On marriage, grief, family, ambition, presence, and deciding when to stop looking backward.
I got married a few weeks ago.
The period immediately after the wedding has been more emotionally and spiritually interesting than I expected. After months of planning, then one very intense day, everything suddenly becomes quiet. You come home. There are cards, gifts, paperwork, photos, things around the house, financial decisions, people to thank, and a thousand loose ends. At the same time, you are supposed to begin whatever comes next.
Part of that process for me has been trying to close some older loose ends too.
My dad, Tore, died two years ago. Our relationship was complicated. There was a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot we never had the chance to resolve. So I wrote him a letter.
This is not the full letter. The original is longer and contains details that belong to me, my family, and the people involved. I wrote that version for him, not for the internet. What follows is an edited version of the same letter, with some private details removed.
For Tore
September 3, 2026
Dad,
I’m sorry you haven’t heard me call you that in 18 years or so, but for this (letter), it feels right.
Quick life update: I got married. Gretchen is my wife now. She is an Udahl.
The last time we talked, I asked if you had any advice, and you told me to take care of Gretchen. In other words, don’t mess it up. I proposed to her at Castle Hill, in front of the lighthouse, with probably the best sunset I’ve ever seen. A few weeks ago, we got married.
We just got back from a few days away after the wedding, and now real life is starting again. There are cards and gifts to organize, paperwork, photos everywhere, things around the house, accounts and plans to sort out, people to thank, and a thousand loose ends. It is exciting, but stressful. Turns out becoming the person you want to be and building the life you want takes a lot longer than making a good income and getting married. Also, weddings are really expensive.
I’ve been thinking about you more the last few days. Not because I want to sit around and be sad. I don’t really have time for that right now. There is too much to do and too much I want to build. I’ve spent a lot of the last two years reflecting for both of us. I promise you that.
The wedding was one of the best days of my life. I was stressed, nervous and emotional leading up to it, but when the day came, all of it disappeared. I was present. It reminded me of hockey on game day, when everything else gets drowned out because there is only one thing to do. That feeling of complete focus and flow may have been my favorite part.
I’ve come to learn that there are very few times in life when so many of the people you love, admire and respect are together in one place. Looking around and realizing it was actually happening was humbling. At moments I could almost see my future self looking back at the day through my own memories.
I didn’t feel your absence the way I thought I might, and I think that’s a good thing. There was one moment while everyone was getting ready when it became obvious. Both families were around. Some of my oldest friends were with me. Everyone was moving around getting ready, and you were really the only person missing. I didn’t need to stop or make some ceremony out of it. I knew.
I think you would have enjoyed the wedding. Maybe not the social obligation or small talk, but the energy and aesthetic. It was executed well.
You contributed to it too. Some of the money you left behind helped us pay for the wedding. Thank you. Money was always something you thought about carefully, so there is something fitting about part of what you left behind helping bring both families together for that day.
Your family was represented too. We invited everyone, not because I felt obligated to, but because I wanted them there. I especially appreciate the people who made the effort to come and who have been welcoming and open with me. They have also helped me piece together a lot of the family history I never cared enough about when I was younger.
I care now.
I’m sorry to tell you that Bestemor, your mother Grete, died in April 2025. I went to Norway for the funeral. It wasn’t convenient. I was in the middle of work, it cost money, and I hadn’t seen many of those people in more than a decade, but I went. I saw her body, served as a pallbearer at her funeral and visited your father’s grave.
Being asked to serve as a pallbearer meant more to me than I expected. You were her oldest son. I am your oldest and only son. I had been away for years, but somehow I still had a place in that family. Nobody needed to announce it or explain it. They treated me like I belonged because I did.
Your death and that trip changed how seriously I take family. Life in Norway feels different. The history feels closer. Family feels less disposable. People seem to have a different relationship with time, community and what deserves their attention.
With help from the family, I’ve traced the Udahl line back eight generations. Names that would have meant nothing to me a few years ago now feel like pieces of something much larger. At the welcome dinner before our wedding, I was given your grandfather’s watch. We believe his father gave it to him. It’s beautiful.
I also have your red Swiss Army knife, the one I remember you having forever, and I actually use it from time to time. I even bought a small one of my own when I was in Switzerland. Those objects matter to me. Not because they’re worth a lot of money, but because they create continuity. Something you used becomes something I use. Something someone in our family carried generations ago ends up in my hands. It makes time tangible.
And now Gretchen is Gretchen Udahl. What a beautiful name. German and Norwegian. The irony.
In sports they always say to play for the name on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back. The way I see it, Udahl is the name on the front.
I take that seriously. Not because the name makes us better than anybody. It doesn’t. A name only means something because of the people carrying it. I want ours associated with people who are kind, competent, curious and responsible. People who are useful, take care of others, can be trusted and contribute something. People who are respected, appreciated and loved. Eventually, I want us to be missed because our presence mattered.
I also see more of you now. Humans have a negativity bias, so naturally a lot of the bad memories stayed vivid. You used to make me really mad. Since you died, you’ve mostly just made me sad, but not in a bad way.
I haven’t rewritten what happened. There were difficult years. Alcohol was part of it. Our relationship fractured, and by the time I was becoming an adult, I was already somewhere else doing my own thing. But I got to see the good and bad.
After you died, something stood out to me: people respected you. They honored you. Maybe death changes how people talk about someone, but I don’t think that explains all of it. I remember how many people from the post office came to your funeral. One younger guy was particularly upset. I was too numb at the time to even catch his name, but it was obvious you meant something to him. I hope he’s doing well.
When I was younger, I looked at the house and resented you for accepting the way things were. The clutter. The chaos. Things that never seemed to get resolved. Sometimes I thought you were lazy or had simply stopped caring.
I didn’t have enough context.
You left Norway, crossed an ocean, went to college and played soccer. You fell in love here, went to graduate school at Northeastern, worked at State Street for almost twenty years, and supported three kids and a household through the financial crisis and housing collapse. Then you got laid off, adapted, worked other jobs and eventually became a mailman.
At the time, I thought that was beneath someone with your intelligence. I don’t anymore. You did what you needed to do. There’s dignity in that.
There’s also a lot I simply took for granted. Every Sunday you went grocery shopping. You knew what everyone needed, found the deals, kept the house stocked and understood the budget required to keep everything moving. You maintained the lawn, put up fences, took down trees and fixed things. You and your dad built the playhouse, the shed, the stairs and countless other things I probably walked past a thousand times without ever wondering who made them.
Now I’m trying to maintain my own home. After you died, I tried mounting a TV in our apartment. I had the TV, the mount and the tools. Hours later I was staring at a wall covered in measurements trying to get the thing centered and level. This summer I stained our deck. My God, that was frustrating.
Little things.
Then I remember you were doing projects on a completely different scale. You were taking down trees while you had cancer. Things don’t magically stay nice. Someone has to notice, care and do the work. You did a lot of that.
So thank you, for the things I noticed and especially the things I didn’t. Thank you for driving me an almost incomprehensible number of miles between soccer, baseball, hockey, school, practices, games and tournaments. You spent countless hours doing things that probably weren’t how you wanted to spend your day because they mattered to your kids.
I remember more than I sometimes give myself credit for. I remember going to New England Revolution games with you at the old Foxboro Stadium. I remember Bird Park, collecting things and making maps. I remember camping, sledding and skiing. I remember a lot.
Those ordinary moments are more valuable to me now than they were while they were happening.
When I become a dad, I want to be present enough to recognize that. There will always be work, money, schedules, stress and a hundred other things competing for attention, but the small moments may eventually become the memories that survive everything else.
I don’t want to miss them.
Your death is what made me start tracking something called Life in Weeks. It is a simple visual of a human lifespan, with each box representing one week. Seeing an entire life laid out on one page is humbling. I can look at my age, look at where you were at the same point, and see both how much time there may still be and how finite it actually is.
It isn’t a YOLO thing. Almost the opposite. Quantifying time makes me want to use it better. There can be a lot of it if you are fortunate, but there is never an unlimited amount.
The house still bothers me. A lot of what you built and maintained has deteriorated. But I haven’t forgotten about it.
Toward the end, you and I actually did some good work there together. When I moved home, we attacked a basement that had become almost unusable. We emptied it, cleaned it, painted, did the carpets and turned it into somewhere I could work.
At the time, I thought we were cleaning a house.
Now I realize you and I were doing something together.
I wish I had appreciated that more while it was happening.
The family has changed a lot. Your oldest daughter got married, and I walked her down the aisle. I never expected that responsibility to fall to me, but I was honored to do it. There are nieces and nephews now. I’m a godfather.
Also, your truck is safe. Kristine has officially commandeered it, quietly and politely, like a ninja. I think you’d find that funny.
I’m not a father yet, but I can already imagine how much I’ll care about my kids: whether they’re healthy, happy, using their abilities, who their friends are, what they’re interested in and whether they’re becoming people they respect. It makes me wonder what you saw when you looked at me.
I’ve always had an enormous internal drive. I took sports incredibly seriously. I hated soccer even though you coached me, but I loved hockey and wanted to be excellent. Then I left home young. Private school. British Columbia. Hockey. College. Work. Travel.
I became extremely self-directed and spent a long time looking almost exclusively at whatever was directly in front of me. Somewhere in that process, I stopped developing relationships with some of the people who mattered most.
You were one of them.
I can’t change that now, but I can make sure I don’t repeat it.
Losing you also forced me to accept something difficult: there are parts of life nobody else can carry for you. People can love you, support you and sacrifice for you, but eventually you still have to make the decisions and live the life yourself.
When you died, I lost one of the very few people in the world I knew would do essentially anything for me. That was a wake-up call. It also meant accepting that I wasn’t going to get any more mentoring, guidance or help from you. Not the kind I could find from friends, bosses, books or other people. The kind that only my father could give me.
You were the only person qualified to give me that, and suddenly you were gone.
Eventually I had to stop waiting for answers and take ownership of my own life.
Which brings me back to that last conversation.
I asked you for advice, and you told me to take care of Gretchen. You loved her, which stood out because you didn’t exactly open yourself up to everybody. You saw how caring and selfless she was and how much she added to my life.
I’ve probably overanalyzed your words, but I think what you meant was pretty simple: don’t lose this. Take care of her. Take care of the relationship. Don’t assume something important will maintain itself.
I won’t.
You also asked me who my friends were. I told you Tim, and you told me to stay in touch with my friends. Tim stood next to me at the wedding as my best man.
You were right about that too.
A lot has happened since you’ve been gone. I’ve traveled a lot. More than 200,000 miles, with what probably amounts to weeks of my life in the sky. I’ve been to Hong Kong, London, Norway, Switzerland and plenty of other places. I caught a 434-pound, 92-inch tuna. There have been a lot of moments that would have made pretty good phone calls home.
Technology is one of the things I really wish I could update you on. I don’t know if you remember, but I showed you ChatGPT when it first came out and we played around with it and had fun. It was a simple chatbot at the time. I was one of the first few thousand people using it.
It reached around a million users within days, around 100 million monthly users within a couple of months, and now roughly a billion people use it every week. That little thing I showed you is changing the world. In my opinion, it isn’t slowing down. A lot of the science fiction stuff we used to imagine is becoming normal life.
I could write an entire letter about that alone, so I’ll spare you the full digression. What I’ll say is this: everything is connected. There are layers beneath layers, foundations beneath each tier, with energy somewhere near the bottom of all of it. I plan to pay attention to what is happening and make the most of the opportunities in front of me.
You’d get a kick out of the Tesla too. You know how I used to rave about the self-driving stuff. Gretchen and I got the new Model Y last April, and it is everything I thought it could become and more. The car handles basically all of my driving now, and it keeps improving.
I barely drive.
You would be amazed by it.
One of the last things I remember being excited to tell you was that I had gotten a bonus worth a huge portion of what I had previously made in an entire year. At the time, it felt enormous. I was proud, and I wanted to tell you.
Less than three years later, I was making roughly ten times what I had made when I first left school. Eventually I reached a point where I willingly walked away from more guaranteed money than I once could have imagined earning.
That probably sounds strange compared with how excited I was about that first bonus, but the numbers eventually became big enough for me to realize they weren’t answering the question I thought they were.
Money matters. Financial security matters. Being compensated fairly matters. But money is not the thing you actually own.
For a while I thought the answer was time. Money buys time, so time must be the scarce resource. I don’t think that’s quite right either. You can have time and waste it.
The thing you actually own is your attention. Your presence. The current moment.
You can spend the present regretting the past or worrying about the future, but while you’re doing either of those things, you aren’t actually here. And if you’re never here, what exactly are you doing?
That doesn’t mean I’ve lost my ambition. Not even close. I still want to build. I want to make money. I want to create things. I want to push myself and see what I’m capable of. I want to give my family opportunities I didn’t have and improve the quality of life for the people around me.
The difference is that I don’t want to sacrifice the experience of living in pursuit of some future point where I finally give myself permission to live. That was part of why I walked away from work.
What I bought back was not just time. It was the ability to decide what deserves my attention.
The day you died affected me more than I understood at the time. We thought you were coming home for hospice and that we had weeks. That night, you barely had any energy, but somehow you worked yourself out of bed and sat on the edge of it with me.
We talked.
That was our last conversation.
I had a work trip the next day. You told me to go, so I went. I was in Florida for less than 24 hours when nobody was responding to me in the middle of the night. I opened the Ring camera and saw the hospice people carrying you out of the house.
I came home.
Some of that has caught up with me in strange places since, especially airplanes. There were trips to Asia where I was already many hours into traveling, with many more to go, sitting there wondering what I was doing. On one of the last trips, Gretchen had hidden a note in my bag. I had already resigned and didn’t want to go, but I went because I believed finishing properly and introducing the new team was the right thing to do.
I opened her note somewhere over the world and completely lost it.
Those experiences forced me to ask bigger questions. I don’t have religious answers. I don’t know how the universe works, and I don’t know what happens after we die.
But I’m curious.
I think, meditate, question things and try to connect dots. You sometimes interpreted my pushing back or playing devil’s advocate as me trying to be difficult or thinking I knew better. Maybe sometimes I was, but mostly I’ve always wanted to understand. I want to know why, get to the bottom of something and build the bigger picture. I like conversations where people can challenge each other without somebody needing to win.
I wish you and I had eventually gotten to know each other that way.
Maybe we would have.
That last night, you also started to talk about everything that had happened between us. You said something like, “There’s just too much.” I stopped you. I told you I knew, that it was okay, and that we didn’t need to solve the world’s problems right then.
I still think about that.
If I could sit beside you on that bed for another five minutes, I’d tell you the same thing. It’s okay. Whatever you thought you needed to explain, apologize for or reconcile, it’s okay.
I saw the good and bad. People are complicated. It’s easy to reduce somebody to the worst period of their life, their biggest weakness, their job, their addiction or their mistakes.
A human life is bigger than that.
You struggled. You adapted. You succeeded. You failed. You built things and damaged things. You took care of people and sometimes needed people to take care of you.
You were a person.
So am I.
I’m entering a different phase now. I’m married. I’m getting organized. I’m trying to become healthier, figure out what I want to build, make our home better, and become a better husband, brother, son, friend and eventually father.
And I’m done spending unlimited energy trying to untangle everything behind me.
Sometimes you have to cut the knot.
Alexander didn’t untangle the Gordian knot. He cut it.
I don’t need a perfect explanation for our relationship. I don’t need to understand every decision you made. I don’t need the past to become something it wasn’t. I can acknowledge it, learn from it, appreciate it and move.
I have agency over what happens next.
That’s what legacy means to me.
The strange thing about spending so much time looking backward through the family tree is that it has made me think much further forward. Someday Gretchen and I may have kids. Maybe they’ll have kids. Two or three generations from now, somebody related to me may have no idea who I was.
That doesn’t bother me.
What matters is whether they are living inside something that I helped make better.
I want each generation to inherit more than the one before it, and I don’t just mean money. Better relationships. More curiosity. More opportunity. More stability. Better health. More freedom. More perspective.
I want a family where people actually know each other, show up, travel and experience things, ask difficult questions, disagree without destroying relationships, and take responsibility for themselves without believing they have to do everything alone.
I want to create environments where people can flourish.
And when my kids eventually ask about their grandfather, I’ll tell them about you. I’ll tell them you were quiet, reserved and very funny. That you were probably misunderstood. That you kept a lot of the infrastructure of our lives operating without much recognition and generally did what needed to be done whether you felt like doing it or not.
I’ll tell them you struggled too.
I’m not going to turn you into a saint because you died, and I’m not going to reduce you to your worst years. I’ll tell them about Norway. I’ll show them the watch. Maybe they’ll use your Swiss Army knife. I’ll tell them about Revolution games at the old Foxboro Stadium, Bird Park, camping and the little playhouse you and your father built.
And I’ll tell them that losing you is part of the reason their dad takes family, time and presence so seriously.
We aren’t responsible for everything that happened before us, but we are responsible for what we do with it. I can take the best of you, learn from the rest, add what I learn myself and hand something better to whoever comes next.
That’s what I intend to do.
I’ll take pride in the Udahl name without taking myself too seriously. I’ll be kind, useful and curious. I’ll take the things that matter seriously enough to try to do them well. I’ll take care of Gretchen, stay connected to my friends and family, go back to Norway, keep learning where we came from, take care of what gets entrusted to me, and make sure you remain part of the story.
I don’t think more highly of you simply because you’re gone. I just see more of the whole person now, and I’m more grateful than I knew how to be when you were here. For the work, the miles, the groceries, the things you built and fixed, the money you worried about, the opportunities, the Swiss Army knife I still use, the family in Norway, and the name my wife and I now carry together.
For the good, and for what I learned from everything else.
Earlier tonight I sat down alone at my favorite bar and ordered some soup while trying to figure out how to finish this. Then I heard the Jeopardy! theme.
I didn’t plan that.
I’m not joking when I say I probably sat down within seconds of the show starting.
And I think that’s probably enough for me.
I got the message.
This letter is part of me saying goodbye in a way I never really knew how to before. Not goodbye as in forgetting you. The opposite. I’m taking what matters with me.
But I’m done trying to untangle every knot, replay every conversation or find a perfect explanation for everything that happened.
I don’t have time to live backward.
I got married. There is a lot to do. Gretchen and I have a life to build, and I intend to be present for it.
I still have ambitions. A lot of them. I’m going to pursue them.
But I’m going to pay attention while I do it.
I wish you could see what comes next.
I’ll make sure you’re part of it.
Everything is okay.
I’ll take it from here.
Erik
The full letter is more personal than what should be published. That is intentional. Not everything meaningful needs to become content, and not every person involved in someone else’s story chose to become part of a public one.
But I wanted to publish this much because writing it clarified something for me.
Moving on does not mean forgetting someone or deciding that the past no longer matters. It also does not require solving every contradiction before you allow yourself to move forward. Sometimes there is no final answer.
You take what was good. You learn from what wasn’t. You honor the people and circumstances that made you who you are. Then you accept responsibility for whatever comes next.
For the last two years, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the knots.
I think I’m done with that.
It’s time to cut them.