A Letter from the Other Side

Is it enough to repair a fractured memory?

My father straddling a pipeline. Date uncertain.

I was eighteen in 1985 when my father died. Just old enough to know that the world was unfair, but too young to understand the full weight of what he carried. I was angry. His death came like a quiet punctuation—no final conversation, no warm closure, just the sudden stillness of a man I never really understood. What he left behind wasn’t inheritance or clarity, but a house filled with echoes: hurt people, quiet voices, heavy silences, and although you might think me cruel for admitting it, peace and calm.

My father was an alcoholic. Not the comical kind you see in films with slurred speeches and broken promises on repeat, but the loud kind. The kind that shows up to every family function only to throw everything into turmoil. Present in body, devilish in spirit. He’d sit at the table, nod at the conversation, smile in the right places, but the glaze in his eyes gave him away. He was calculating his entry into discussion, stirring the pot, throwing out an offensive statement or two to see if anyone would bite. In my family there was always a nibbler. I wonder what he was looking at—what haunted him, what had hurt him so, what held him at arm’s length from us, from me.

Ours was not an uncommon story, not in the Portuguese community I grew up in. (a caveat, if you will, before this article ignites the kind of anger I’ve come to expect . . . alcoholism exists in our community as it does in all other ethnic communities. It is a disease and we must let go of the shame stigma). Fathers, uncles . . . men with calloused hands and cracked hearts. Men who came to Canada carrying dreams in one suitcase and shame in another. Men who gave their bodies to the factories and their nights to the bottle. They loved us, we were told. But they just didn’t know how to show it. Or maybe they had loved once, in a way they couldn’t return to after immigration took the softness out of them.

I never really believed that excuse. It always felt like a lie we told ourselves to keep from falling apart. Until I found the letter.

It was tucked between old immigration documents in a box filled with photographs I inherited shortly after my mother passed. I’ve barely looked at it since but I was sorting through these photographs and digitizing them. (So many of these photographs have become the subject of my articles here on this platform). Grief has a way of collecting dust when no one’s looking. And then, like some ghost come to speak, there it was: a typed letter on official letterhead, dated March 23, 1957.

The letter was brief, written in clean military prose. It was a “Letter of Commendation and Appreciation”—a character reference, of sorts. In it, the Major Sergeant confirmed that my father had served as a local worker, a military driver, at the 1605th Transportation Squadron, stationed at the Lajes Field base in Terceira Island, Azores. It was his Portuguese military duty and assignment. Some men went to Africa but my father was assigned the US. airbase in Terceira. I learned my father’s badge number was 5691. I’m not sure why that meant so much to me to know this—a number attached to my father—but it somehow made me feel like he had been part of something greater than himself. The attached photographs of him on that base working with these other men, the smile on his young face, made me see a man filled with hope for something more, something bigger. And the letter indicates my father had “executing his duties of which are highly in a capable and efficient manner,” and then continues “an aggressive type of person for his sincere and courteous and efficient in performing his duties is seldom seen.” The letter goes on to describe my father’s “devotion to duty” and I thought to myself, What went wrong? What happened to his desire to build a better life for his future family in Canada? That’s duty! The idea of it all got caught in my throat.

I read it again and again. Each time, it felt like the letter was speaking not just to some faceless immigration officer, but to me. As if my father had left this behind for a reason. As if the man I had grown up loving and resenting all at once had been this other person, different—someone who dreamed, someone who believed.

For years, I had known only the version of him shaped by absence. The man who came home tired and angry. Who barked instead of spoke. Who turned inward when we needed him most. Who disappeared into the basement’s wine cellar or slipped away down the laneway to a friend’s garage for another drink. I saw the alcohol, the emotional distance, the passive silence. And then I saw the full swing of the pendulum, witnessed the anger and violence toward my mother and us all. We learned to fear him when he was at his worse, avoid him whenever we could. My mother’s safety was what me and my sister were most concerned about; quite the burden for us both. But I saw a man I could never reach. What I didn’t see—what I had never imagined—was the version of him before all that. The man my family said was charming and funny and sociable, the man who I like to think stood at the edge of the world, in a wind-swept corner of the Azores, looking out toward a new country with his heart full of hope.

That letter revealed something I had never thought to look for: a man in-between. In-between the old world and the new, in-between who he was and who he hoped to be. He must have held that letter close. Maybe he kept it for the days when he needed to remember why he left. Or maybe, over time, it became just another yellowing page in a box full of lost chances.

It’s easy to forget that our parents were once young. That they had aspirations that didn’t begin and end with survival. For many in our community, coming to Canada meant sacrifice—yes—but also promise. A future. A sense of purpose. But what happens when that promise falls short? When your degree doesn’t translate, your accent marks you, and your work is measured by hours, not passion? What happens when your identity is swallowed whole by the need to provide?

Maybe my father thought the hard work would be enough. That building a life brick by brick would make up for what he lost in tenderness. Maybe he thought fatherhood would just come to him naturally, setting like cement setting on its own. But it doesn’t work that way. The truth is, that fractured relationship changed me. Strangely, in my own personal relationships, I became overt with my affection toward my wife, my children, my friends. I’m still slow to trust. I never mistook emotional detachment for strength. His silence echoed in my relationships, his absence filled the rooms he never entered. I carried him in the shape of my defenses, but with Father’s Day approaching and this letter newly discovered, I think I’ll have some more poignant thoughts to share with him when I visit his grave to light a candle and lay some flowers. Perhaps I’ll even say the words out loud, I think I get it.

And yet, this letter—it softened something. It didn’t erase the pain, didn’t mend the years of broken connection, but it offered a lens I hadn’t considered. A before.

There were a couple of photos tucked inside that letter. My father, in his early twenties, standing near the hangars at the base, leaning against a car. He’s dressed impeccably, his head topped by a fedora, eyes squinting toward the horizon, smiling. He looks calm. Determined. Like a man trying to become more than what he was born into. A man trying to claim something for himself—something for us.

Manuel Rebelo de Sa - my father - far left. Outside Lajes Air Force Base

We never got to have that final conversation. He died before I ever got the chance to figure out what he had wanted, what he had hoped for, what he had lost. But I like to think that if I had, he might have pointed to that letter. Not as a justification, but as a beginning. A starting place. A way to say: I tried.

That matters now. More than I expected it to. I’ve started to see him as a man shaped by his time, his choices, and his pain—not just the father who failed me. I don’t know if that’s forgiveness. Maybe it’s just understanding. Or maybe that’s all forgiveness really is: the ability to hold both truth and tenderness in the same hand. Perhaps it’s the reason I want my three boys to see me—really see me—with all my flaws and with the limitless amount of love and pain and joy and frustration and hope they provide me.

In the end, his drinking stopped him from opening up. We never talked about what the move to Canada had cost him. Maybe he didn’t know how. Or maybe he thought he had more time. But through that letter, I caught a glimpse of who he wanted to be. And in that glimpse, something settled inside me. I think I’ll always carry the scars of our fractured bond. But I think with Father’s Day approaching and now that I’m a father of three remarkable young men, that letter now takes on a brighter meaning. A piece of paper, fragile and fading, but filled with the idea of a man I’m only just beginning to understand.

And maybe that’s the beginning of something, too.