I held my father’s hand as he took his last breath of this life.

It was 2014, and my father was in a nursing home living out his last days. I can still recall pulling up to that nursing home for the very first time and seeing the dingy brick building with two employees standing just outside of the front door smoking cigarettes. A man and a woman. Both wearing uniforms. Both, by appearance, in bad health themselves. I remember thinking they were each one shift away from becoming residents in the nursing home themselves.

As I entered the building and walked the dirty halls, I could smell urine and less identifiable foul smells.

This was my father’s last stop before his passing. It was somehow simultaneously appropriate and sad. You see, even while dying from cancer he could not find it within himself to be civil to the very people taking care of him. He had been literally kicked out of other nursing homes, and every other place that had a possible opening turned him down for care within their facility. It seems, word spreads quickly.

I would like to be able to say it was the cancer that made him this way, that somehow the cancer had stolen part of his mind and that he was actually a good man. But that would be a lie. The truth is, I have only known my father to be an angry, bitter man. One who held this world, and God, in contempt for ever having allowed him to be born in the first place.

I think this world, this life, just beat him up until he felt like he couldn’t win. He suffered a tragedy that fractured his life in a way that he could never get beyond. When he was just 7, he fell under a train ultimately losing his arm and his leg. But I suspect he lost so much more from the events of that time in his life. Most of the damage you could not see. I believe he allowed that moment to define the rest of his life. Always feeling inferior to others, embarrassed, a failure. Masking those feelings through his verbal and physical assaults on our family, and others.

How many of us allow a tragedy to alter who we are until we simply emerge as a completely different person?

Here was a man who at one point in his life had a registered IQ of 152, who could draw better than most, and who, when I was a teen, did advanced math problems on a sheet of paper that he somehow just simply knew. Numbers and symbols printed across his mind.

Yet one accident was the defining moment of his life, and it ate through him long before the cancer ever did.

I think many of us are like that. Going through this life allowing the pain of one event from our past to stop us from living the life we were meant to live. Allowing our past to define our future. It tears away at us every day until it alters our very spirit; until we end up living an unfulfilled existence where our goals and dreams of yesterday become the regrets of tomorrow.

In his last moments, he was unresponsive though his whole body labored to stay alive. I kept assuring him it was going to be okay. He struggled to breath until he could not struggle any longer, and finally let go. I was holding his hand as I silently said my goodbyes.

I carry those moments with me and have thought of them often throughout the years. I didn’t shed a tear though I was grieving inside. I was not grieving because of the loss of my relationship with my father. I had made the tough decision to sever ties with him years beforehand. His anger, and unpredictability weren’t something I wanted in my adult life having had no choice but to live with it throughout my childhood.

I was grieving the loss of opportunity, the loss of hope. Hope that one day he might find his way out of his anger and we could have some resemblance of a relationship. I was grieving the thought that my father never really loved me. He never told me; those words never crossed his lips. And as I search my past for signs that he might have, I am hard pressed to find any proof that he expressed it in more subtle ways.

And what saddens me even more… I never told him that I loved him either. And as I search my past for signs that I might have shown him, I am again hard pressed to find the proof that he somehow just knew that I loved him too.

Tough lessons to learn.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from his life though is that we all have a limited amount of time to actually live. A limited time to squeeze as much life out of life as we possibly can. I refuse to be on my deathbed fighting to hold on just a little longer because I did not actually live while I had the chance.

The human experience is tied so closely to pain, but its tied so closely to joy too, if we stop to look for it once in a while. And mystery, adventure, challenges, friendships, love, lost love, and so much more. We all face untold challenges and tragedies that threaten to steal our future if we allow that to happen.

Refuse to live small. Refuse to allow the events of your past to determine your future. Refuse to carry regret to your deathbed.

Save Nothing for the Next Life