45 Get Well Soon Messages for Dad (When He Won't Tell You Anything Over the Phone)

He's closed every channel except this one

Ask a lot of fathers how they are and you'll get a fine, a joke about hospital food, or a hard swerve into whatever's wrong with the car. It isn't always avoidance in the sad sense. Some of it is forty years of being the man who reports upward and never sideways, and some of it is that he genuinely finds his own body a dull subject. Either way the information doesn't come out of him in conversation. It never has.

A card works differently, and that's its whole advantage. He reads it alone. He doesn't have to compose a face, produce an answer, or hold up his end of anything. You can put something in writing that neither of you could survive saying across a kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon, and he can read it twice and never mention it. He probably will never mention it. Don't read that as a verdict.

Two rules come out of that. Keep it short, because a long card asks for a long reaction and he hasn't got one. And don't ask him a question. A question in a card is a job with his name on it, he won't do it, and then the card is a small failure sitting on a windowsill.

A short illness, and the week after an operation

Flu, a bad back, a hernia repair, a knee. It ends, he knows it ends, and he's already working out the earliest day he can be back on the mower. He doesn't need encouraging. He needs permission with a number attached to it, because a vague rest up gets ignored and six days doesn't.

• Sit down, Dad.
• Six days of doing nothing, and then we can argue about the mower.
• Dad, the surgeon put a number on this and the number is three weeks. I know exactly what you've got planned for Saturday. Saturday is not inside the three weeks.
• Heal up. The gutters will still be full in April, and I'll still be worse at it than you are.
• You're allowed to be bored. Being bored is the treatment. Ring me when it gets unbearable and I'll come and be bored with you.
• Get well soon, Dad. I've told everyone you're fine so that nobody rings, which I believe is what you wanted.

"He was fine on Tuesday"

That's my aunt's sentence, and I've heard versions of it from four different families since. A heart attack or a stroke doesn't come with a rehearsal. One day he's arguing about a parking space, and the next there's a ward, a monitor, a stack of leaflets about salt, and a man in a chair who looks smaller than he did on Tuesday.

Two things are going on at once and the card can only really speak to one of them. There's the medical event, which the hospital is handling. And there's the fright, which belongs to him and to you and which nobody has said out loud. He won't raise it. A stroke in particular wrecks the ordinary machinery for raising anything: he may be slower with words, or the words may arrive in the wrong order, and he knows it, which makes him quieter still.

Write short sentences. Write them so they can be read by a man whose concentration is shot and whose glasses are in a bag somewhere. And say the frightened thing plainly, once, because he's frightened too and he has nowhere to put it.

• That was the worst phone call of my life and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You're still here. That's the whole of what I've got today.
• Slow is fine. Slow is the plan.
• Dad, you scared the daylights out of every one of us. Consider that your one free go.
• I have read the leaflet about salt. I'm going to be insufferable about the salt. Prepare yourself.
• You don't have to talk. I'll do the talking on Sunday and you can correct me when I get it wrong, same as always.

When get well soon wouldn't be true

Parkinson's, COPD, a cancer with no date attached to it. Don't write get well soon on that card. It quietly sets a deadline he can't meet, and every week he fails to meet it the card is up on the shelf being wrong at him. Don't promise a recovery nobody has promised you. And drop fighting, battling, beating, warrior. A man who is tired of being told he's a fighter has nowhere to go with that except to keep performing it on the days he has nothing left.

What replaces the wish is duration. Name a time you'll be there, then be there at that time. Writing to someone with a serious illness is a different job from writing a get well card, and worth reading properly if that's where you are.

• I've got nowhere else to be, Dad.
• Nobody is asking you to be brave about this, and I'm certainly not. Wednesday at two, blue chair, same as last week.
• I don't need you to explain any of it to me. I need you to let me know when the appointments are, and I'll do the rest.
• I keep trying to write something that helps and there isn't anything. So instead: I'm coming on the 12th, and again on the 26th, and we don't have to talk about any of it while I'm there.
• You have never once asked me for anything in your life. I'm not going to make you start now. I'll keep turning up and you can tell me to go home.

Hospital, and the man who's being driven to his appointments

A hospital week takes a specific thing off a father, and it isn't comfort. It's jurisdiction. He can't drive, can't pay for anything, can't fix the tap dripping in his own bathroom two towns away, and a twenty-six-year-old in scrubs calls him by his first name and asks him to rate his pain. Then he comes home and his son drives him to the follow-up, parks the car, and holds the door.

Most of the damage in that sentence sits in the words drives, parks and holds. He's being handled. He has spent his entire adult life being the one who handles, and now there's a rota with his name on it that he didn't write.

So ask him something. Not how are you feeling. Ask him the one thing in the room that only he knows: where the stopcock is, what year the roof was done, whether the noise the car is making is the belt or the bearing. My sister Ruthanne put a line in a card that said the well pump is wired to something nobody else in this family understands and I need you to tell me what. He never answered the card. Three weeks later, on the phone, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely, he said tell Ruthanne it's on its own breaker at the back of the panel. That's what a reply from him looks like.

I said at the top not to ask him anything. I still think that's right. I also think this is right, and I've stopped trying to make the two of them agree.

• Nobody's driving your car but you. It's sitting exactly where you left it and I checked the tyres.
• Dad, the pump. Which breaker. Nobody else knows and I'm not guessing.
• Three more nights, and then your own bed and your own kettle and nobody waking you at four to take your blood pressure.
• The consultant comes round at eight. Write your questions on the back of this card the night before, because you'll forget every one of them the second he walks in.
• You are not a job and this is not a rota. I'm here because I want to be, and if that ever stops being true I'll tell you.

From a son who has never written one of these

This is the hardest card in the category and it isn't close. A man in his thirties or his fifties sits down to write to his father and finds he has no vocabulary for it, because the two of them have never once done this out loud. Not at graduations, not at weddings, not in the car park after the funeral of the man's own father. The relationship was conducted in lifts to the airport, borrowed tools, and a particular grunt that meant well done.

So the first attempt comes out as a joke, because the joke is the only thing the two of you have ever agreed to say to each other. The second attempt comes out as a business memo. Then the pen goes down and you buy a card with a printed verse inside it, and the printed verse is worse than either. I once spent forty minutes in a hospital car park writing four words on my phone, deleting them, and writing the same four words again.

Here's the move that works, and I've watched it work three times now. Write the sentence you'd normally attach a joke to. Then delete the joke. That is the whole technique. Not a paragraph of feeling, which will read as somebody else's handwriting to both of you. One undecorated sentence with nothing hedging it at either end.

The other thing that works is an object. You taught me so much is air. I still back the drill out a quarter turn before I drive a screw and I couldn't tell you why it works, only that you did it that way, is a father and a son and a garage in a single line. Objects are how the two of you have always talked. Use the vocabulary you've actually got instead of the one the card shop is selling.

On the sign-off: if you've never written love before, writing it now will land, and it'll land hard, and you'd better mean it. If you can't, then your son and your name is not a failure. He knows who you are. What he'll notice is that you sat down and did a thing you don't do.

He may say nothing about it, ever. I wrote one to my own father in February and got back, three days later, a text asking whether I wanted his old bench grinder. That was the reply. I took the grinder.

• Love you, Dad.
• Not my strong suit, this. Get well anyway.
• Dad, I don't think I've ever written you a card in my life, and that's probably the most useful thing on this one.
• I still back the drill out a quarter turn before I drive a screw. I couldn't tell you why it works. I only know that you did it that way, and so I do.
• You have never asked me how I feel about anything and I have never told you, and somehow that's been fine between the two of us for forty years. It isn't fine this week. I love you. Get well.
• I'll be up on Sunday with the long ladder. You can sit in the chair and tell me I'm doing it wrong.
• Whatever it was you did that made me someone who can handle things, you did it, and I have never once said so out loud. Consider it said. Now do what the doctor tells you.
• Get well soon, Dad. Your son.

From a daughter, and from a long way off

Daughters usually get the easier half of this, in that the words are available to them, and the harder half, in that he may not know what to do with them once they arrive. A father who has spent thirty years deflecting warmth from his daughter with a joke will very likely deflect this one too, out loud, in front of you, and then read it again after you've gone. That's fine. Send it anyway.

Distance changes what belongs in it. The instinct from four hundred miles away is a long apology for not being there, which quietly obliges a sick man to reassure you, and reassuring people is precisely the job he currently can't do. Give him a date instead. Dates are the thing that travels.

• I know you'll read this and say I shouldn't have gone to the trouble. I went to the trouble.
• Dad, I've booked the 19th to the 23rd. Five days. You're not getting rid of me.
• I've given Mrs. Alcorn next door my number and told her to use it without asking you first. You have been outflanked. Rest.
• I'm still your girl and you're still the one I ring when the car makes a noise. Get well, Dad.

The dad who turns all of it into a joke

Only if he's that sort of father, and only if the illness is the sort you can be light about. Aim at him, never at the disease. Funny get well soon messages has more of them if that's how he takes things.

• You're on the sofa now. This is the one argument you aren't going to win, and there are five of us.
• The hospital has your file. I have your car keys. Between us we have you covered.
• You've spent my entire life telling me to walk it off. Walk it off, Dad.
• Get well soon so you can go back to telling me that the route I take is the wrong route.

If you aren't close, or aren't speaking

Some of these cards go to a man the writer hasn't spoken to properly in nine years. The card isn't a reconciliation and shouldn't try to be one. It can't carry that weight, and if you load it up it reads as an invoice: I wrote to you when you were ill, therefore. Keep it to the fact of the illness and nothing else. Short reads as honest here rather than cold, and anything longer starts to sound like it wants something back.

Don't open old ground. Don't write I know things have been difficult, because he'll read the next eleven sentences waiting for the one that starts and so. There may not be a second card. That's allowed too.

• I heard. I'm sorry. I hope the surgery goes well.
• Dad, I heard about the diagnosis from Ruthanne. I didn't want the week to go past without you knowing that I know, and that I'm sorry.
• I'm not going to pretend this card is more than it is. I hope you get better. That part isn't complicated.
• You won't hear from me again unless you want to. I just wanted you to know that I know.

Short lines for the card the whole family signs

One line each. Six people writing six paragraphs makes a document, and a document is hard work from a chair with a drip in your arm. Let the grandchildren write badly and don't correct the spelling, because that's the one he reads out to the nurse.

• Rest up, Dad. Everything here is handled.
• Get well soon, Grandad. We're saving you a seat and the good chair.
• All of us, all week, and no need to ring anybody back.
• Feel better soon. The shed is untouched and nobody has moved anything.

Turn it into a group card

The people who want to sign a card for a sick father are almost never in one place. A brother in another state, the grandchildren, his own brother who doesn't drive any more, the two men he's played cards with on Thursdays since 1994. A paper card going round by post takes a fortnight and arrives after he's home and back up on the roof.

A free get well ecard that everyone signs fixes the geography. One link into the family group chat, and each person writes their own line in their own time. You can create a card online in a few minutes, and people can keep adding to it after it's been delivered, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because week four is when the cards stop and the illness doesn't. If anyone freezes at the empty box, send them to our page of get well soon messages.

Point the unsure signers at get well messages for a family member, or get well messages after surgery if there's an operation and a date involved. If it's your mother rather than your father, get well soon messages for mom is a different card and a different problem. Then set the delivery for the evening rather than the morning. Rounds and physio are finished by six, the visitors have gone, and the long part of his day is the part after that.