“I love you, Dad”

That was the last thing I said to my Dad when I still knew for sure he could hear and understand me.

Some of you already know, some of you don’t, but my Dad died on the 15th of November.

To answer your immediate and obvious questions, he died of stage four lung cancer. Something he’d been living with for almost a decade.

The lung cancer was a result of his time in the Vietnam war. He was stationed at a base in Vietnam (Lai Khê) where Agent Orange had been used heavily. Many of the soldiers stationed there developed cancer later in their lives as a result.

Dad had lived with this cancer for so long beyond the time we were originally told he would survive that it sometimes felt like it would never get the best of him.

Then, this fall, he got Covid 19 and managed to survive that as well.

What we didn’t know at the time was that Covid had weakened him enough that his cancer was able to come back full force, and that was ultimately what overwhelmed him in the end.

My Dad and I were about as different as two people could be, except for maybe how much we both like to talk.

He was always the life of the party, always engaging other people in conversation (whether he knew them or not), always wanting to know how people were doing, and always interested in what he could do to help someone.

If someone on the street asked for money, Dad always gave them everything he had on him. Often apologizing to the person because he couldn’t give them more than he did.

He was that rare person who would ask how a person was doing and actually wanted to know.

He wasn’t a perfect person; none of us is.

But I never doubted his love for me and I admired him in so many ways.

Given that I lived in a different state and had my own family after a certain point, I saw less of my Dad than I used to.

But we still talked on the phone all the time.

He’d call me, and we’d talk, easily spending an hour or more on things we’d recently read, or learned, or watched.

Dad was also fond of giving me sermons on a particular spiritual topic or bible verse he’d recently had an epiphany on. Something which he always worried I disliked but that I actually enjoyed.

Then there were the random phone calls to apologize for something he’d done or said many years earlier that he regretted. Usually, it was something I couldn’t even remember happening or had already forgiven him for many times over.

But those calls always brought a smile to my face. How lucky to have a parent who was always looking back at their life and had that constant desire to make things right.

We all experience loss in different ways.

For myself, it’s been whenever I read, or hear, or learn something that I know my Dad would have enjoyed talking about.

I have that reflexive instinct to file it away so we can talk about it the next time one of us calls the other, only to remember I can’t call him anymore.

But how wonderful is it to have had a father you looked forward to talking to?

How wonderful is it to feel that loss because there was something to lose?

And how wonderful it was to get to tell my Dad one last time, “I love you, Dad.”