Time is a thief

Yesterday marked 12 years since my dad died.

Twelve years.

Sometimes that feels impossible, because grief has a strange relationship with time. A memory can make someone feel as though they were here yesterday, while the calendar quietly reminds you how many years have slipped away.

Time is a thief. And boy, does it move fast.

The older I get, the more I realize how wonderful youth is, and how completely unaware we are of it while we are living it.

I had a dad who took care of everything.

My car was always clean. The oil was always full. Somehow, the gas tank was miraculously never empty. Things were fixed before I realized they were broken.

My dad wasn’t the huggy type. He wasn’t a man who constantly told you how much he loved you.

He showed you through acts of service.

Love was a clean car and a full tank of gas. It was fixing something that needed fixing. It was working hard, providing for his family and making sure the people he loved were taken care of.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand that.

Now I do.

I wish I had savoured those moments more. I wish I had understood what an incredible luxury it was to have someone quietly looking after me.

I think about that when I remember the years when my own boys were little. Those years were wonderful, but they were also busy. I was tired. There was always somewhere to go, something to do, someone who needed something. My kids were in everything!

At the time, some days seemed endless.

Now I would go back and do every one of them again in a minute.

Only this time, I would know.

I would appreciate the little boy voices and the mess and the noise. I would understand that the ordinary Tuesday I was rushing through would someday be something I would give almost anything to experience one more time.

We rarely stop and appreciate the moment when we’re young because we assume there will always be another one.

It seems terribly unfair that we gain the wisdom to understand the value of time only after so much of it has passed.

Sometimes I think it would be wonderful if we could Benjamin Button our way through life, growing younger instead of older, carrying everything we have learned back with us.

Imagine being 25 with the wisdom of 54.

We would hug our parents longer. Rock our babies without worrying about the laundry. Sit around the table a little later. We would worry less about things that don’t matter and pay much more attention to the things that do.

This summer, our family lost Lyle’s dad, Gary.

Much like my own father, Gary showed his love through deeds.

He was one of the most magnificent men I have had the privilege of knowing. He took care of his family. We never wanted for anything, and his generosity seemed to have no limits.

Losing him reinforced something I have come to understand after 26 years in the newspaper business.

I often say you can tell how loved someone was by reading their obituary.

I have read a lot of obituaries over the years. Some are short. Some fill half a page. But the ones that stay with you tell remarkably similar stories.

They talk about who someone loved.

They talk about children and grandchildren, friendships and marriages. They talk about kindness, humour, hard work, generosity and the ways a person showed up for others.

You can sometimes feel the loss between the lines.

What they almost never talk about is stuff.

We spend so much of our lives working to buy things. Bigger houses. Better vehicles. Newer this. Nicer that.

And then, at the end, none of it makes the obituary.

The things that remain are the people we loved, the people who loved us and the ways we made their lives a little better while we were here.

On Saturday, I climbed a big mountain.

When I finally reached the top, I stood looking out at the clouds and that enormous blue Alberta sky. For once, I wasn’t rushing anywhere.

I just stood there.

And I thought about my dad. I thought about Gary. I thought about all the people I have loved who are no longer here.

For a moment, standing high above everything, I had the strangest thought.

This is as close to them as I can get.

Maybe that’s why I keep climbing mountains.

Maybe somewhere along the way, I have learned that sometimes you need to climb high enough to stop, look around and remember just how precious the view really is.

Time is a thief.

So perhaps our job is to steal a few moments back.