A personal memoir.

It begins in stillness. A dream, like the slow unfurling of old film. I’m standing at my father’s funeral again, twenty-one years on, yet I’m not in it this time — I’m watching from somewhere just beyond. Invisible, detached, but alert. Every detail is crisp: the cool air, the hush of gathered voices, the way the light presses through the church windows and lands on the polished wood of the coffin.

I move through the scene like an archivist of memory, inspecting each moment to make sure it’s perfect — as though I can correct the record, tidy the grief, get it right this time. It isn’t painful, not like it once was. It’s almost… procedural. Gentle. I’m revisiting the day not to relive it, but to understand it.

I suppose that’s what the mind does when it circles an old wound: it keeps looking for an angle that finally makes sense.

He’s been gone a long time, and yet, he has a way of returning. Always in dreams. Always at seven-year intervals — as if some quiet metronome inside me measures out the distance between us. Seven years of growth, seven years of change, and then he steps through the veil again, each time a little different.

It took seven years after his death for him to appear at all. I remember waking from that first dream with my heart hammering, unable to tell whether it had really happened. He spoke — I can’t remember the exact words, but I remember the feeling of being seen, the shock of recognition. He was younger than when he died, lighter somehow, as if time had loosened its grip on him.

Another seven years, another crossing. He would visit before each turning point in my life — never long, never dramatic, just enough to remind me of something I hadn’t quite learned yet. Sometimes he’d say nothing, just stand nearby, radiating that same quiet assurance he carried in life. Other times, he’d speak in riddles, the kind that only make sense years later.

The last time, we were racing. A car, the world blurring past in silver streaks and heat. He was in the passenger seat, map in hand, shouting directions over the roar of the engine. I was driving — fast, too fast — trusting him completely, the way I once did when I was small. There was exhilaration in it, a childlike joy I hadn’t felt in years. But as we neared the end of the course, something in the air changed. A stillness behind the noise. We both knew it: this was the last lap we’d drive together.

I remember the final look we shared — that wordless exchange that said, you know what to do now. Then he folded the map, placed it on the dashboard, and was gone.

After that, the dreams stopped. Until now.

This last one felt different. He wasn’t there, not even as a shadow. Only the echo of his leaving. The scene of the funeral replaying, not as tragedy, but as review. Like my mind was conducting an audit of loss — examining whether the story had settled properly, whether the lessons had been absorbed.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this time, he didn’t need to appear because I’ve already internalised the voice that used to come from him. Maybe the navigator is in me now — his instincts stitched into my own.

Still, I wonder.

Each time he’s visited, it’s been before something pivotal. A shift, a reinvention, a leap into unknown territory. Always the sense that change was coming — that I was about to steer into a new life, and he was there just long enough to remind me I could. So when I dream of him, even now, I find myself scanning the horizon when I wake: what’s about to change? What road is opening?

Of course, part of me knows it’s projection — my subconscious staging its own theatre, letting old love and unfinished longing play their roles. But there’s another part, the quiet part that surfaces in the middle of the night, that wonders if these are visits of a sort. Messages from a place beyond psychology. After all, the timing is too precise, the wisdom too timely. Maybe both things are true — maybe the mind and the mystery are just two halves of the same conversation.

In this latest dream, my task wasn’t to speak or to race or to receive guidance. It was to see clearly. To look at the moment of loss itself and recognise it not as the end, but as a point of inheritance.

When I woke, I felt an unfamiliar calm. Not relief exactly, but acceptance — the sense that the story between us had closed its loop. He had been my navigator, then my teacher, then my mirror, and now, finally, a still point inside me.

It’s strange to think that for years I looked for him to come back and fix things. As though there were things left unsaid, wrongs unrighted, truths unspoken. But maybe he knew that wasn’t his role. Maybe his leaving — and my repeated dreaming — was the only way I could learn to hold both grief and gratitude in the same hand.

The dreams were never about bringing him back; they were about bringing me forward.

Now, when I think of him, I picture that final race. The road stretching ahead, his map folded neatly on the dash. The horizon open, inviting, a little blurred at the edges. The wheel beneath my hands, steady.

I still hear his voice sometimes — not in words, but in instinct. The quiet confidence that rises when I’m about to make a turn. It’s not advice anymore, just presence. A faint hum in the bones.

Maybe that’s what it means to integrate someone — not to stop missing them, but to stop needing them to appear in order to feel their guidance.

So I carry on. I watch, I drive, I steer.
And somewhere beyond the visible world, he rides alongside — no longer a ghost, but a compass.

The funeral, the dreams, the race — all of it part of the same long conversation about letting go without forgetting. About learning that closure isn’t an ending, but a kind of quiet trust: that the road continues, and that I can navigate it on my own.

I don’t know if he’ll appear again. Maybe he doesn’t need to. Maybe this was his final message — not through presence, but through absence. The kind of guidance that arrives when you finally stop asking for signs and start listening to what’s already inside you.

Still, if he ever does return, I’ll know the terrain by heart.
I’ll know the difference between longing and direction.
And I’ll meet him not as a child looking for repair, but as a driver who has learned the shape of the road.