Nicole Lieurance, staff writer

And in an instant, it could all be over

By: Nicole Lieurance

Posted: 10/29/07

I never knew my father very well. This became all the more apparent as I sat in a funeral home on Oct. 19 trying to fill in the details of his life.

"Where was he born?" asked the funeral director gently as he filled out the paperwork.

Luckily, my uncle and stepmother were there to answer, but frankly, I was stumped. I also didn't know what his major was when he attended SJSU more than 30 years ago.

Like many marriages, my parents' ended in divorce.

From a very young age, I lived apart from my dad, and we never developed a close relationship.

Yet, to say I didn't know my father would be untrue. Quiet and stoic, he was a hard person to get to know, and I suspect I knew him better than most. The few times we did spend more than an hour or two together were memorable: fishing in the rivers of Montana and hiking through the Arizona desert in the springtime.

As I got older, however, I filled my schedule with other things, and my time with my father tapered off to a few hours once a month or so. In those awkward, stiff encounters, I would sit across the coffee table from him and exchange small talk.

I was forced to re-evaluate my time, however, when last year he was diagnosed with having carcinoid tumors. His doctor did not expect him to live more than another five years.

I considered what I should say - what I should do now that I had a time frame for the rest of my father's life. But how to build a close relationship where one never was?

I was still pondering this problem when he found a surgeon who could remove most of the tumors, extending his life by five to 10 years. He elected for the surgery, and it was successful.

Things returned to a state of relative normality for a while, and I no longer felt as much urgency to visit. Then on the morning of Oct. 18, while getting ready for work, my father collapsed suddenly and never woke up.

***

It's a cliché but it's but true: You never really know what you have until you've lost it. At times over the past few years, I wished I was closer to my dad. The emotional gorge between us was daunting.

I didn't know then how to bridge that gap. In reflection, the answer was there in my past, in the Arizona desert and the Montana rivers, so to speak. The phrase "quality time" comes to mind, and I know now that it didn't come out of all those coffee-table conversations.

How would it have changed things to spend an entire weekend with him and do something we would have both enjoyed? It's too late to know, but I suspect it might have been a start.

You can't force closeness, but it will often come on its own if the time spent together is meaningful. True intimacy comes from those quiet moments at the end of a long day together, and true conversation comes when it's not forced.

Too often, we slot our time into small "single serving" packages, jumping from engagement to engagement without letting ourselves linger too long. If we aren't careful, our relationships can become shallow and sometimes break.

One of our Spartan Daily advisers reminded us last month that it's important to make the distinction between what's urgent and what's important. The difference sometimes gets lost in the midst of deadlines for school and work, and we forget that there are things that matter much more to us in the end than a failed paper.

As I sat in the funeral home that day, I came face-to-face with how unpredictable life can be. Though we may think otherwise, we never know how much time we have with those we love.