My name is Harper Ashford, and I’m twenty-nine years old.
If you asked my co-workers, they’d probably say I’m the dependable one. The woman who always has a contingency plan, who remembers every client deadline, who can pull a system diagram out of thin air at 11:47 p.m. when everything’s on fire and nobody else knows where the smoke is coming from.
If you ask my boss, she’d call me something more clinical. Critical resource. Key asset. The kind of phrases that sound flattering until you realize they’re just fancy ways of saying, We don’t know what we’d do without her, but we still won’t treat her like a person.
Hey, Reddit—whatever you’re drinking, keep it close. This isn’t just a story about grief. It’s about the morning my dad died, how my company tried to make me choose between burying him and keeping my job, and what happened when I finally decided I was done being the only adult in the room.
The call came at 7:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.
I was standing in my tiny Chicago kitchen halfway through my first cup of coffee when my phone lit up with a 773 number I didn’t recognize. Chicago, sure, but not saved in my contacts. Probably spam.
I almost let it ring out.
Something made me pick up.
“Hello, is this Harper Ashford?” A woman’s voice. Professional. The kind of tone you use to deliver bad news before you finish your own first cup of coffee.
“Yes, this is Harper.”
“I’m calling from Northwestern Memorial. I’m very sorry to inform you that Mr. Martin Ashford passed away at 5:47 a.m. Massive coronary event. The emergency team did everything they could, but the damage was too extensive.”
For a second, everything went quiet. Not the comfortable kind of quiet—the kind where your ears ring and your body is still, but your brain is sprinting.
She kept talking. Heart attack. Found by a neighbor. Brought in by ambulance. Couldn’t stabilize him.
And I just stared at the half-full coffee pot like it had personally betrayed me.
“Did you want to speak with the attending physician?” she asked gently. “Do you have questions about next steps?”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
My dad was just my dad. The man who ironed his jeans, who kept his house so clean the baseboards looked like they’d been inspected by the military, who called every Sunday at 9:03 p.m. to “check your oil,” his code for making sure I was eating and sleeping and not letting work bury me alive.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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