The watch sat in a drawer for eleven months. Wearing it felt wrong — like I was pretending to be him, or worse, replacing him. Turns out, that was exactly the point.
This isn't a story about watches. It's about the specific, uncomfortable moment when his stuff stops being his stuff and has to become something else — because you're still here and he isn't.
The Drawer Stage — Why You Can't Touch His Things at First
There's a phase after your dad dies where his belongings feel radioactive. You can't throw them out. You can't give them away. But you also can't quite touch them. They just sit there — in a drawer, on a shelf, in a box you taped up and put in the garage — becoming relics nobody asked for.
The watch is the clearest example because it's small enough to keep but loaded enough to leave alone. But it could just as easily be the jacket hanging in the closet, the baseball cap on the hook by the back door, the coffee mug he used every morning, or the set of hand tools still arranged exactly the way he left them.
Whatever it is, you know the one. You walked past it a hundred times in the first few months. Maybe you moved it to a drawer so you wouldn't have to look at it. Maybe you left it exactly where he put it because disturbing it felt like erasing something.
Both of those are normal. Both of those are also, eventually, a trap.
The trap isn't grief — grief is fine. The trap is when the object stops being a connection and becomes a shrine. When the whole point of keeping it is to leave it untouched. Because an untouched object doesn't actually keep him around. It just keeps a version of the loss frozen in amber, and you check on it occasionally to confirm that yes, he's still gone.
That's not the same thing as keeping him close. Not even close.
What You're Actually Afraid of When You Put It On
Here's the thing nobody says out loud: it's not about the watch.
The hesitation to wear it, use it, put it on — that's rarely about the object itself. It's about what the object means once it's yours.
The first fear is the fear of presumption. I didn't earn this. He bought that watch, or someone gave it to him, and it meant something specific in the context of his life. Wearing it feels like claiming something you haven't paid for yet. Like you showed up to a ceremony you weren't invited to.
The second fear is the fear of finality. If you take the watch out of the drawer and put it on your wrist, you are admitting — in the clearest possible terms — that he is not coming back for it. He won't need it. It's yours now. And while you know this intellectually, the watch staying in the drawer is a way of not quite confirming it. Leaving it there keeps the sentence technically unfinished.
The third fear is the strangest one, and the hardest to admit: wearing it makes you him. And you're not sure you're ready to be that.
This one runs deep for men who had complicated relationships with their dads. If you spent years trying to be different from him — make different choices, live differently, react differently — putting on his watch feels like surrendering. Like the thing you were trying not to become is now literally on your wrist.
And if you had a good relationship with your dad, the fear is almost the opposite: that you'll never be enough of him to deserve wearing it. That putting it on will expose the gap between who he was and who you are.
Both versions of this are the same fear in different clothing. The fear that the object will say something true about you that you're not ready to hear.
The Moment You Do It Anyway
Here's what actually happens, and it's not the transcendent moment you're either hoping for or dreading.
The watch is probably too big, or too small. It sits on your wrist at a slightly wrong angle. If it's old, the band smells like something — leather and time and something else you can't name but recognize immediately. You look down at your wrist and there's a half-second of cognitive dissonance, the kind you get when a word stops looking like a word if you stare at it too long.
That's not my watch.
And then: No, it's his.
And then, somewhere in the next few days, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not in a way you'd want to describe out loud to anyone. But you check the time and you see his watch and for one second he's there — not as a ghost or a memory you have to summon, but just there, the way he used to be when you weren't even thinking about it.
This is the thing that the Dead Dads episode with Bill Cooper gets exactly right: your dad shows up in you even when you don't notice it. In the way you hold a tool. In the joke you make at the wrong moment. In the route you automatically take when you're driving somewhere you've been a hundred times. The watch is just a more visible version of the same thing — a way for him to show up on your wrist at 2:30 on a Tuesday when you're stuck in a meeting and you couldn't be thinking about him less.
One writer for Hodinkee described searching for his father's stolen Rolex Day-Date — a watch his father wore everywhere, that appeared in nearly every family photo — and realizing that the search wasn't really about the object. It was about the relationship encoded in it. The watch was where his father had stored all the things that were hard to say directly. Getting it back meant getting access to something he hadn't realized was locked.
That's not a rare experience. It's actually the most common one. It just sounds too soft to say in regular conversation, so most men never say it.
Why Objects Are One of the Few Grief Tools Men Actually Use
We don't journal. Most of us don't process out loud. We don't call a friend and say "I've been thinking about my dad and I needed to tell someone." That's just not how most men move through grief, and judging that fact doesn't change it.
But we keep things.
A pocket knife. A cap. A specific tool from the garage that isn't particularly useful but that you'd never get rid of. A lighter, even if you don't smoke. Men have always done this — kept one physical thing from someone who died — without ever calling it grief work, because we'd never call it that.
But that's what it is. And the key insight is this: physical objects are a form of ongoing, low-key conversation with someone who can't talk anymore. Every time you use the thing — check the time, reach for the pocket knife, put on the cap — you're having a brief, wordless exchange with him. A micro-moment of contact.
When you stop using his things, you stop having that conversation.
The drawer keeps the object safe. It also keeps it silent. There's a version of honoring your dad where you preserve everything and use nothing, and it feels respectful but it's actually a slow disconnection. The object loses its charge. The association fades. Give it enough years and the watch in the drawer is just an old watch in a drawer.
This connects directly to something worth sitting with from the Bill Cooper conversation on Dead Dads: if you don't talk about your dad, he disappears. Not all at once. Slowly. Through omission. Through avoidance. Through the accumulated weight of all the moments you could have mentioned him and didn't.
The same is true of his things. If you never use them, never take them out, never let them be part of your actual life — they become museum pieces. And museums are for people who are definitively gone. Not for people you're still in conversation with.
There's a whole parallel worth thinking through when it comes to what you pass down, too. The watch you wear becomes a watch your kid sees on your wrist for twenty years. It becomes a thing they associate with you, with normalcy, with Tuesday afternoons and hardware store runs. It carries meaning forward by being used, not by being preserved. If you're thinking about how to carry your father's legacy forward without forcing it, this is one of the least forced versions of that: just wear the thing.
The Hodinkee editors put it plainly in a piece about their fathers' watches: watches are meant to be shared. The best version of an inherited watch isn't sitting in a box. It's a story. It's context. It's a grandfather's watch on a grown man's wrist that a kid notices one day and asks about.
That question — whose watch is that? — is a conversation that never ends. And it starts with you taking it out of the drawer.
The Part Nobody Gets To Skip
None of this is a formula. Some guys put on their dad's watch the week after the funeral and it helps. Some guys need a year in the drawer first. Some guys can't do it with a watch but can do it with a jacket or a tool or a way of making coffee.
The object is almost beside the point. What matters is that you eventually let his things back into the living part of your life, instead of sealing them in the grief part.
Because the grief part is heavy and still and doesn't move. The living part is where he still shows up — not because you summoned him, but because you built something with his hands, fixed something with his tools, or checked the time on his watch and thought of him for exactly three seconds before you got back to your day.
That's not closure. That's not healing in any packaged sense. That's just him, still around, in the only way he can be now.
Take the watch out of the drawer.
If this landed somewhere real for you, there's more where it came from. The Dead Dads podcast is a show for men figuring out life without a dad — honest, occasionally funny, and never clinical. Find it at deaddadspodcast.com or subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.