Posted by ReyFort Media
It’s Father’s Day 2026 this coming Sunday, and our dear Kuya Kim Atienza just flew in from the US — not for a taping, but for two graduations that meant more than any award show. His wife Felicia walked for her second post-graduate diploma, a Master of Public Health from Harvard, and days later, their daughter Eliana graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, also taking home the Elaine Simon Award for Social Justice.
He posted the photos smiling, but if you know Kuya Kim, you see it. There’s “a noticeable weight behind Kim Atienza’s smile. It still has the same warmth, but there’s a before-and-after that’s hard to ignore.” That before-and-after is Emman.
Less than a year after Emman’s passing, Kim isn’t pretending the pain is gone. He’s redirecting it.
For decades, his public image was simple: “anchored on curiosity and accessibility. He’s beloved not because he had all the answers, but because he made information approachable.”
Today that same generosity has a deeper purpose. After Emman died, strangers — mostly kids — started messaging him. He realized a reply could be life-or-death, so he did something un-celebrity: he enrolled in a course. He learned to listen without judging, and to always hand off to professionals because he “doesn’t know the medicine and science behind healing mental illnesses.”
He tells one story that still stops him cold. A young woman with Bipolar 1 told him she’d planned everything, and wrote as a final clause: “I will send a message to Kuya Kim. If he replies, I will postpone my plan.” He replied. He met her for coffee. He listened, referred her to a psychologist. “Imagine kung hindi ako nag-reply?”
That’s why he keeps showing up online.
His Father’s Day wish isn’t flowers or golf. It’s conversation.
“I want the stigma to lessen. I want the kids to be able to express themselves, not only through social media, but to their parents.”
He’s blunt with fellow Gen X and Boomer dads: our kids aren’t us. “Whatever worked for us during our time as Boomers and Gen Xers will not work with our kids who are Gen Z and Gen Alpha now.”
When older people call Gen Z “weak,” he corrects them: “Our kids are not weak. They are different. There’s a big difference between weak and different.” You can’t just cut social media, he says, because for them it’s not a distraction, it’s their social life and their classroom. Take it away and “they’ll be even more ill.”
And as a Born Again Christian, he’s clear: “mental health has nothing to do with faith… Mental illness is a disease. People get cancer. Pastors get cancer.” Faith helps him cope, it doesn’t replace treatment.
Kim doesn’t hide the hard parts. Emman’s room is untouched. Her whiteboard still has her social media deadlines, and “it actually still has her smell.”
He goes in every morning because his shoes are there, and he does his quiet time with his Bible beside her bed. He weeps. A fellow grieving dad told him to “tear off the bandage” instead of protecting the wound. So he does — daily.
Grief, he says, is not linear. First Christmas without Emman, at the same place they’d been with her the year before, was brutal. Some days feel like Day 1. Some days are joyful. Both are true.
Losing Emman didn’t make Kim stronger in the macho sense. It made him softer, more useful.
He’s become “more accepting of things that come… I can advise them, but I can never, ever, ever control them.” The best parenting advice he got recently came from his own kids: “Papa, chill.”
He’s also found purpose in what Emman left behind. At her wake, he discovered she had been DM-ing other struggling kids, giving advice even while she was ill herself. “That’s the purpose that I am pursuing now — to be as passionate, even more, than my Emman.”
And he holds tighter to the good. “There’s always a good purpose for whatever bad thing happened. That’s what I’m looking at now.” Watching Felicia accept her Harvard degree and Eliana graduate with highest honors wasn’t just pride, it was proof that joy can coexist with grief.
His message is simple and urgent, especially for Filipino tatays who measure love in overtime: “Sa lahat ng mga tatay, have fun with your kids… Because when they’re older, even if you wanna enjoy them, they do not enjoy us anymore. They’ll enjoy their friends. So while we have that window to enjoy our kids, have fun, play with them, spend time with them… Because, at a certain point, we can’t. Even if you want to, too late [anymore].”
That’s the new angle. Kuya Kim is still the explainer we grew up with, still curious, still approachable. Only now the trivia isn’t about weather patterns, it’s about how to stay in the room when your child is hurting, how to listen first, how to chill, and how to tear the bandage off every day so the wound can breathe.
After Emman, his life didn’t get easier. It got clearer. And for a father, that might be the better gift. (N. Ferrer/ Malaay)
ReyFort Media 
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