"Becoming"

"I've been afraid of changing because I built my life around you."

For years, I thought that line from Landslide was about romantic love. The older I get, the more I realize it sounds like grief.

My dad was the person I built so much of myself around. He was the one person who seemed to understand me in a way that required no explanation. With him, I never felt like I had to earn love. It was simply there, steady and unquestioned. Yet somehow, I spent my life trying to prove myself to him anyway. Maybe that's what children do with the people they admire most.

He was a complicated man. He loved deeply and generously, but he also carried burdens that often seemed heavier than he could bear. Bipolar disorder was an invisible companion that followed him through much of his life. Sometimes it took him away from us for weeks or months at a time. He would come back, but never quite the same. It was as if each episode carried away a small piece of who he was, and eventually there wasn't much left of the father I remembered.

But I held on.

I kept him on a pedestal for years, preserving the version of him that lived in my childhood memories. The dad who read stories at bedtime. The dad who took us fishing and hiking. The dad who packed us into the car for vacations, spent long days at the beach, took us swimming at the lake, played football in the backyard, and sat beside us in movie theaters. Those memories were real. His love was real.

So was his illness.

For a long time, I treated those two truths like they couldn't exist in the same space. I wanted to protect the father I idolized. I wanted to believe that if I held onto him tightly enough, I wouldn't have to acknowledge the ways his illness changed him or the ways it hurt the people who loved him.

The truth is, I lost pieces of my dad long before he died.

His death was not the first goodbye. It was simply the final one.

Now I find myself standing in the place Stevie Nicks sings about—a place where change feels both necessary and terrifying. Not because I want to leave my father behind, but because moving forward means accepting that the person I was with him cannot be the person I am forever.

I've been afraid of changing because I built part of my life around him.

I built it around his approval, around his stories, around the belief that somewhere ahead of me was another conversation, another fishing trip, another chance to make him proud. Grief asks me to loosen my grip on those expectations. It asks me to become someone new.

The hardest part of losing a parent isn't just losing them. It's learning how to exist in a world where they no longer do.

I don't want to live in a world without my dad. But every day I wake up and do exactly that. And somehow, that's what living is.

Maybe that's what Landslide has always been about. Not loss itself, but the courage to keep becoming. The courage to let the old version of yourself fall away so another can take its place.

Because whether we're ready or not, life keeps moving. We lose people. We lose versions of ourselves. We watch the years pass and realize we're no longer the children we once were, even though part of us still feels like them.

And so we do the only thing we can.

We carry the love forward.

We keep the stories.

We honor the people who shaped us.

And then, with trembling hands and an aching heart, we learn how to climb the mountain without them.