Who usually gives one
His children, mostly, and his grandchildren. Sons-in-law and daughters-in-law more often than you would guess, partly because they had an easier time with him than his own children did.
Workplaces are the other big one. A father’s death tends to be the loss that gets announced at the office, so teams go in together on this more than on any other kind of sympathy gift. That works when the group knows the family a little. It does not work when nobody in the room can say the man’s first name.
What we would ask you about him
Answer what you can and skip the rest. We ask about the shape of his day, meaning the hour he got home, the chair, the station the radio was tuned to, the first thing he did when he came through the door. We ask what he taught you without ever once calling it a lesson. What he did when he was proud, given that he may never have said the word. What he kept, and where. What he said so often that you can still hear the exact voice saying it, including the parts you used to find unbearable.
We ask what he was like with his friends, or with your mother, when he thought nobody was paying attention. Men of that generation were often a different person in the driveway than at the dinner table.
And we ask what he was bad at. A tribute with no flaw in it doesn’t sound like anybody’s father. The stubbornness about directions, the terrible singing, the fact that he could not be persuaded to buy a new coat. Those lines are the ones his children read twice.
When to send it
Not the first week. The first week takes care of itself, and the house is already full of food nobody ordered.
What comes after the funeral is the sorting. His tools. The truck to sell. A workshop or a garage that nobody wants to be the first to walk into and change. Weeks four to ten is where a piece like this does its work, because by then the visitors have gone back to their own lives and the family is alone with the job.
The dates to watch for a father are Father’s Day, his birthday, and the opening weekend of whatever season he never missed. There is also an unpredictable one that comes for adult children eventually, which is the first time something breaks in the house that he would have fixed in an afternoon. That is why people cry in hardware stores. If you’re sending to a colleague, wait a few weeks past their return to work. The first day back is already more than enough.
Allow about two weeks from proof approval if you want it to arrive by a particular date.
What to write on the note card
Most fathers had a public self their family rarely saw. If you knew him from work, or the boat, or forty years of Thursday nights, you are holding a story his children do not have. Write that one. It is worth more than any sentence you could compose about loss.
Something he did, in a place, at a time. Your dad drove out to the plant at eleven at night in 1998 to jump my car and never mentioned it again. That is the note. It gets kept in a drawer, and it gets read again.
If you never met him and only know the bereaved, say that honestly. I never met your father, but I have known you for twelve years, and I can see where a fair amount of you came from.
Two things to leave out. Don’t tell a son he’s the man of the family now. And don’t reach for how proud his father would be, unless you actually heard the man say it, because plenty of people are grieving a father who never did.
Is it too personal for a colleague
Less so than you might think, as long as the group is real rather than an all-staff list. A team who has heard about his fishing, or met him once at a retirement party, can give this well.
Keep it to the 8×10 in that case. It sits on a desk or a shelf and doesn’t oblige anybody to rearrange a wall. Have one person write the card and sign it from the group, rather than circulating it for eleven signatures and a smiley face.
If nobody in the office can name his father, send lunch for a week or take something off their plate at work instead. That is the better gift, and it costs us the sale, and we would rather tell you.