Dad

Two months ago today, I lost my Dad -- one of the greatest people I've ever known.

My father was the best father a little girl ever could have hoped for. I am proud to be his daughter, and I am proud of him for what he experienced and created with his life. I feel lucky to have known him and to have been close to such a good human.

When I was a kid, my Dad was everywhere, with me all the time. I was almost always in his orbit. Everything he was interested in, I became interested in too. To see him I would brave the painful barefoot walk across the rough gravel he had laid in the driveway connecting our house to his workshop. I'd hang around his dark, dusty shop, both when he was there and when he wasn't. If he had finished his work and was sitting in contemplation, I'd ask him for life advice on childhood and future adulthood matters. If he was off somewhere else on the farm, I'd approach his workbench carefully like an archeologist at a prehistoric site. I'd behold his tools lying around, the offcuts of wood he'd cut, and his carpenter's pencil, freshly sharpened by his knife. He was always full of ideas and always making something. I looked up to him, wanted to be him. I saw myself as a miniature version of him.

As we grew older, our identities became more distinct. Physically and emotionally we lived on opposite sides of the world for my whole adult life. In the last decade, he lived in a small town on the east coast of the U.S., far away from where we came, and I lived on a continent at the end of the Earth. We both had valid reasons for our choices -- we were following the sun and our own hearts. We were no longer joined at the hip, but still I felt he just a phone call away.

After he lost his voice to throat cancer three years ago, we could no longer call each other. It broke my heart. Our communication and knowledge of each other reduced to a trickle. I would visit once a year, and those would be meaningful but emotionally intense visits for me, knowing that I was losing him little by little. Our last visit together was in the Grand Canyon in September last year. At that time he was still walking and driving, smiling and being hopeful. I went back to Australia thinking he was regaining his strength and was beginning to start living again. Then in late May, I was in Scotland for work when I received news that he had had a small stroke. He was recovering well, I was told, doing physical therapy and getting better. But then in the subsequent weeks, things took a sharp turn. In his final month of life, there was radio silence. Being in Australia, not knowing much at all about how he was doing, and not being able to talk with him on the phone or even get a message from him felt like a horrific death before his real death. When I arrived, he was lying unresponsive in a hospice bed, with hardly any semblance of his body left, but still breathing strong. I'm convinced that if it were up to him, he never would have given up. It was heart wrenching to see, yet I was happy that we could finally be in the same room again.

Now that he has transitioned out of this existence and into the next one, I am relieved that he is no longer confined to a single point anymore, far away from me. I feel happy for him that he is no longer confined to a single house or single farm on the east coast, no longer confined to a single chair or sleeping position, to a day full of pain medications, or to a notepad and pen. He is now back under the care of Mother Nature, where he is truly free. Back in the hands of Nature, the all-giving, all-caring, all-encompassing home, he is closer to how he was when I first knew him. Once again he is everywhere, all around me -- in the pensive furrow on my brow, in the glimmer of hopeful ideas in my eyes, in my brother's purposeful walk and his ambitious plans, in the innocent calm trust on his granddaughter's face, in the cells of the wood that he so lovingly carved and would watch crackle in the fire in his shop, in the babble of the streams where he would fish and canoe, in the rise and setting of the sun, which followed loyally through each of his days, and in the stars under which he'd dance to a good country ballad.

I admire this man. I look up to him still and still want to be him. Luckily he is now all around me once again, always and forever. That's how huge of a soul my Dad is.

May you enjoy the eternal peace and beauty of Nature, Daddy. I will always love you.