The week began with coffee.

Or maybe it began with rain.

Walking out of my homestay quite early, the sky was hanging low over Saigon, dark enough to promise rain sooner rather than later.

I knew immediately the weather would decide where I drank my first coffee.

Not me.

The first heavy drops fell just as I ducked beneath the umbrella of a tiny street stand. Twenty thousand đồng. Less than a dollar. A cup of cà phê sữa đá and another reminder that some of life’s best decisions are made by the weather.

A woman abandoned her broom to serve me because everyone in the alley looks after one another’s customers. She laughed in disbelief when I ordered black coffee without sugar, repeating không đường over and over as though I couldn’t possibly mean it. But. I did.

Before dawn on Thursday morning, my phone vibrated.

A message from my former stepmother.

They had been divorced for decades.

“Sorry to tell you like this…”

My father had died.

I stared at the screen without moving.

No racing heartbeat.

No tears.

Only the strange stillness that sometimes arrives before emotion catches up with fact.

I closed my eyes, hoping sleep might return.

Instead, memories arrived.

I remember his laugh.

The glint in his blue eyes.

The laugh I inherited.

He laughed easily. Loudly. Sometimes until tears formed in the corners of his eyes.

I know I was responsible for many of those laughs and I’ll gladly own that for the rest of my time on earth.

For all the complicated years that followed—for the distance, the absences, the estrangement—that is not how I’m going to remember him.

I’m going to remember the beautiful laughing boy he once was.

The seventeen-year-old who had no idea what life would ask of him. The father I adored.

The young soldier who would find himself stationed in Germany and Korea.

The father who loved olives enough that I ate them too, despite not liking them.

The young man who sat beside me with a jar of Marshmallow Fluff and we’d eat spoonfuls as we watched tv, while my mom was out.

Memory is generous that way.

It edits.

Not by deceiving, but by deciding which moments deserve to survive.

Mine chose his mischievous smile.

R. I. P. Dad

July 2026