The fireworks that sounded the night before my father died felt threatening. Not like the fireworks of years previous, where my face, up-turned to the night sky ooo’d and aww’d at the bursts of light. My father would be turning 67 today, June 20, on the Summer Solstice, the brightest day of the year, but he won’t turn 67 because he left this life at the age of 58. He died on July 5th, just 15 days after turning 58. All of these numbers I know by heart. But I don’t know the dosage of morphine the hospice nurse administered that finally allowed my father’s resistance to death to dissolve with his breath. My father loved life. Were he a card in a deck of tarot, he’d surely be The Lover, the one who showed me just how to decorate life with all the glitter and shine. His belief in life juxtaposed with his premonition around his own death was a paradox within the confines of which he both lived and died. But at the end, there was an unrest, a surreal blanket of fog enveloping the six months from diagnosis to death, a feeling like it just shouldn’t have been him.

The nurse who finally told my father he was going to die, the one who answered him when he asked, “How long do I have?” She was a gentle soul with the spirit of the deer. She had soft brown hair, framing her face in feathers and doe eyes that conveyed a depth of compassion that made me want to be better, do better, love better. She was not the one who was ultimately there at the end, but she is the one I remember the most. She sat on the edge of my parents’ bed, next to my father, before the hospital bed arrived. She sat on the edge of that bed on the 20th of June, his final birthday, and delivered the news to my father that we were all too scared to speak. “A week...two at the most.”

As I shifted my eyes from the green of the comforter, I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap as I sat at the foot of the bed, and my skin looked red. I felt what could best be described as relief as my father’s head collapsed into his palms, as he shook his head and said, “I just can’t believe this.” Something happens in me when the sword cuts through any kind of denial I’ve been an accomplice in perpetuating. It’s like chains are broken, and I can finally breathe again. I am no longer responsible for holding a lie in the name of protecting someone else.

A week before his birthday, when my father was still choosing to go to dialysis in a wheelchair we had to lift him in and out due to the overwhelming weakness in his body, he asked me to pick out his clothes. My father loved to be stylish. His wardrobe was all glitter, not in the literal sense, but figuratively, you know - brand names, bright colors, intriguing patterns - simple but interesting. My fingers passed over the folded Under Armor shirts, finding the royal blue, the one that matched his eyes, those deep set eyes unders sandy brows. The muscles in his body atrophied, his legs like a chicken’s, his cheeks sunken, the gray stubble on his face and then the sharp Under Armor tee and three-striped Adidas warm-ups. I could just break with the memory of it.

My dad visits me from time to time in my dreams. Sometimes he’s sick, but sometimes he’s perfectly well. He might tell me that the doctors fixed the cancer and that he’s back to normal and ready to play. Once, in a waking dream, the kind that comes with a deep and intentional visualization, I met my dad on a beach. He was laughing and shining so bright, like the light of the sun could be no match for his wonder. I ran in and out of the crashing waves, my feet gliding atop the warm, wet sand. He approached me and opened out his hand to reveal the most beautiful pearl, gesturing in his expression that it was for me. Taking a moment to revel in the sight of him, so alive, standing across from me before I received his gift, I marveled at how just when it seems nothing makes any sense, it all suddenly does. Like the paradoxes ride on rockets into the sky and burst into a million sparks of light, and every time the boom of a firework blasts through the night, one more “should” or “shouldn’t” bursts along with it. Of course it shouldn’t have been him that died, but it was, and it will someday be all of us, and that is half of what it is to be alive. To say, I want one more day. One more day to live life in all of its glitter and shine. My father passed to me the pearl of the truest wisdom.

God, how my life does sparkle.