My dad called me on a Tuesday in early June, two years ago, just to ask if I'd seen the baseball game. I said I'd call him back. I didn't. Father's Day was that Sunday, and I figured I'd say everything I needed to say then.
He had a stroke on Saturday.
I'm not telling you this to be dramatic. I'm telling you because I think most of us are walking around with a quiet, low-grade assumption that there's still time. Time to write the letter. Time to send the card. Time to say the thing out loud instead of in our heads where it stays safe and unspoken.
Father's Day is coming up. And if your dad is still around — even if he's a complicated person, even if you don't talk much, even if he wouldn't know what to do with sentimentality if you handed it to him in a wrapped box — I want to make a small case for actually sending him something this year. Not because the calendar says so. Because the calendar is the excuse you've been waiting for.
The card itself doesn't matter. What matters is that he knows you thought of him.
I used to think cards were kind of pointless. A piece of folded cardstock with someone else's words printed on the inside, signed in a hurry at a grocery store checkout. My dad never made a fuss over them. He'd read it, smile, put it on the kitchen counter, and three weeks later it would be in the recycling. So what was the point?
The point, I figured out too late, is that for about ninety seconds — the time it takes to open an envelope and read what's inside — the person on the receiving end gets to feel like someone stopped what they were doing and thought about them specifically. Not in a group text. Not in a "hope you're well" email. Specifically. By name. About them.
That's the whole product. That's what you're sending. The cardstock is just the delivery mechanism.
Why I started sending video cards
After my dad passed, I got obsessive about not making the same mistake with anyone else. My mom turned seventy last year and I wanted to send her something she'd actually keep. I'd seen the standard e-cards — the bouncing GIFs, the MIDI music, the screen full of clip art that looks like it was designed in 2003. They felt worse than nothing. Like I'd half-tried.
A friend told me about CinematicCard, which lets you build an actual cinematic video — your photos, your music, your words — and send it as a link. No app, no signup on her end. She just tapped a text message and it played like a little movie.
She called me crying. Good crying. The kind of phone call you don't forget.
The thing I liked about it, beyond the obvious, is that it didn't feel like a gimmick. It felt like a letter you could see and hear at the same time. And because it's a link you can send instantly even if you live in a different state or country — which, increasingly, most of us do — there's no delay, no shipping, no "I'll mail it tomorrow" that turns into next week.
The first one is free. I think CinematicCard does that because they know once you've seen one work — once you've watched someone you love watch it — you don't really go back to flat paper.
What to actually say in it
This is the part nobody tells you. Most people freeze when it's time to write something real, because they think it has to be profound. It doesn't. It has to be specific.
Don't write "thanks for everything." Write "thanks for driving me to baseball practice in 2003 even when you were exhausted from work."
Don't write "you're the best dad." Write "I think about that thing you said when I dropped out of college more than you know."
Don't write "love you." Or — write that too, but write it after the other thing. The specific thing is what makes the general thing land.
If you have photos, put them in. Old ones. Ones he hasn't seen in twenty years. The grainy ones from a disposable camera at a campsite. The one where you're four and he's holding you upside down by the ankles. That's the stuff.
And if you want to send him money inside the card — for a steak dinner, for the round of golf he's been putting off, for whatever — you can do that on CinematicCard too, and they don't charge a fee on it. I mention it because I almost didn't with my mom and she got more excited about the twenty bucks than she should have, in the way that only a parent does when their kid sends them something.
Don't wait for the right moment
There isn't one. The right moment is a story we tell ourselves to justify the postponement.
If your dad is alive, send him something this Father's Day. Not because he needs it. Because you'll need to have sent it.
If your dad isn't alive, send something to whoever has been a father figure to you — an uncle, a coach, a friend's dad who treated you like one of his own. They've probably been waiting their whole life to hear it from you and don't know they have.
Make one. Send it. It takes ten minutes.
The card they'll never forget is the one you almost didn't send. Send a CinematicCard.
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