It’s been eleven years since my dad passed away.
Honestly, it still hits me.
Some years more than others.
Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like grief — it feels like he just went away on a long holiday and I’ll see him again soon. (No, I’m not suicidal, ha. It’s just that the mind does strange, gentle things with absence.)
I miss him. Not for the big things — for the small, quiet ones. The way he sat. The way he smiled without needing to say much. The way his presence just made a room feel… safe.
It still catches me that I can’t even find his old texts or his number in my phone. He died right as WhatsApp was becoming the thing everyone used. Our time together was in person and over short calls — so there’s no thread to scroll back through, no archive of his voice. I wish I had more of him saved. I have memory, and memory fades and edits itself, and I resent that a little.
What his death rearranged in me
After he passed, something in me shifted that has never shifted back.
I’d already started a business by then — the one I eventually sold. It was in its early, just starting to be profitable. But my focus changed. I stopped caring about wealth or status for its own sake. What I suddenly, desperately wanted was time.
Because here’s what wrecked me, and what I want you to sit with:
My dad died at fifty-nine. The very year he was due to retire.
We’d talked about it so many times — what he’d finally do with all that freedom. Maybe open a small noodle shop. He used to describe it: he’d start at 5am and be done by 10. That was his dream of enough. A simple, good life he was going to begin… later.
And later never came.
He deferred his whole life to a finish line, and God moved the finish line. Straight to green light, no waiting room.
That is the thing I cannot un-see.
He didn’t run out of money.
He ran out of later.
The lie I almost inherited
Most of us are running a quiet bet we never agreed to out loud: I’ll grind now, and I’ll live later. Push through this season, this launch, this decade — and the real life, the present life, the noodle-shop life, starts once the work is finally done.
But the work is never finally done. There’s always one more season. And “later” is not a guarantee anyone signs.
I watched my father make that bet in good faith, and lose it through no fault of his own. And I realised that if I didn’t deliberately choose differently, I would inherit the exact same wager — the hamster wheel that quietly steals time from families, from fathers, from faith, one “I’m almost there” at a time.
That wasn’t the life I signed up for. So I stopped waiting to be handed permission to live, and I started building toward it on purpose.
So this is why I build
Not for toys. Not for trophies. Not to die with the biggest number.
I build businesses to earn more, so I can invest more, so I can buy back time — earlier, not at fifty-nine-and-hoping. Time with my wife. Time with my kids. Time to think, to breathe, to pray. Time to actually live. Time to sit with God in an unhurried way, the way you can only sit with someone you’re not rushing away from.
I refuse to choose between providing for my family and being present for them. My dad’s generation was told those were the same thing — that providing was presence, that the paycheck was the love. I don’t believe it. I want both, and I’m building a life with enough margin to have both.
That’s the entire engine under everything I do. Not greed. Not ambition for its own sake. Just a son who watched the cost of “later” and decided to pay for “now” instead.
He never got to see this
My dad never saw me sell that first practice.
He never saw us rebuild and grow Phoenix into what it is. He never met my children. He never got to see the man I’ve been trying to become.
I wish he had.
But some part of me believes he knows. And I hope he’s proud.
If you’re the one wrestling with this
Maybe you’ve lost someone too. Maybe you’re building out of pain, or love, or longing, and you can’t always tell which. Maybe you’re just so busy that you can feel life sliding past you while you’re heads-down “almost there.”
I get it. So let me say the one thing I most needed to hear:
You don’t have to stay on the wheel.
You can build a life that gives you time back — time for the people you love, time to heal, time to become who God actually made you to be. Not someday, when the work is done. Starting with the next decision you make.
Don’t defer your whole life to a finish line that was never promised to you.
I miss you, Dad Daniel Chua Oon Hian.
If you can see me from where you are, I want you to know: I’m trying to be the kind of man you were. Present. Grounded. Quietly strong. I still remember how you lived, and I carry it every single day.
Until we meet again.