Recently, I pulled out my birth certificate. Not because I needed it. Not because I was applying for anything. Not because I was planning a trip. I found myself staring at it, because my dad is gone.
Since losing him, I have discovered that grief has a way of sending you looking for things you never expected to need. Old photographs. Handwritten notes. Birthday cards. Ticket stubs. Family recipes.
And apparently, birth certificates.
At first, I noticed the obvious details. I was born on July 23, 1982, at 8:39 PM in Danbury, Connecticut. I weighed 8 pounds, 13 ounces. I laughed when I saw that. Apparently, I entered the world making a statement.
Then my eyes drifted down to the line that listed my parents. My mother was twenty-five years old. My father was forty-one. Forty-one.
I sat there for a long time staring at that number. Because when I think about my dad now, I picture the final chapter. I picture hospital rooms. Hospice. Wheelchairs. The gradual losses that came with age and illness.
But my birth certificate reminded me of something I had forgotten. Before he was my elderly father, he was a young man. A forty-one-year-old dad holding his newborn daughter for the very first time.
A man with hopes and dreams for a little girl whose future he could not possibly imagine.
He could not have known I would travel to more than seventy countries. He could not have known I would live in China and learn Mandarin. He could not have known I would become a Chinese Medicine Doctor, a writer, a photographer, a wife, and a mother. He could not have known there would one day be a little boy named Joaquín running through our lives and stealing all our hearts. He could not have known I would spend years collecting stories from around the world.
But somehow, he helped make all of it possible. The older I get, the more I realize that parents shape us in ways we do not always recognize until much later:
- My dad taught me curiosity.
- He taught me how to talk to strangers.
- He taught me to collect experiences instead of things.
- He taught me that the best stories are often found in unexpected places.
Looking back, I can see pieces of him woven throughout every chapter of my life. In my travels. In my writing. In my love of people. In my ability to find beauty even when life feels impossibly hard.
Recently, I had my birth chart read using the exact information from that birth certificate.
The astrologer described me as a storyteller, a traveler, a seeker, and someone who finds meaning through experience. Whether astrology is real or not is almost beside the point. Because what struck me most was not the chart itself.
It was the realization that my life has become exactly what my dad encouraged from the very beginning. A life built on curiosity. A life built on connection. A life built on stories.
The birth certificate did not tell me anything I did not already know. It did not reveal some great secret.
But it did give me something unexpected. Perspective. For a moment, I stopped looking backward at the end of my father’s life. Instead, I looked all the way back to the beginning of mine.
And there, in black ink on an old piece of paper, was proof that our story started long before either of us knew where it would lead.
Grief often tricks us into focusing on endings. But sometimes healing comes from remembering beginnings. And sometimes all it takes is an old birth certificate to remind you that every love story has a first chapter.
Even the ones that never truly end.
