Just Call Him: Estrangement, Grief, and the Father I'll Never Fully Know

Some goodbyes don't come with a conversation. They come with a phone you keep picking up and putting back down. Brittany Perham grew up in a house full of friends and happy memories, with a mom who protected her and her brother, and a father whose drinking nobody named out loud. In college, when things got scary, she made one of the hardest grown-up decisions of her life. She stopped answering his calls. The silence stretched to almost fifteen years. When her brother reconnected with him before his wedding, Brittany found herself back in a little bit of contact, just in time for her father's final year. There was one good phone call, a recipe, a "good to talk to you." And then there was a hospital room at Mass General, where she and her brother had to decide to let him go. Then came the surprise. Weeks before he died, her father had changed his will and named her the executor of an estate that turned out to be buried in debt. It took almost seven years to close. This is a tender, honest conversation about estrangement, about guilt and sadness living side by side, and about how a story keeps changing each time we tell it. Brittany is a poet and a teacher, and she talks about her father with so much care and so much honesty. I loved every minute of this one. What You'll Hear: Growing up in what looked like the perfect childhood while living with a father's quiet addiction The decision at 21 to get a therapist and step away from her dad Why estrangement never really feels like freedom Walking around the house holding the phone, unable to make the call The one good phone call, and a recipe she'll never forget Taking her father off life support and the strange intimacy of that moment Being named executrix of an indebted estate she never saw coming Why the story of her father is ultimately a story of not knowing Guest Bio: Brittany Perham's new memoir, Executrix (University of Georgia Press), won the 2025 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. She taught for fifteen years at Stanford University before joining the English faculty at Endicott College, where she is an associate professor. She lives in San Francisco and Massachusetts. Website: www.brittanyperham.com Executrix (University of Georgia Press): https://ugapress.org Listen and follow: www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com/follow Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thelifeshiftpodcast.beehiiv.com/ Keywords: estrangement, grieving an estranged parent, alcoholic father, children of alcoholics, executor of an estate, grief, memoir, memory, family stories, complicated grief You Might Also Like: Grief and Fatherhood: The Song That Changed Everything Part of Me Died That Day: Learning to Live After the Worst Day of Your Life Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices