Honor Thy Father and Mother

I’ve been sitting with the commandment lately as both a son and a student.

For much of my adult life, I’ve carried a quiet heaviness. My parents loved me, supported me, and believed in me. Yet I often felt I had not given them the thing many parents hope for after a lifetime of sacrifice: a simple success story.

Not because I never achieved success. There were good jobs, leadership roles, titles, and income. But my life rarely stayed on the path success was supposed to follow. Illness interrupted it. Divorce interrupted it. Questions interrupted it. Eventually vocation interrupted it.

Again and again, I found myself choosing coherence over certainty, meaning over momentum, humanity over optimization. I do not know if those are choices my parents would have made. Sometimes I wonder if they understand them even now.

If I’m candid, there are days I still feel the weight of that. The feeling that I should have given them an easier story to tell. A story with fewer turns. A story they could point to with uncomplicated pride.

For years, I assumed honoring my father and mother meant becoming that story. Lately, I am beginning to wonder if it means something else.

My father, Henry Sukumar, and my mother, Shirley Queeni, sacrificed much so that my brother and I could have opportunities they did not. Like many children of their generation, I inherited an equation that seemed obvious: they sacrifice, I succeed. Their giving becomes my gaining. That is how sacrifice is redeemed.

Life has made that equation harder to hold.

I have seen people gain everything and lose themselves. I have seen people give everything and lose themselves. Success does not necessarily preserve the human. Neither does sacrifice. Both can become forms of drift. Both can pull us away from compassion, integrity, presence, relationship, and wholeness.

Both leave behind the same question:

What remains?

The older I get, the more I suspect coherence is the original state. Everything else is drift.

We drift into ambition. We drift into fear. We drift into performance. We drift into self-protection.

The work of a life may not be becoming someone else, but returning to what was there before the drift began.

Perhaps that is the question I have been chasing for years without realizing it. Not what I achieved. Not what I earned. Not even what I overcame.

What remains.

When I think of my parents now, I no longer ask whether I became the success they imagined. I ask whether their sacrifices helped preserve something worth passing forward. Whether more compassion remains. More integrity. More presence. More relationship. More humanity.

If coherence is the original state, then perhaps honoring our father and mother is not ultimately about proving their sacrifices were worthwhile through our success. Perhaps it is about ensuring their sacrifices do not end in our drift.

Perhaps to honor them is simply to remain the person their love was trying to protect.