The night before my first job interview, my father could not sleep.
I know this because I woke at 3 AM to get water and found him sitting in the living room, staring at nothing. “What are you doing?” I asked. He said he was just thinking. I went back to bed, mildly annoyed. It was my interview. Why was he losing sleep?
I was twenty-two. I thought his worry was excessive, almost embarrassing. It was just an interview. The worst that could happen was rejection. I would survive rejection. I had survived it before. His anxiety seemed like a failure to understand that I was an adult now, capable of handling my own life.
I did not understand then. I understand now.
When I was twenty-five, my friend Riaz died in a car accident. He was driving home from work on a road he had driven a thousand times. A truck ran a red light. That was all. One moment he was alive, thinking about dinner, maybe listening to music. The next moment he was gone.
I went to his parents’ house after the funeral. His mother sat in the corner, not crying, not speaking, just sitting. His father kept saying, “He called me that morning. He said he would come for dinner on Friday.” He repeated this several times, as if the promise of Friday dinner should have protected his son from dying on Wednesday.
Something changed in me that day. I began to understand what my father knew.
Parents worry because they have seen what we have not seen. They have watched people die unexpectedly. They have received phone calls that changed everything. They have learned, through decades of living, that life is fragile in ways young people cannot imagine.
When I was twenty-two, I felt invincible. Bad things happened to other people, in other places, for reasons that did not apply to me. I took risks without calculating them. I drove too fast, stayed out too late, trusted strangers I should not have trusted. I did these things because I believed, without knowing I believed it, that I was exempt from tragedy.
My father knew I was not exempt. He knew no one is exempt. He had buried friends, colleagues, relatives. He had seen how quickly the phone rings and the world ends. His worry was not irrational. It was the only rational response to a world where children die before parents, where accidents happen on ordinary roads, where one wrong turn erases a life.
But I could not see this. I saw only a man who worried too much about things that would probably never happen.
They probably would never happen. That word—probably—is where parents and children diverge. To a young person, probably means almost certainly. The odds are in my favor. Why worry about unlikely outcomes? To a parent, probably means possibly not. The odds are good, but odds fail. People win lotteries. People also get hit by trucks.
My father could not protect me. This is the central agony of parenthood. You create a life, you love it more than your own, and then you must watch it walk out the door into a world full of dangers you cannot control. You cannot drive the car for them. You cannot choose their friends. You cannot stand beside them at every crossing.
So you worry instead. Worry is the only action available when action is not available. It is useless—worry prevents nothing—but it is something. It is a way of caring when you cannot care for. It is love translated into anxiety because anxiety is all that remains.
I have a younger sister. She is twenty-four now. Last month she traveled alone to a city she had never visited. The night before her trip, I could not sleep.
I lay in bed imagining scenarios. What if her taxi driver was dangerous? What if she got lost? What if something happened and she was alone, far from anyone who could help? These thoughts circled and circled, accomplishing nothing, preventing nothing, but refusing to stop.
At 3 AM I got up for water and found myself sitting in the living room, staring at nothing. And I remembered my father, twenty years ago, doing the same thing before my interview.
The circle had completed. I had become him. His worry, which I once dismissed as excessive, now lived in me.
My sister called the next day. Everything was fine. The trip was wonderful. She had a great time. My worry had been, as worry always is, pointless. But I could not have stopped it any more than my father could have stopped his.
This is the inheritance no one tells you about. Not property or money, but worry. The capacity to love someone so much that their safety becomes your obsession. The knowledge, earned through loss, that the world is not safe and the people you love are always at risk.
I called my father after my sister returned. I did not tell him about my sleepless night—that would have embarrassed us both. But I said, “I understand now. Why you used to worry.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I still worry. Every day.”
He is seventy. I am forty-three. And he still worries about me. This seemed absurd once. Now it makes perfect sense. I will be seventy someday, and my children will be in their forties, and I will still worry. Because the love does not diminish with time. And neither does the knowledge of what can be lost.
Riaz’s mother is still alive. I visit her sometimes. She never fully recovered. How could she? Her son called on Wednesday and promised to come for dinner on Friday. That was twenty years ago. She is still waiting for a Friday that will never come.
This is what parents know. This is why they worry. Not because they doubt our competence, but because competence is not protection. You can be smart and capable and careful, and still a truck can run a red light.
I used to think my parents’ anxiety was about me—my choices, my abilities, my judgment. Now I understand it was never about me. It was about existence itself. About the terrifying randomness of a world where anything can happen at any moment. About the unbearable love that makes other people’s survival feel more important than your own.
My father is old now. When I visit him, I notice he moves more slowly, forgets more easily, tires more quickly. And I realize: now I worry about him. Now I am the one who lies awake wondering if he is okay. Now I am the one who cannot protect someone I love.
The worry has reversed direction but remains the same worry. The same love. The same helpless knowledge that phone calls come without warning and change everything.
I understand now, Dad. I understand completely.
I wish I had understood sooner.
But I suppose that is not how it works. We understand our parents only when we become them. And by then, so much time has passed.
The night before my son’s first day of school, I could not sleep. He was five years old, walking into a world I could not control.
I sat in the living room at 3 AM, staring at nothing.
The inheritance continues.