My kids never met my dad. But they know he would have ordered a Blizzard every single time, and they remind me when his birthday's coming because they don't want to miss it.
That didn't happen by accident.
Dairy Queen became synonymous with my dad while he was still alive. So when he was gone, I made it a thing with my kids. Now I get reminders weekly, months in advance of his birthday. Is it time to go to Dairy Queen yet? I want a Blizzard! When was Papa born again? It gives me the perfect occasion to talk about him again with a minimum of rolled eyes — and I think that's pretty much what most of us want.
But it took me a while to get there. Because the instinct, especially for guys, is to keep the grief private. Handle it internally. Don't make it heavy for everyone else. And somewhere in all that self-management, you end up protecting your kids from the sad stuff and accidentally protecting them from him entirely.
The Silence Is the Danger — Not the Grief
Most of us go quiet because we think we're being considerate. We don't want to put grief on our kids. We don't want to make dinner weird. We don't want to cry in front of them about a man they never knew and wouldn't understand.
So we say nothing. And then we say nothing again. And after a while, nothing becomes the default.
Here's the thing: the version of your dad that lives on only exists if someone keeps talking about him. Time doesn't preserve him. Your memory alone doesn't preserve him. Silence doesn't protect your kids from grief — it just guarantees that your dad becomes a stranger to them. A name. Maybe a photo on a shelf.
There's an episode of Dead Dads that gets into this directly. Bill Cooper, who lost his father Frank after years of dementia, talked about what it actually means to carry a dad forward — through stories, habits, through the way you show up with your own kids. The line that stuck: if you don't talk about him, he disappears. Not dramatically. Just gradually. Episode by episode of silence, until he's gone in a way that death alone couldn't accomplish. You can listen to more on how that plays out in practice over at What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad.
The grief isn't what erases him. The silence is.
Start With the Specific, Weird, Human Stuff
Kids don't connect to the eulogy version of a person. "He was a good man who worked hard and loved his family" — that's a headstone. That's not a human being.
What they connect to is: he ate cereal at midnight. He could not parallel park to save his life. He cried at the same commercial every single Christmas, and he knew he cried at it, and he still cried. He had one joke he thought was funnier than everyone else did. He called every restaurant "a bit much" if the menu had more than two pages.
The strange details are the ones that stick. They're the ones that make a dead man feel like an actual person rather than a concept.
When you lead with the specific and the strange, something shifts for your kids. They start to see him as someone real, someone they could have had opinions about. Someone they might have liked, or found annoying in a fond way, or argued with over the remote. That's the point. You're not trying to make them mourn someone they never knew — you're trying to make them feel like they missed out on knowing someone worth knowing.
Start there. Not with his virtues. With his quirks.
Give Them a Ritual That Becomes Theirs
The Dairy Queen thing works because it gives my kids ownership. It's not just a thing I do to remember my dad. It's a thing we do, together, on his birthday. They care about it. They track it. They ask about it months out.
That's what a ritual actually does. It creates a recurring entry point for conversation, memory, and connection — one that doesn't require me to initiate a Heavy Talk about grief. The ritual does the work. I just have to show up and order the Blizzard.
The ritual has to be theirs too, not just yours. It has to involve them in a way that gives them some stake in it. Maybe it's a specific food your dad loved. Maybe it's watching the game he always watched, even if nobody in your house follows the team. Maybe it's going to the hardware store on his birthday, because that's where you always ended up with him on a Saturday morning.
It doesn't have to be elaborate. It has to be consistent. Consistent is what turns a single memory into a tradition, and a tradition is what gives your kids a way to miss someone they never met. That's not a small thing. Take a look at Father's Day Without Your Dad: How to Build Traditions That Actually Help for more on building rituals that actually hold up over time.
Let Their Questions Be the Weird Ones
At some point, if you've been talking about your dad with any regularity, your kids will ask something that catches you completely off guard.
Was he scared when he died? Did he know about me before he died? Would he have liked me? What would he think of our house?
Don't deflect. Don't smooth it over with something warm and reassuring that ends the conversation. Sit in it with them.
Kids ask the questions adults have learned not to ask. They haven't yet developed the social instinct to leave the uncomfortable stuff alone. That's not a problem to manage — that's actually the good stuff. The real stuff. The conversations that end up meaning something.
"Would he have liked me?" is not a question you can answer with certainty, but you can answer it honestly. He would have thought your jokes were too clever. He would have complained about the noise and then asked you to do it again. He would have been proud of you in a way he probably wouldn't have said out loud. You're not making things up — you're translating. You knew him. Use that.
When kids ask about death directly — was he scared, did it hurt, what does dying feel like — answer as honestly as their age allows. Don't pivot to heaven or sleep or euphemism if you can help it. They're asking because they want to understand something real. Treating their question as real is a form of respect.
What to Do When You Genuinely Don't Know
Some of us lost our dads before we were old enough to really know them. Or we lost them suddenly, before we thought to ask the things that matter. Or we had a distance with them that meant we only knew the surface.
You might be sitting across from your kids and realize you can't answer the simplest questions. What was his favorite song? What did he want to be before he became what he became? What did he actually believe?
"I don't know" is a complete sentence. And it's also an invitation.
You can tell your kids what you wish you'd asked him. You can tell them the questions that still sit unresolved in you. That's its own kind of knowing — it tells them who he was in the negative space, the outline of a man defined partly by what he kept to himself. And it models something valuable: that it's okay to carry questions you'll never get to answer, and to say that out loud without pretending you've resolved it.
The What I Wish I Had Asked My Dad Before He Was Gone piece goes into this more — the specific weight of unanswered questions and what you can actually do with them. It's worth a read if you feel like the gaps are bigger than what you have to give.
Not knowing everything doesn't disqualify you from the conversation. You're not a biographer. You're a son, passing on what you've got.
He Shows Up in You Whether You Notice It or Not
Here's the thing your kids are already getting, whether you've said a word about your dad or not: they're inheriting him through you.
The way you handle setbacks. The things that make you laugh when you're not trying to. The food you go back to when you want something that feels like home. The way you get quiet when you're worried. The stubborn streak. The specific way you mispronounce one word that you've been mispronouncing your whole life and have stopped questioning.
He's in there. He's in you, and you're passing him down whether you mean to or not.
The work — if you want to call it that — is just to name it when it happens. Point it out. That's a Papa thing. He did that too. Your grandfather would have said the exact same thing in this situation, and he also would have been wrong about it. Give it a name. Give it a face. Give it a story.
When you do that, your dad becomes a thread running through your family rather than a sealed chapter. He stops being just a loss and starts being a presence — imperfect, specific, real. The kind of presence that a kid can actually feel something about, even if they never got to sit next to him at a Dairy Queen and order a Blizzard.
That's the goal. Not grief management. Not legacy preservation as some formal project. Just keeping the man real, in the small and recurring ways that actually work.
His birthday is coming up. Order the Blizzard. Tell them the cereal-at-midnight thing. Let them ask the weird question.
That's enough. It really is.
Dead Dads is a podcast for men figuring out life without a dad — one uncomfortable, occasionally hilarious conversation at a time. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen.