It’s interesting what haunts your memory when you’re the most vulnerable. Routine machine noises and looming chemical smells in the air were meaningless until just two years ago, where they painted the background of the days I sat beside my dad’s hospital bed. Sometimes death is swift and ruthless, sometimes it waits for you to accept it as an inevitable reality before it shows its face. For my dad, it was both of those.

The first days of his stay were the most promising. I envisioned him making jokes to the nurses as soon as he woke up from the coma, just to calm me. I knew he’d ask about what I was doing in school and he’d probably lecture me about keeping my door locked or something. The following days passed only with small improvements in his health, but my family and I stayed optimistic. Losing my dad was unfathomable for as long as it could be; it was foreign enough to see the strongest man I ever knew appear so powerless.

That final week of his hospital stay I was numb from the emotional roller coaster, where the one last light at the end of the tunnel of his recovery faded away from our hopeful vision. Here he was, the man who encouraged me to tough my problems out and to never give up, succumbing to what had at first seemed like a simple illness. His organs began failing and there was nothing the doctors could do. Encouraging my dad to wake up turned into simply promising him that we'd be okay.

The last Saturday of his life I sat in the hospital chapel and prayed to my dad, knowing surely there was somewhere beyond the material world he could hear me. Two short yet grueling weeks on life support finally came to an end when my mom and I saw him take his last breath. Dad was gone and not even the awful feeling in my gut, the one I had the minute I found out he had gone down, could’ve prepared me for accepting that reality.

Fate teased my family in those two weeks, waving the prospect of his recovery in our face many times and then jerking it away. Death taught me resilience, as few experiences in my life will ever be so gutting and so difficult. But it also taught me to distrust happiness, that there's always an end in sight to everything that brings us joy. What’s crueler than death itself are life’s uncertain twists and turns that betray the only hope we can cling to. I rejected the idea of him no longer being in this world every day until the day I felt my heart sink and finally on the night it became so real I broke down over it on my roommate’s shoulder. Every last thing I said to my dad in the hospital was never met with a response, and for the longest time while he was in there my greatest fear was having it end that way.

I don’t know a lot of people my age who have dealt with a death of a parent, but I’d like to think some people my age know the many ways of dealing with death itself. Every now and then I listen to my dad’s old voicemails and my dreams of him so often seem like he’s never even left this world. I regretted letting every story of his go in one ear and out the other, or every time I disrespected him as a grumpy teenager.

But I was thankful, too. Thankful my dad stayed at home to raise me and used that opportunity to instill the value of education and curiosity in me from a young age. I’m thankful my dad taught his family the therapy of humor and laughter, where even at his death it was our medicine. I continue to relearn the many lessons he taught me and every day I find one more thing that makes me appreciate his memory even more.

Everybody figures out what death is, but they don’t tell you how to respond to it. They don’t tell you’ll have normal emotions even when there’s a permanent knot your stomach or that in-between the crying, you find yourself desperate for any reason to laugh. Losing my dad was heart-wrenching as it was empowering. I forfeited excuses I made for myself because if I could withstand an experience like that, I could do anything. I loved my family even more and realized the preciousness of my own life and my youth.

I think about my dad all the time, wishing I could have told him things I never talked to him about, wondering how he would feel about my life right now. My dad is still my guidepost no matter where he is in this universe; even in his memory I live through him and the values he brought me up with. I count my blessings and in many unconventional ways, losing him had its blessings too.