I think about my dad a lot When you really love your parent, it doesn’t matter if it was the right time for them to leave, it doesn’t matter if they lived a long and good life. You still want more. The one thing I always think about is a conversation I had with him while he was sick with Parkinson’s disease.

He was suffering from hallucinations at night, which is one of the symptoms of Parkinson’s. He would wake up in the middle of the night and be convinced that someone was in the living room smoking. Of course when he turned on the light, the person would disappear…but this started happening more frequently. Finally he told me about it. When he was describing it, he said to me “Then I was very brave and told him to get out of here!” After talking to my dad further, I spoke to the doctors about it. But I didn’t try to talk him out of it…it was very real to him, but I told him that turning on the light would make him go away. (Being thrifty, he’d always turn out the light when he went to bed!)

Thankfully, we were able to get him medication which stopped the hallucinations. But I never forgot what he said to me…that he was very brave. There isn’t anything more heartbreaking than someone you love telling you about being brave in the face of something scary. Even at 83, you can be scared at night. It was my turn to make the monsters disappear at night…just like he did for me when I was little.