A tribute to my dad, and a reckoning with the goodbye we couldn't afford to give him.
By Janet Turkula
My dad did a boo-boo dance.
Any time one of us kids came running in bleeding, scraped knees, bike-handle bruises, the usual evidence of a childhood spent outside, he would sit us down, reach for the peroxide, and start jumping around the kitchen holding his own knee like he was the injured one. He'd yelp on our behalf, make exaggerated faces, hop from foot to foot until whatever we were crying about became something we were laughing about instead.
That was his trick.
He could turn pain into a joke so fast you forgot you were hurt.
He'd been voted class clown multiple years in a row, according to the yearbooks I used to flip through looking for proof he had always been this funny. He had.
For most of my life, he was also a single dad raising three kids. My mom moved back to Korea after the divorce, a cultural fault line our family never quite learned how to cross. My dad picked us up and just kept going.
At one point, he was working three jobs while serving in the Air Force: the pig farm before sunrise, Walmart janitorial shifts overnight, security police in between. I think about that now and my chest aches. I didn't understand then what it costs a body to hold a family together by hand.
We also lived with my grandmother, who had dementia. For years, my dad was her son, her caretaker, and our father all at once. I remember her wandering. I remember the fear in the house at two in the morning when we couldn't find her. Eventually it became unsafe, and he had to move her into a home. One of those decisions that isn't really a decision at all, just a door closing while you stand there.
His family had always been small, and getting smaller. The genes in our line were not kind. People in my dad's family tended to die young. Stroke young.
And then there was my dad. Still laughing. Still here.
Until he wasn't.
He gave and gave until his body finally had enough.
WHAT HE DID WITH WHAT HE HAD
We never had money. His parents didn't have money. Their parents didn't either. Birthdays were small. Christmases were small.
But the love in that house was never small.
My dad refused free lunch for us at school. Too prideful, he said. Even as a kid, I understood pride was the thing standing between him and drowning. He would not take a handout. Not one.
What he would do was this:
When he found a litter of feral kittens in our basement, he took two of them to the vet every paycheck, just two, because that was what he could afford, until every last kitten had shots and a home lined up.
That was the shape of his kindness. Small. Stubborn. Done in installments. Done anyway. He was 54 when he died. Suddenly.
I flew a red-eye to Illinois, rented a car I couldn't afford, and walked into a hospital room to take my father off life support.
I had just started a new job. I missed two weeks of work. I stopped getting paid. My car almost got repossessed while I was burying him.
There was no will. No final wishes. Just bills.
THE PART I DON'T WANT TO WRITE
One of the worst feelings of my life was standing in a room full of caskets trying to pick one out for my father.
And then came the worse feeling:
Realizing none of them were within reach. Not one.
Every casket in that showroom was a number we could not make work. I stood there staring at wood grain and satin lining and price tags, doing math, slowly understanding those caskets were not made for families like ours.
No child should have to do that. No one should.
We chose cremation because cremation was what we could almost afford. A direct cremation. An invoice. A small box.
I have carried the wrongness of that for more than fifteen years.
Not the cremation itself, people choose cremation for deeply personal and beautiful reasons. What haunts me is that we didn't choose it. It chose us because we were broke, and he was gone, and there was no time to be anything except practical about a man who had never once been practical about us.
My dad deserved a eulogy.
He deserved a room full of people telling stories about the boo-boo dance, about the kittens, about the three jobs, about the laugh.
He deserved to be sent off the same way he showed up: generously, warmly, surrounded by people who loved him.
Instead, his three kids stood in a funeral home doing math.
We should not have to grieve and fundraise in the same breath.
WHY GIVEWILLOW
GiveWillow is a funeral registry.
That sounds unfamiliar only because it has never existed before. Not because it shouldn't.
We have baby registries for a life event not everyone experiences. We have wedding registries for another life event not everyone experiences.
But death, the one thing guaranteed to every single one of us, has never had a place where community could show up intentionally and concretely for the people left behind.
It does now.
GiveWillow is for the family that cannot afford the casket. It is also for the family that can.
It is for the friend who wants to help but doesn't know how. The coworker. The neighbor. The cousin across the country. The people standing in their kitchens saying, "Please let me know what you need," and genuinely meaning it.
It gives people somewhere for that love to land.
A meal. Childcare. Funeral costs. Bills. Rides. Groceries. Real support during an unreal moment.
Building this company has not been easy. Building a tech company is hard on a good day. Building one inside an industry people avoid talking about is harder.
There have been sleepless nights. There has been loneliness. There are still weeks where I wonder who I think I am to ask the world to rethink how we show up for grief.
And then I remember her. The 22-year-old on the red-eye. The one counting dollars in a funeral home. The one who needed this and didn't have it.
I am not building GiveWillow for a market.
I am building it for her.
And for the version of her sitting somewhere right now, in a hospital parking lot, on the floor of a hallway, at a kitchen table, doing the same math we did.
WHAT I WANT YOU TO KNOW
My dad was gentle.
He was funny in a way that made strangers feel less alone.
He worked himself to pieces for three kids and a mother who could no longer remember his name.
He found homes for feral kittens two at a time.
He did the boo-boo dance.
He is my why. He will always be my why.
And if GiveWillow exists for even one family standing where we once stood, then maybe something changed that I could not change for him.
A place to show up, on purpose.