AARP Hearing Center
The Five Words My Father Waited a Lifetime to Say
A final conversation with my father and unexpected words from my mother taught me that the strongest families make room for imperfection
Over a simple meal with his father a few months before his death, author Minh Nguyen learned that late-life change doesn’t have to be dramatic to matter.
Raven Jiang
My father died late in the evening of October 23, 2025, in Hồ Chí Minh City. I was in San Diego, on a video call with my son and my siblings, watching him take his final breaths from 8,000 miles away. The connection held. I could see his face, the room, the movements of the people beside him. It was a strange way to witness a passing, but it is the way life works now: families stretched across continents, doing the best they can to be present.
I had been preparing for that moment for years. But what I felt was not what I’d expected.
More Ways to Benefit
- Related Benefit 1
- Related Benefit 2
- Related Benefit 3
- Related Benefit 4
- Related Benefit 5
My wife was beside me. She reached over and asked how I was feeling.
I told her I didn’t know.
I still don’t, entirely.
I grew up in a rigid family structure, one where emotions were managed through silence and expectations were met without question. My father was not a gentle man. He gambled, most times ruinously. He was given to silences that could last for days. There were moments of violence I carried into adulthood without naming them. Unconsciously, I’d brought that same rigidity into my own life. I became the kind of father who loved deeply but held on tightly, who believed stability came from control. I worried over little details and tried to keep everyone on a path I thought was safe. I didn’t understand how narrow that path sometimes seemed to the people I loved.
As an architect, I build tolerance into every structure I design. A beam can be off by an eighth of an inch. Concrete is given room to crack. Steel is allowed to expand and contract. These allowances are not flaws. They’re what keep a structure standing. Without it, everything breaks.
I didn’t learn that lesson in my personal life until my 60s.
Author Minh Nguyen (center) with his father and family at their last dinner together in Hồ Chí Minh City, December 2024.
Courtesy Thư Stephanie Nguyễn
The December before my father died, I had dinner with him in Vietnam. It was a simple meal of soft noodles and vegetables in a loud restaurant where we had to lean in to hear each other. He reached for my arm and said he knew he hadn’t been perfect. It was the closest he’d ever come to acknowledging our complex past: the gun he had once pointed at my head, the years of gambling, the silence that had cost our family so much.
I told him I had not been perfect, either.
It was a brief exchange, but it approached the truth of our relationship. I walked out of the restaurant feeling something I hadn’t felt in decades regarding him: peace.
Ten months later, he was dying.
My mother was on the call, too, though they had been divorced for more than 30 years. Her marriage to my father had been arranged. I don’t know if she ever loved him. She said her prayers quietly, asking God to receive him with mercy. Then she said something I will never forget: “I forgive him.”
She said it without being asked, without condition, without expectation. I sat in my house in San Diego and listened to my mother forgive a man she had long since left. Their marriage had held more turbulence than tenderness, yet she offered him grace anyway. And I realized something then: Forgiveness is its own kind of tolerance. It is a widening of the emotional space inside us, making room so that what we carry doesn’t break us.
After he died, I kept returning to that dinner. The soft noodles. The way he held my arm. His five words — “I have not been perfect” — suggesting he wished our past had been different.
What I have learned is that late-life change is possible. It may not look dramatic. It may not resolve everything. But it matters. I am learning to let conversations unfold without steering them, to let imperfections stand, to trust that closeness doesn’t require control.
I am grateful I had that final conversation with my father. I am grateful my mother found her own way to forgiveness. I am grateful for the tolerance I learned to build into myself, the emotional flexibility I wish I’d had sooner.
It is never too late to build that in. The materials are not what you think they are. They are not the grand conversations or the formal reconciliations. They are a simple meal. A touch. A prayer offered into a phone, across thousands of miles. The small things that, in the end, turn out to be the whole thing.
AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.
AARP Membership
Join AARP for only $15 per year with automatic renewal. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of benefits, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP The Magazine.
You Might Also Like
I Stopped Driving at 58. My Life Improved
Here’s why you, too, should learn how to live without a car before you absolutely must
Sing While You Can: Why I Joined a Gospel Choir
After decades away from singing, I learned a powerful lesson about aging and joy
I Finally Asked My Mother About Her Upbringing
I spent decades respecting her silence, until her cancer opened a door to her past