My Dad’s Greatest Gift

Tony Knight
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

Twenty years ago, it was just the three of us and we were all a bit uneasy. Small cell carcinoma brought us together in this hospital room in a way nothing else could. I was just north of my 28th birthday and my estranged sister was next to my father’s bed, staring intently at the highway of tubes and other devices he was connected to. I leaned back against a table at the foot of the bed, hoping for a moment of levity to break up the tension. I just didn’t know what to say, but was completely unprepared for what happened next.

“I’ve been such a bad father!” he blurted out, his eyes welling with tears I’d never seen before.

My dad was a man that always projected himself much larger than he actually was. He was proud in an old school way I never understood. Too proud to ever give me a hug, or tell me he loved me, or just watch me pitch my first little league game. This moment was devastating to me, not because I felt such a deep connection to him, but because for the first time in my life I felt what he felt. Instinctively, my sister and I rushed to comfort him; acting in unison for the first time in nearly 15 years. He didn’t elaborate, but I knew. My father wasn’t a terrible person at all. People who met him almost always liked him. I liked him too, but it seemed he liked other people a tad more. Despite living under the same roof, he was so absent from most of those key milestones in my life that I’d often look for others to take his place. That sense of loss finally caught up with him. I thought he had time to fight it, but lung cancer had a different plan.

I tucked that memory in the back of my mind for a long time and moved on, but ten years later it surged out during conversation with my neighbor. Out of the blue, I plucked out this memory and recounted it in a deeply surprising way. I found myself having to listen to my own voice in order to grasp its profoundness and realize my father’s most generous act. You see, it would have been so easy for him to have ridden out the rest of his life just as he’d lived it. Who would have blamed him if his public display of regret had been a very private one? Instead, he passed along one of the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life. As a parent, do the very best you can at the moment, and you won’t have any regrets later. Today, I’m the proud father of two lovely young girls and somehow that memory became part of my DNA. Though I’m deeply imperfect, when it comes to being a father, I don’t leave much on the table.

Twenty years on, I look back at my father’s incredible emotional courage with gratefulness. Without it, I could very well have been a different person.