Bringing You Home

Dear Vic,

Today, I brought you home -
to our family’s ancestral altar, where we honour those who came before us, and those who are no longer here in body, but never absent in spirit.

It felt important to place you here.
Not as a guest. Not as a memory tucked away.
But as family.

I wanted you to be part of this space - the quiet centre of our family home in Mỹ Tho, so that whenever Kenzo returns here, he knows you are still with us. That you belong. That you have a place not just in stories, but in ritual, in presence, in continuity.

This altar holds generations. Names, faces, lives that shaped who we are - even if Kenzo never met them. And now, you stand among them. A father. A link. A thread that connects past to future.

I know our path wasn’t simple.
I know there were years when we lived separate lives, when distance (emotional and physical) sat between us. But none of that erases what matters most.

You are Kenzo’s father.
You are part of his beginning.
And you are part of the story he will carry forward.

Watching him sit there quietly today (small, still, trying to understand something far bigger than words) I realised this wasn’t just for you. It was for him. So he knows that even in absence, there is belonging. Even in loss, there is honour. Even when someone is gone, they are not erased.


This is where you rest now,
not just in memory, but in place.
In incense smoke.
In candlelight.
In the silent acknowledgment that love does not end when a life does.

No matter the years we spent apart before you passed,
you are (and always will be) part of our family,
and part of our son’s story.

You are home.

— N

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