Four days after his father Jorge Messi passed away at age 68 following a serious illness, Lionel Messi broke his silence Wednesday with a lengthy, deeply personal Instagram post honoring his memory. The soccer legend wrote about their close relationship, his father's final days, and the difficulty of imagining life without him.
"Dad, I still can't believe you're gone. I'm not falling apart, or rather, I don't want to fall apart. It's so hard for me to imagine that I won't see you anymore, that we won't talk anymore," Messi wrote. "I know you were suffering and that this is for the best, but you left too soon. We still had so much left to enjoy together."
Messi reflected on the most recent World Cup, revealing that his father had urged him to participate even as his health was deteriorating. "I told you we'd reach the final so you could come and watch me," he wrote. After each match, Messi said, he waited for a message from his father, until he realized how serious his condition had become.
"We reached the final, and you couldn't be there. I wanted to win the cup to bring it to you and show you a new one. I couldn't manage it; my legs just wouldn't give anymore," he added.
According to Messi, when he returned home, his father believed the national team had lost the final on penalties. "We couldn't talk about everything that happened. You couldn't enjoy any of it," he wrote. He continued: "We didn't become world champions, but you have no idea how much we enjoyed every single match. Once again you were right: I needed to be there and play."
