'I found my late dad's diary and his note inside changed my opinion about him'

Father-son relationships can often be difficult. Different generations brought up with separate ideas of manhood, showing emotions and how to communicate your own feelings, often clash and can often make those relationships feel distant or surface level - when deep down it is anything but.

Men of an older generation, in particular, can find it difficult to open up or show vulnerability, instead having that “stiff upper lip” mentality where they keep their head down and crack on no matter what they end up dealing with. One Reddit user, known as Recent-Diet4649, opened up about his relationship with his father, which, after his death, took a heartbreaking turn when he began to clear out his old things.

Posting on the r/Story forum, he wrote: “I lost my dad six years ago to a sudden heart attack. No warning. One minute he was working on the lawnmower, the next he was gone. He was 58.

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“He was a quiet man. The kind of dad who fixed things around the house, said ‘I love you’ in the form of ‘Did you check your oil?’, and always sat in the same chair at the dinner table. I grew up thinking I knew him, but only in the way you know someone from routine. Not depth.”

But that would all change when, hiding in a faded box alongside some old memories from his college days, was a selection of journals spanning 12 years of his life. Although his dad might not have been able to express his feelings, he didn’t have the same struggle when it came to writing.

After an internal debate about opening his dad's journal, curiosity got the better of him, and he began reading.

The first note, dating back to 1982, was a passage about the early days of his love life with the poster’s mum: “First time I told her I loved her today. Didn’t mean to. It just came out. She was laughing about something, how the microwave makes leftovers taste like 'sadness.' I looked at her and just... said it. She said it back, but I think I surprised her. Hell, I surprised myself."

The passage showed the poster a glimpse of his father he’d never seen before, even after his death.

He added: “Entry after entry, I found more: how scared he was when I was born premature. How he used to stand outside my door at night, listening to me breathe. He felt like he was failing as a provider after getting laid off in '98, even though he never let us see him crack.

“How proud he was when I got into college, but how he cried the night before I left because he didn't know how to say goodbye.”

But one note in particular stands out for being so heartbreaking, his father wrote: "He’ll never know it, but I stood outside his dorm after dropping him off. Just watched the window until his light turned on. That’s when I knew he was going to be okay. And I wasn’t."

The poster then revealed he sobbed in a way that he hadn’t since the funeral, with the revelation completely changing the way he viewed his dad.

He added: “My entire childhood, I thought my dad was distant. That he didn’t feel things deeply. But now I know he just carried them quietly. He loved so, so loudly, just not in the way I was listening for.”