LovingMemo.com

“My Father’s Key”

By William C. Herrera

My dad was a fighter. A brave man. A person who defied all odds. A man everyone knew and loved—not because life made it easy for him, but because he chose to live fully in spite of everything stacked against him.

He wasn’t held back by what was placed onto him—not by the doctors, not by the diagnosis, not by the systems that are still in place today. What the world didn’t see was the man who fought every single day. The man who made it from one day to the next, when sometimes, during certain nights, I wasn’t even sure he would make it through.

My dad’s life changed forever at age two, when a man threw him down a flight of concrete stairs in Mexico. The trauma triggered lifelong seizures. Doctors told my grandparents he wouldn’t live past 11. He made it to 54.

Growing up, I didn’t know anything different—just that my dad had seizures and I had to be alert, quick, prepared. I watched him power through jobs, through judgment, through those silent glances people give when they think you’re “less than.” He was never less than anything. He was more.

At 50, a fall at work changed everything. He had a seizure on the job that left blood pouring from his head. I’ll never forget the image. The sound. We thought we were losing him. But in one of those strange twists of fate, something shifted. His seizures… stopped. After decades, they just stopped.

He got his driving privileges back. He lit up like a kid. He smiled in a way I hadn’t seen in years—like someone finally handed him back a piece of himself he thought was gone forever. He drove again. He laughed more. He was alive in a new way.

And then, one night, just a few years later, the seizures returned.

He went to bed and never woke up.

We lost him to a grand mal seizure in his sleep. It was sudden, quiet, cruel in how peaceful it appeared. There was no warning. No goodnight that felt like a goodbye. Just the weight of absence.

There’s something about losing someone who always fought—that kind of silence is loud.

Now, I carry the key to his Victrola on my own keychain. He kept it on his every day. It’s an old cherry wood record player, beautiful and dignified, like him. That key opens more than a cabinet—it opens memories, opens grief, opens strength I didn’t know I had until I needed it.

Every time I hold that key, I remember how he never stopped fighting. And now that he’s gone, I keep fighting too—fighting for others like him, like me. Fighting systems that still fail people with disabilities, immigrants, Latino fathers, and families just trying to make it through the night.

My dad didn’t get to write a book or give a TED Talk. But his life was a blueprint for resilience. He taught me what quiet strength looks like, how to stay grounded even when the world is unstable. He taught me how to protect others. How to keep dignity intact, no matter what.

In the Latino community, we often carry our pain in silence. We push forward. We keep it moving. But mental wellness, to me, means making space to speak on it. It means grieving out loud, honoring our people, and letting their lives echo beyond the struggle.

This isn’t just about remembering him. It’s about becoming who I was always meant to be because of him.

And maybe one day, when someone asks me about the key on my chain, I’ll say—

“It’s my father’s. It doesn’t just open a record player. It opens everything.”