One of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do, my dear, is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive. Jeanette Walls

My parents spent six weeks in Italy during my junior year abroad. Using Florence where I was living as a hub, they radiated their way to Rome, Venice and Milan, returning in between to spend time with me. Their Italian was elementary but serviceable. With her pale skin and blue eyes, no one mistook my mother for a local. But more than once, an elderly kerchiefed woman approached my father and began speaking rapidly to him in Italian. Did she need help or directions? He was never quite sure. Dad was Jewish but with his smooth olive skin, dark eyes, light suede jacket and old-world manners, I could see why the signore got mistook him for a fellow Italian.

Dad was eighty-one years old on that trip. Still working full time during the week and out in the yard raking redwood leaves on the weekends. With a sixty-year age gap between us, he was often mistaken for my grandfather. But because of his vibrancy, most people pegged him as being twenty years younger.

My college roommate had spent the last three years expressing quiet concern about what she saw as my disconnect from reality. “You realize that he’s in his 80s, right? I know he’s good health right now, but he’s not going to live forever. I’m worried that you’re going to be ambushed when he goes.”

I understand her point, but I couldn’t imagine my father slowing down, much less declining. Sometimes, in a quiet moment or late at night, I’d try on the idea as if I were in a play. Dad terminally ill. Dad bedridden. Dad dying. But I couldn’t picture it.

Two years later, Dad was diagnosed with colon cancer. By the time he called to share the news, he’d seen three surgeons and already decided there would be no follow-on treatment. If the cancer had spread or the malignancy couldn’t be removed, he would live the days he had left free of side effects or misery from either radiation or chemotherapy. At twenty-two years old, the decision made no sense to me, but I knew better than to argue with him.

The thought of losing him was terrifying. Work was a distraction, but on my walk home, the what ifs were all I could think about. Would I need to ask for a leave of absence? Return home to help mom care for him? Sit helplessly next to his bedside for whatever days he had left?

But the surgeon was able to remove the tumor with margins, and life returned to normal. I let my breath out and continued moving through the world as though Dad would live on indefinitely. Other than his cancer scare days, I couldn’t pre-grieve, no matter how hard I tried.

Dad lived another nineteen years, dying of old age at the age of 102. He slipped away quietly, free of pain, in my parents’ bedroom in the home I grew up in. When I was young, fretting over an upcoming test or a speech, he used to quote from the book of Matthew – “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” gently encouraging me to stop worrying about what I couldn’t control or might never happen in the first place.

If Dad fretted about his expiration date, he never shared those fears with me. He tried not to waste time on worry and instead be grateful for his good health and the opportunity to learn something new every day. He taught me there’s no way to prepare for our losses, no matter how certain or time-bound they are. We can’t rehearse our pain or practice for the aftermath. Even if we could, I doubt they’d diminish the eventual pain and all the unexpected ways loss can pummel us.

I miss Dad’s calm ways, more and more as I get older. When Molly or Dan is slow to answer a text or a dear friend celebrates becoming an octogenarian, I think of him and remind myself to take a deep breath. and wait until there’s a reason to be frightened. To stay in the moment and not suffer any more than I have to.