Richie Anne Castillo never saw anything unusual about her dad. To her, Richard was simply her dad.
But the other kids at school did. They teased and harassed her, calling her abnormal because her father had Down syndrome. That girl from Cebu City, in the Philippines, learned to hide him so they would stop making fun of her.
When Richard turned 50, on June 2, 2019, she was already 23 and wrote a letter on Facebook that began with an apology.
She apologized for being an absent daughter, for not taking him to the beach more often or visiting him more frequently, and for hiding him from her life because she was still, she wrote, the same little girl afraid of being bullied.
Then came the best part: she called him the strongest and bravest human being she knew. Needles, surgeries, a lifetime of dialysis, and hardly ever a complaint. “The doctors are still amazed” that he made it to 50, she wrote.
She knew he might not even know what Facebook was. Even so, she wanted the whole world to know how proud she was to be his daughter.