the child who dug through his books, traced his margin notes with my fingers. He’d scold me when he caught me. You’re just like me, he’d say, but I never knew if that was true or just a story he told himself. Now, I see him in fragments. Like Montaigne wrote: framed of flaps and patches. Or Woolf’s silence that had lasted all these years. He was the sum of his absences, the gaps between his words, the pauses in his stories.

11.

I knew my father in glimpses. Not enough to fill the spaces, but enough to learn how to live with them.

About the Author:

Tolu Daniel is a Nigerian essayist. His debut collection of essays is upcoming in Spring 2027 by Cavan Kerry Press. He was recently awarded the 2025 Isele Nonfiction Prize and a Heartland Journalism Fellowship. He writes from St Louis Missouri.

*Feature image by Kevin Escate on Unsplash