Memories - By Tyler

Big day of more visitors coming. If you want to come, please please do. 

What do you do when you know your soon losing a pivotal part of your life?  How do you cope? How do you deal?  My dad has been the strongest man I have ever known. He has helped me through everything that has come in the 42 years I have been alive.  I don’t have a lot of sentimental memories that don’t contain him.  He has been my hero for my entire life.  My go towhen I need mechanical input, my hunting partner, my whole life.  Dad has always been there to help me through whatever I needed.  

 

When we found out about the cancer in February, we were all upset, scared and broken hearted.  Then we came together as a family and decided we should go on a trip we were told roughly 3-5 months.  Seems like the next day everything went downhill.  With the Fluid Draining from his chest, and the pain meds our 3-5 months is getting shorter by the day, by the week.  I go by the house as much as possible to see him because I know it won’t be much longer till I can’t see him anymore.  But at the same time seeing the cancer eat his strength is breaking me inside.  I try to sleep, and I see him in my dreams, I see our past experiences and relive them over and over.

 

1.) Waiting at the airport for his plane to land.  Mom trying to control the four of us at the terminal gate waiting for those doors to open so we could go running up to hug him after he was gone for a month.

2.) Collecting golf balls in the river in Windermere when we floated down for the first time.  

3.) Learning to waterski and forgetting to let go of the rope and dad diving off the boat to come save me as I became a human sub.

4.) On vacation overseas when we were feeding the monkeys and them chasing me and mom and dad yelling to run at the same time holding the video camera to catch it all on tape.

5.) Countless construction projects in the shop building something or fixing a truck or a car.  Learning to work on cars and thinking there is nothing dad didn’t know about them. 

6.) My first deer hunt.  Being dropped off on the top of the ridge to push the bush down and him driving around to the other side.  But I shot the deer at halfway down and had so much energy that I drug it up to the top of the hill before he could get back.  

7.) Snowmobile trips in the mountains.  Having to ride a sled backwards down a mountain because the thing powered out just before the top.  Then siting there in the cold and changing the jets in the carbs so we could keep going.

8.) Quad trips and camping trips getting stuck.  Jeff, Dad and I at the mud bogs drinking and having fun till we had to help dad into his tool truck to sleep because he couldn’t keep up with his kids drinking!

9.) Him standing there at my wedding looking so happy for me and being there for me.  To him hugging me and comforting me when I got divorced.

10.) The stories of being picked up by the antlers of the caribou in the old house when he went to hang it and I was under foot and too close.

11.) Breaking the engine mounts on mom’s snow mobile,jumping a beaver dam.  

12.) Fishing in the creek in BC and catching the 18lb Brook Char.

13.) Mom and Dad dancing on speakers at the silver bullet on my 18th birthday.  

14.) Dad being the apex predator in a game of Predator and Prey at my grade 6 camping trip.

15.) Or driving my car down south to sell it on the trailer and the car falling off and stopping the trailer in its tracks.  

16.) More recent trips like last year when we went to work together in Cold Lake and caught 50+ lake trout for two days before I had to work a day and come home.

17.) I remember him saying he was proud of me.  I remember how that made me feel because I didn’t think he was.  When I was at my worst, and he said that to me it lit me up inside.

People keep asking me, what can they do? What can they say?  Well, the answer is this!  Send us an email or a letter of some memories you have had with my dad.  Let us live your memories of him as we have lived our own.  Shower us in the love and stories he has shared with you, so we can share the memories together.

 

I will miss the amazing stories, all the tales of things that happened when he was working overseas.  From boar hunts inthe long grass in Indonesia to giant snake skins and practical jokes on the rig with friends.  Pictures that tell stories like the small monkey dad used to have that lived in his file cabinet.  Or plane rides where I was the “most adorable, quite child” on the plane till we landed, and I puked on some guy.  I am blessed to have seen more of the world than some people dream of following dad around his work and traveling with my family.  

 

We go through life thinking people will always be around, so we put off trips and adventures because there is always more time.  Well things happen and time is abruptly ripped from our graspas we have learned.  There are trips still waiting to be had that I now know I will never get a chance to have. Like salmon fishing in Alaska or Halibut fishing off the coast.  There will always be regrets for the things we didn’t do but I would trade nothing in my life.  I have had 42 years with my father, and I cherish every one of them.  But I will long for more time always. No amount of time will ever be enough, but I am grateful for the time we had and the little time I still have left.

 

Love Always,

 

Tinker Tyler