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My relationship with my dad was thorny, messy and difficult. It didn’t start out healthy and then deteriorate, nor did it flounder initially and then improve later. It was simply a brewing storm from the day I was born until the day he died halfway through my twenty-ninth year of life.

He’s been dead for thirteen years now. This May, I went to a friend’s house for a workshop on intuition. At the end of this perspective-shifting day, we did a group meditation where my dad appeared beside me. He handed me a note that read, “I’m sorry.”

Those words did not pass between us when he was alive, at least not in any meaningful way, but to hear them in that meditative setting seemed entirely right. They sewed up a wound that needed attention since I was a very young girl. In that quiet, contemplative place, something special, healing and transformative occurred for me.

I came home from the workshop and allowed myself time to let it settle. Soul work has its own rhythm and schedule. Thirteen years is nothing when it pertains to the soul. When we are ready, healing comes to us, with no amount of cajoling, forcing or urging on our part. I didn’t know it when I walked into that workshop, but I was now in a place to reconcile with my bipolar, alcoholic, lost father. And he was ready to return to me.

In one of his final letters to me, a few years before he died, he said that he would like his tombstone to read Perfect Peace. This request seemed at odds with his turbulent life, but I’ve come to see that my dad never stopped searching for peace. It may have eluded him while he was alive, but a part of me feels at rest when I dream about him finding it at long last through death.

It’s always bothered me that there is no physical marker anywhere of my dad’s life and death. In the last few years, I have come to understand that most of my core character attributes passed to me directly from my dad. It was hard for me to claim these while he was alive, but now, with a daily reminder in the form of my son, I see evidence of my dad’s DNA in me and around me. And I feel so grateful.

The older I get, the less I demand of myself or of others. We are all doing the best that we can, on any given day. I think it would be quite different if I could sit down with my dad today and have a conversation. After my profound experience at the intuition workshop, I wanted to give something back to my father; to show that his time here on earth was valuable and important. It mattered. He mattered.

Because of him, I am who I am, and those same character qualities exist in William. We are a chain of DNA, stretching out into the future, and I wanted to say to dad, “Look at what you have done. I love you, I have no more hard feelings, and I think you would be proud of me, my husband and my kids.”

I ordered him a bench plaque and chose a picturesque spot in our hometown that holds special meaning for both of us. It was a healing experience to visit the bench with Jason and the kids on a beautiful summer day. I cried when I thought about dad, in that beautiful spot, and I experienced the perfect peace he spent his whole life pursuing.