This is a novice mistake. If the worst thing you can think to do to a character is kill them, you're not thinking hard enough. There are all sorts of ways to get hurt. Love, family, friends, status, and property are but a few things that can be lost or threatened. Tension is conflict, and conflict can be found at all scales, tiny and large.

Tension, A Series of Definitions

The state of being stretched tight
Mental or emotional strain
A strained relationship
The relationship between conflicting ideas, qualities, demands, or implications.

How Do I Tension?

It's right there. You create a conflict. Conflict begets tension. Conflict of any size, that is important to your readers introduces tension into the story. It's not any more complicated than that, but of course picking the right conflicts is itself an art. You know if you're doing it right by the following

Literary Tension.

Tension is a measurable feeling of dissonance that a reader feels, that is in relationship to their expectations and hopes and feelings in a given moment in a story.

This often looks like it is caused by the immediate mystery of what might happen next; but, it is actually connected to the feelings you are generating within a reader; which might include the excellent feelings of expectation, uncertainty, and anxiety, but are not limited to those feelings.

Tension: Death

Death is a tense experience. It's traumatic. It is the thing many people fear the most. If you give it gravity & weight & make the thing that is dying familiar and loved, then the tension at the moment of the death, leading up to the death and even after the death is quite high. This correlation to emotion is not a mistake; tension is the measurement of emotion. That is why we value it in stories.

You can have near perfect information about an oncoming death being inevitable; and that will increase tension if you like the character and DO NOT WANT THEM TO DIE. That is the conflict. Your expectations/desires as a reader being in conflict.

Tension: Love

Can you have tension when you know two people will get together? Yes, if you ultimately don't know how or if the thing that you want ends up being different than the thing you know will happen. IE, you can know that two people end up happy together because you've seen the sequel. But, if option C is a much more likable person and leads to a much more likable relationship but can't be had for certain reasons, you may find that you actually want A & C to be together even though you know A & B together is just fine.

Of course it's much easier to inspire tension if your reader doesn't know whether A will end up with B or C; and D is threatening some sort of villainy to boot.

Tension: Situational

You may consider something like a power outage, which clearly ramps up the readers anxiety to be inspired by the lack of knowing what will happen. And it's true that this will happen; but this again enforces the wonderful definition above. Tension is the measurable feeling of dissonant emotions in a time and place within a story. In this case we're tweaking anxiety, perhaps fear; or even annoyance if we know who caused the power outage and feel some frustration towards that person. This type of anxiety might not play a role in our climax, but it can be a good thing to push interest early in the story before you've formed bonds with characters that can be pushed for higher levels of tension.

Tension: Etc

These were not nearly all forms of tension because tension results from the infinite spectrum of conflict. How do you tension? Take anything, set it at odds with anything else. The more that's in conflict and the stronger the emotion you are tweaking the higher the tension.

Your Problem

The tension in your prequel will have to do with reader expectations. You'll need to give them the hope for a better outcome, but serve them something inferior. In that way, even though they know the father will come out of this, they won't know in exactly what ways this will happen.

It would be a good idea to have this prequel affect some element you haven't expanded on so that there can be a sense of the unknown. Even though the unknown is not required for tension, it is a catalyst that makes tension stronger. Anything that increases the schism between what a reader wants and what they expect has the potential to increase tension.

This is often the reason so many prequels fail and I would caution you not to write one if you have another option at hand. If they're dealing with well known elements that lack of mystery does make it harder to write a lot of the little interceding bits.

A word of caution

If you piss off your readers, you don't get tension; you get bad reviews. There are obvious attempts to create tension that will instead piss readers off and send them running away. This is part of why writing is hard and everyone wants realistic, "good" writing.

Things to think about

Why does death, even though it is often expected, feel so tense?
Why does uncomfortable humor make you uncomfortable, even though you know so much about the situation?
If you know something bad will happen, what often accompanies that to make it more tense?
How do all those stories where people don't die, work?

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