My father passed away alone on the side of Highway 49 last week

sitting against his broken-down Harley in 103-degree heat, waiting for the daughter who was “too busy” to answer his calls. They said it was from a heart attack after he’d been there for hours. His phone showed seventeen missed calls during that time — all ignored because I was tired of hearing about his “biker nonsense” and assumed he just wanted more money for motorcycle parts.

For thirty years, I told everyone my father was a deadbeat who chose his motorcycle club over his family — a man who missed my college graduation for some silly rally, who showed up to my wedding reception smelling like motor oil, accompanied by his “trashy” biker friends.

What I never told anyone was that he called me the morning he died, leaving a voicemail I deleted without listening, still angry over an argument we’d had months earlier when he refused to sell his “precious” Harley to help pay for my kitchen renovation.

Now I’m standing in his garage, surrounded by photo albums I never knew existed — pictures of him teaching me to ride a bike, cheering at my softball games, working overnight shifts at the factory to pay for my Catholic school tuition. Page after page revealed a man I had somehow forgotten… or perhaps never allowed myself to see, consumed as I was by the anger that he wasn’t the father I thought I deserved.

The other bikers from his club told me he talked about me constantly, carried my baby picture in his wallet until it fell apart, and kept newspaper clippings of all my achievements, carefully preserved in plastic sleeves. They said he had been trying to reach me that last week because the doctor had given him only six months to live — pancreatic cancer, already spread to his liver — and all he wanted was to take one last ride to the lake where he had taught me to fish when I was seven, to sit with his daughter one more time before the cancer took him.

Instead, he died alone, slumped against the bike I had hated for so many years, clutching a letter he had written to me that began:

“My darling daughter…”