Silver Linings

Did my dad die while still in his prime from a terrible disease that struck at random? Or did he stave off a killer for much longer than most anybody does, and manage to have a good few years of enjoying his hobbies and his family? If he were here to answer, unquestionably he would say simply, "Yes."

Pick up two different newspapers some time and read their coverage of the same event. What exactly happened? Perspective matters. Attitude matters.

Even though I had my dad for 31 years before cancer, and only four and a half with it, life before we entered the cancer universe is hard to separate in my memory. Earlier today I flipped through some pictures of a long ago visit to my parents' house. At the time we had "only" two kids, and the older one was not yet three. The baby was all of three months old. There are some great photos of my dad holding the baby, and as I tried getting into my memories of 2006-2007 it dawned on me that we weren't sure these two would ever get the chance to meet. He is the second of my parents' five grandchildren, and my dad got his diagnosis a couple of weeks before we even got to tell everyone that my wife was pregnant with him. As it turned out, they did have time together. The few years they got to enjoy each other's company was entirely too short, yes, but it was all borrowed time. When I think about it, I am grateful that there was any time at all.

Terminal illness forces you to mark time that you might have let slip by without a second thought. It makes a lot of first times that much more important, because they might be "only times". This was exactly the case with my baby daughter and my sister's baby son meeting my dad last spring. But instead of crushing myself with the thought that the grandchildren won't have their papa as they grow up, I try to focus on the silver lining: He got to see them all in the flesh - even the two who were weeks old when they lost him. He held them and kissed them and played with their tiny baby fingers and toes, heard them cry in the same room. Posed for more pictures than he probably wanted to, but that he knew we needed to have.

You can't squeeze a lifetime into a long weekend, but for the babies and for my dad, at least we had the long weekend.