The picture of dad finishing the Chicago Marathon with a giant grin on his face is one of my favorites. Sure, the photo was taken over four hours into his run, but he is doing it, doing what he set out to do and accomplishing his goal. We trained for that marathon together my senior year of highschool, but a chance at a state volleyball tournament veered me from the race that day, so I trained again on my own, years later, to finish my marathon. But it wasn’t running the race that mattered, it was the time we had together on the training runs that I remember.

Dad and I would lace up our shoes and head to the Rock Island Trail that stretched over 20 miles from just outside of Peoria to the little town of Dunlap where my brothers and I went to school. On weekends we would stride beneath the leafy deciduous trees for our long runs, not talking, just running.

My Dad and I never really talked much, I learned to be comfortable with silence, with another’s presence without having to fill the space with words and distractions. We were comfortable like that. Like father, like daughter.

I can see myself in his goal-drivenness. And of course, my Mom is that way too. We decide something, we do it. We want to achieve something, and we work towards it.

I think I also got my voracious love of reading from him. He was always reading something, and I followed suit.

I grew up at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where he worked in computing services on the campus. I remember a fantastic mural of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man made up of thousands of little tiles of animals and plants. I spent hours in the natural history museum wondering at dinosaur skeletons and other treasures. I took art and Shakespeare classes during the long summers, and I know my love of knowledge grew during those years.

When we later moved to Peoria, Illinois, so he could become Bradley University’s Director of Computing, he would walk out of the house in suits, a very respectable man. When I started attending Bradley after high school, I got a job in his department and would stop in to say hi a few times a week. Those summers, I worked with a crew cleaning computers in trashed dorm rooms, readying them for the next year, and still stopping in to visit with Dad from time to time.

Once I joined the Peace Corps and started my hiking career, I didn’t make it home much, but when I did, he and Mom were always moving in some new direction. While I was in grad school, they decided to build their earth sheltered home in the middle of the Illinois countryside, not far from the Illinois River near the little town of Havana. He called that poured concrete home with dirt on the roof their hobbit hole and it was the most lovely, comfortable nest…although cell phone signals didn’t often make it through the 5 feet of dirt on the roof.

It was a conventional life filled with lots of unconventional highlights, like the hobbit hole.

In 2020, it was undeniable. My Dad’s memory was going. In a gut-wrenching decision, my parents decided to leave their dream home in the midst of the pandemic and move down to Louisiana, where my Mom grew up. The promise of an extensive family to assist during this trying time and close access to medical care helped make the decision easier. The hobbit hole was at least an hour from a hospital, and only one brother and his family were left in Central Illinois to help out.

My mom still has multiple siblings in the Lafayette area, and they stopped by frequently to visit. Cousins would bring food, and as my dad’s dementia became full-blown Alzheimer’s over the 5 slow years of his decline, the help increased. When I came to visit, Dad and I would walk around the neighborhood every day. He loved his walks…much like I do. For a while they had a little German Schnauzer, Lily, and he would share the same daily joke with me on our walks, “She’s leaving a pee-mail,” he would grin as Lily lifted a leg on yet another mailbox. I would laugh and ask him about the air force again…those older memories were rooted deeper, and he could usually recall some tidbit with interest.

It was hard to see Dad decline into memory loss, and at the end, a vacant stare, but often with a sweet smile on his face.

Sweet is the right word for it. I was visiting for the holidays last year when I was diagnosed with cancer. At first, we didn’t tell Dad what was happening because we weren’t sure if he would understand or perhaps get upset. Instead, when he learned about my illness, he wanted to give me anything he could from his body to make me whole again. He offered up his veins, his blood…anything he could to help me get better.

When I got out of the hospital on Christmas Eve in 2024, I was able to go home with my parents, Kirk, and my brother Dan. It was the best Christmas present ever. And we still walked! By that time, my Dad had full-time caregivers with him at all times, even during the night. My mom was committed to keeping him at home where he was most comfortable, and while I was waiting to be stable enough from my neck surgery to fly back to Oregon to start my cancer treatments, we would walk. Dad and I holding hands, me with my neck brace on, shuffling along, and Dad with his Panama hat on, weaving on and off the sidewalk, our caregivers following close behind me. April on his side, Kirk on mine.

I didn’t know those would be the last walks we would take together, but man, oh man, they were everything. We didn’t always talk. We just moved at the same pace, side by side.

Dad fell this spring and broke his hip. Some kind of connection broke between his mind and his body, and he never walked again. Mom made him the most comfortable she could at home, and he was put on hospice care. I visited a few times, he sometimes recognized me, sometimes not, but we didn’t need to talk, I was sure he could feel my presence and we could sit in silence as we had often done.

We were all able to visit him one last time in June.

My Dad passed away on August 4, just a few weeks shy of his 77th birthday and my parents’ 51st wedding anniversary.

He was the best Dad.