Years ago, the yearbook editors in the high school where my father taught asked the teachers to include the best advice they ever got next to their photos in the annual. My father's: "Live each day like it was your last and one of these days you'll be right."
I'd forgotten about that until quite recently. But, when Dad died unexpectedly in his sleep at the start of the summer, I wrote his obituary and mentioned that he spent the day preceding his death doing things he loved. Not because of something he said while I still was really young but because it was Dad, living an authentic life.
That makes me grateful. It sets an example I strive to follow; I don't always succeed but I'm getting better at it. When I think about my dear father being gone or that my lovely mother is frail, or when I think about things that have hurt me, it's a challenge. But if I didn't try, then what's left? As long as I try, I have a fighting chance of fulfilling his advice, his example. And it gets a little easier.
I got sober a year ago last month. Had I lost Dad a year or more earlier, I am pretty sure I'd have gone into a tailspin, existing in a self-created mess from which it would have been much harder to extricate myself and probably not until there had been real, and potentially irrevocable, damage. Sobriety is a gift. I never let myself forget that.