I don’t think there’s any way any of us knows how to best prepare for someone who is close to us who is dying.

I’m not going to say it’s harder (because it’s never easy),

but it’s definitely a unique situation when the person dying is someone who is supposed to be someone close to you (in this case, my father),

but then you’re not that close, so we have this huge mountain of unfinished business.

Business that will never be addressed or tended to, because that was never the nature of our relationship, from the beginning.

Sometimes I mourn the father/daughter relationship that we never had. I know my father has been burdened by tremendous health problems most of his life, so I can forgive him, in some ways.

Trips like this do remind me though how much family is how we build it and nurture it around us. That family is in the love of those who care about us, not necessarily in those who are blood related to us.

We can’t take money with us to the grave, and yet it never ceases to amaze me the excuses human beings come up with to be greedy and hoard it.

I am only alive today because of the love and care of a family that I am not blood related to. I’m glad I’ve had this time with my father, and I treasure and smile over the things we share in common,

and I mourn what could have been that never was and it never will be.

It’s time to wrap up, make my peace, and get back to the family I’m grateful to have.

The next time I’m in Ottawa I’ll be visiting my father’s gravesite.

Someone very close to me nailed it when he said that my father was shocked because I was doing something for him he would never even consider doing for me.

Sometimes love just isn’t a two way street. It doesn’t mean the love doesn’t exist or it isn’t real, it just means it is what it is.