This year marks 18 years since I’ve spent Father’s Day with my dad. In the early years, it was tough, but I thought I had managed to get over my sad feelings on Father’s Day. As this Father’s Day approached, I realized that I was experiencing the kind of immense sadness that I hadn’t felt in years.
I know that grief doesn’t have an expiry date, but I didn’t expect the intensity of my feelings. Thankfully, I recognized what was happening and decided to figure out how to work through it positively. I realized that I was missing my dad. Growing up, I knew that my dad wasn’t like a lot of other kids’ fathers. As a teen, I had friends tell me how lucky I was to have the relationship I had with my dad.
As I get older, I find myself missing my dad when I see the relationship other people have with their dads because it serves as a reminder of how lucky I am to have experienced the father I was blessed with. This year, I decided to do something to honour my dad in a lasting way.
I’ve been talking about doing charity work in my father’s name for years, and I didn’t know what that would involve, so I left it on the backburner. After the sadness I’ve been feeling lately, I decided it was a sign that I needed to start working on creating a legacy for my dad.
My dad died long before social media, and I don’t have a lot of digital images of him. If you Google my dad’s name, you can’t find him. I’ve decided that I want to give my dad a digital footprint by creating a foundation in his name.
Starting a foundation is one thing, but I needed to figure out what this foundation would do. My dad loved kids, and children loved him, so I think it’s only fitting that his foundation would serve children. I’ve decided that I’m going to create a non-profit foundation that will build and fund programs for underprivileged kids and their families in Canada and the Caribbean.
I’ve already completed a draft mission and vision statement for the foundation and its bylaws. The next step is to recruit board members. I don’t know if I would have accomplished any of these things if I wasn’t searching for a way to shake off the negative emotions I was feeling.
Grief may be a bastard, but we can use those emotions and transform it into something positive.