3 Years Without My Dad
This week marks three years since my dad passed away. It’s a date that always prompts deep reflection, and makes me contemplate lessons I’ve learned from the experience. Loss has a way of stripping away the trivial and leaving you with only what truly matters. Over the last three years, many core truths have solidified from losing my dad; here’s three of them that I try to embody each day I’m lucky enough to have.
Enjoyment and Action
The first and perhaps most visceral lesson is the sheer urgency of life and the necessity of finding a balance between enjoying the time you have and moving with haste toward your goals. Before this loss, time felt more flexible; now, I am acutely aware that none of us knows our expiration date. This realization is a strong reminder that you can’t afford to put off the things that truly matter, whether it’s life goals, vital conversations, spending time with loved ones, or anything else.
If there’s a dream you’ve been deferring, a skill you’ve wanted to master, or a life change you’ve been contemplating, the time to start is now. You must act as if the clock is running down, because it is. This doesn’t mean you have to rush through life, but you must move with intention and a commitment to your most important objectives.
While urgency is crucial, it means little if you don’t take time to appreciate the present. You have to delicately balance progressing towards getting what you want out of life while not forgetting to enjoy the ride, “losing the forest for the trees” as my dad would say. You have to find a way to chase your ambitions fiercely while simultaneously being present enough to enjoy the brief, beautiful moment you’re lucky enough to have. It’s amazing how quickly everything can change in life: cherish the moments you have while building the life you want.
Your Health is Everything
Your health is the non-negotiable prerequisite for everything else. “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one”. Without your mental and physical health, nothing else matters. When you lose your health, every single one of your goals, ambitions, and dreams are suddenly rendered secondary to the immediate, desperate need to simply be well again.
Your health is the actual springboard for your life. It’s the foundation from which you launch all else. A brilliant mind, incredible ambition, and relentless drive are all hindered, if not stopped entirely, without a healthy body and a sound mind to sustain them. If you neglect this foundation, everything you try to build upon it will eventually become unstable.
This means actively prioritizing your mental and physical health is paramount. Taking care of your mental health is just as important as taking care of your body. Investing in your well-being is the foundational work that allows you to pursue those million things a healthy person wants. Without it, you truly have nothing.
Hardship is Rocket Fuel
You can’t control always control the hardships you’ll face in life, but you can always control your decision of how to react to them and how to leverage them. My dad’s passing was, and remains, a tremendous source of pain, but losing my dad has also given me a level of motivation that to this day I struggle to express in words. I imagine the motivation I feel is something someone can only understand if they’ve experienced similar loss. I made a conscious choice early on to use the experience of losing my dad not as a weight that anchors me, but as a constant source of fuel for the fire to accomplish all the things I’m after in this game called life.
Hardship, when correctly channeled, is a powerful motivator. The pain becomes a driving force to ensure that the finite time you have is spent meaningfully. I often think of my dad during tough times and remember how lucky I am to be here experiencing all the things, good and bad, and how my dad would give anything to experience the same.
This is where the concept of protecting your motivation comes in. Time is a natural healer, and that’s a good thing; the sharp edges of grief eventually soften. However, as you begin to heal and come to terms with a difficult reality, it’s easy for that initial surge of motivation to fade. You have to actively fight against that normalcy. Protecting this motivation is essential to sustaining the urgency and commitment required to achieve the things that truly matter.
Dad,
Wherever you may be I hope I’m making you proud. Not a day goes by where I don’t think of you, how thankful I am to have had you in my life, the incredible life you worked hard to afford me, and the advice you’d give me if you could. I love you dad.
-Kevin Jr.