12d • Journal Entries
The Conversation That Never Left Me
Lesson: Some moments shape a lifetime.
Living Louder Journal
Entry 10 – Reflections on My Father
There are certain moments in life that stay with you forever. Not because they were loud or dramatic in the moment, but because the meaning of them slowly unfolds over time. You don’t fully understand them when they happen. Sometimes it takes years before you realize what actually occurred.
I’ve been thinking about one of those moments recently.
It has to do with my father.
When I was younger our relationship had its ups and downs. After I grew out of my adolescent years, there was a certain amount of tension between us. I still loved him, but it could be difficult at times. Eventually my parents divorced when I was around eighteen years old. My father moved away to live with another woman, and suddenly the whole structure of the family changed.
For me that was devastating.
Not necessarily because the marriage ended. In truth, my parents had argued and fought quite a bit when I was younger. In some ways the divorce almost made sense given how often there was tension in the house.
But what changed was the responsibility.
Overnight I felt like I had become the man of the house. My mother was not mentally prepared to be a single parent and the depression that followed for her was something I was far too young and immature to understand. I didn’t know how to help. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even really understand what she was going through.
At eighteen you are still figuring out the world yourself.
Looking back now, I can see that period probably shaped more of my life than I realized at the time.
When I was very young there were also moments of volatility in the household. Most of the time life was normal. We took vacations, went skiing, celebrated holidays together, and did many of the things families typically do.
But every once in a while there were violent outbursts.
And back then discipline looked very different than it does today. When you misbehaved, you got hit. I was on the receiving end of that more than once. At the time it was simply the era we lived in. Today I can’t even fathom it. The idea of hitting your child feels almost incomprehensible to me now.
But that was the world back then.
After the divorce, my father moved to California. Seeing him required a long flight, so visits were rare. Occasionally I would spend a week with him during the summer. Most of our relationship existed through phone calls.
Despite the distance, those conversations were often good.
My father had a strong personality. He was intelligent, sharp, and had a kind of business-minded humor that kept conversations lively. He would talk about the world, about business, about things I should be thinking about. In many ways those conversations helped shape my understanding of life.
As time passed our relationship improved.
Like most father son relationships, it had its highs and lows, but there was a sense that we had grown back into enjoying each other’s company.
And then something happened that I still think about to this day.
Around 2013, I received a phone call from him while I was at my son’s basketball game.
He asked me if I could lend him ten thousand dollars.
At first I didn’t even understand what I was hearing.
My father had assets. He owned land. He had houses. At one point he had inherited close to a million dollars from my grandfather, which at that time was a very substantial amount of money.
So the question didn’t make sense.
When I asked why he needed the money, his wife told me he had developed a gambling problem and they were trying to get through a difficult period.
The whole situation felt surreal.
At that point in my own life I was building my business and struggling like most entrepreneurs do in the early years. I didn’t have ten thousand dollars sitting around that I could easily send.
I offered him my debit card instead so he could access what I had available if he needed it.
But he wanted the cash.
So I started asking practical questions. How were they budgeting? Why had things gotten so far behind financially?
Those questions were not received well.
His wife especially seemed offended. Suddenly I was the one who looked like the problem because I wasn’t simply handing over the money.
In my mind I had a strong suspicion that the money would disappear quickly into whatever gambling cycle had developed.
And that conversation changed everything.
The relationship fractured after that.
My father even acknowledged it during the conversation. He said that asking his children for money meant things had reached a point in his life that were deeply troubling.
Over time I came to understand more about what was happening.
He was slowly deteriorating from both Parkinson’s disease and mental illness. Looking back, I suspect the gambling problem had probably existed long before that moment but had been hidden or enabled by circumstances around him.
When people reach a stage in life where nobody can tell them no, things can spiral out of control.
Years later I went to see him during the final days of his life.
He was fading quickly.
When I arrived he could barely communicate. His responses felt dreamlike and distant. Even in that moment I could feel the space between us. Not hostility exactly, but an emotional distance that had never fully healed.
There was sadness there.
Perhaps he regretted the path things had taken. Perhaps he wished we had spent more time together. Perhaps I felt the same thing.
But when life reaches its final chapters, there isn’t much opportunity to resolve those questions.
You are left with the reality of what happened.
And the only real option is to cherish the good memories and accept that life is complicated.
Parents and children rarely have perfect relationships. There are misunderstandings, mistakes, missed opportunities.
But what this experience did teach me was something incredibly important.
I want my children to see me grow older with confidence and integrity. I want them to know that I’m handling my responsibilities and managing my life in a way that never places them in a position of confusion or uncertainty.
I want them to feel proud of the path I walked.
Because the one thing I never want them to experience is the quiet confusion that comes when you don’t fully understand what happened to someone you once looked up to.
Interpretation
This reflection is not really about money or even about gambling.
It is about the moment when a child suddenly sees their parent differently.
Parents occupy a unique place in our minds during childhood. They represent stability, authority, and certainty about how the world works. But as we grow older there comes a moment when we realize they are human beings with flaws, fears, and struggles of their own.
The phone call asking for money represented that moment.
It was the point where the image of the father as a stable provider collided with the reality of someone struggling with addiction, illness, and loss of control.
That realization can create emotional distance because the roles in the relationship begin to shift.
The child is no longer simply the child. In many ways they begin to see themselves as the responsible adult.
What makes these situations painful is that they often happen quietly. There is rarely a dramatic resolution. Instead the relationship slowly changes shape until both people are standing on opposite sides of an invisible line.
Yet even in difficult relationships, love and respect can still exist.
The story ultimately becomes less about what went wrong and more about what lessons we carry forward into our own lives.
Lessons From This Entry
Parents are human long before we realize it.
Unresolved moments can linger for decades.
Distance in families often grows quietly, not suddenly.
Understanding comes slowly with age.
The way we live today becomes the legacy our children inherit tomorrow.
👉 Read more on my personal Substack here: https://mattcoffy.substack.com/
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The Conversation That Never Left Me
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