"My dad turned 67 this year. He spent three decades running a small business, and before that he spent a decade learning how to run a small business by watching his own father fail at one. He coached my brother's baseball team for six consecutive seasons. He rewired the kitchen when the electrician quoted too high. He drove four hours round-trip to pick up my cousin from a situation nobody in the family talks about anymore. He was the guy everyone called."
"Last Thanksgiving, I called him at around 2 PM. He picked up on the first ring. Not the second. Not the third. The first. And there was something in his voice - not sadness exactly, more like a man who'd been sitting in a quiet room for a while and had almost forgotten what his own voice sounded like when aimed at another person."
""Just watching the game," he said. But I could tell the TV wasn't on. Here's the thing: my dad isn't depressed. He's not sick. He's not suffering from some dramatic, diagnosable crisis that would mobilize the family group chat. He's just... sitting there. In a house he maintained for forty years, surrounded by the evidence of everything he built, wondering when someone's going to call him for a reason other than a leaky faucet or a tax question."
A lifetime of being the family fixer and community go-to created a clear role and steady stream of demands. Decades of running a small business and handling household and family needs filled days and kept connections constant. As children, neighbors, and friends drift away or grow busy, the calls and obligations decline gradually. The emptiness that remains is not clinical illness but a loss of role and purpose. The person stays in a familiar house surrounded by accomplishments yet waits for calls that are increasingly limited to practical problems rather than companionship.
Read at Silicon Canals
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