This column in the first person is the experience of Jessica Huras, who lives in Toronto and Stratford, Ontario. For more information about the first person stories of CBC, please See frequent questions.
The year my daughter was born, Isabelle Josephine, was the year I knew that my father, Joe, was dying of cancer. Welcome to a child and lose a loved one have a way to collapse time, taking it to the past even when life advances.
After the arrival of Izzy in January 2022, my parents unearthed, old photo albums, amazed at how much it looked like a baby: the same head sprinkled with reddish hair, the same bright smile and in narrowed eyes, a feature I am quite sure that we both obtained from my dad.
But after his diagnosis that fall, I could not look at those photos in the same way.
Joe Dawdy was 42 years old when I was born, and the images show him smiling at the beginning of paternity, his thick and dark hair. These images were a contrast to the man in front of me: only a little gray in his hair but older and faded, in front of the end.
The contrasts began to develop in real time. The joy of the first of Izzy was reflected by the pain of my father’s harsh.
His first wobble steps only a few weeks before he needed help to get out of bed. His first bites while he quickly lost his appetite. His percaramed in his lap to listen The night before Christmas for the first time; He gave the final performance of an annual vacation tradition that began as a child.
Learn to love, unconditionally
When Izzy was born, I did not feel the instant and overwhelming love that some parents speak. Moments after childbirth, he had an apnea episode and stopped breathing. It was urgently taken to the special care unit and connected to a breathing machine. I couldn’t even hold her for more than one moment. He spent his first week in that unit, hidden in a transparent plastic cradle under hard lights, the cables that are resolved on his small body.
I loved her, of course, but she felt scary and distant, as if she were seeing someone else to become a father.
That explosion of love did not arrive in the birth room. He arrived in silence, weeks later, feeding it at 3 am in our room with little light: his little body curled up against mine, we both slept half asleep.
It was the same as I felt sitting in my parents’ room, looking at my dad.
These were the first times that I really understood what it meant to give unconditional love.
He had grown surrounded by that. My parents loved me fiercely, protectively, smoothing every blow on the way they could. When I became an adult, my father maintained all the manuals for my appliances and technological articles perfectly filed in the basement, so that I could be ready to go and fix anything to break. When I visited in the winter, I would find that my muddy boots were cleaned and polished the morning I left.
He worked at Canada Trust, TD TD, in one of those works that he does not fully understand when he was a child. I used to think I was at HR. After his death, I saw his title listed as “Supervisor of the call center” in a form in the funeral home.
But it really didn’t matter. His work did not reflect what he loved, which was to read and learn.
It was my first editor and even a decade in my career as a writer, I would send soft notes with adjustments to my published work. Sometimes he worried about overcoming, but his editions were always thoughtful, always friendly. I find myself wishing to edit this essay: tighten the structure, add a missing comma, remind me to be clearer.
His love was quiet and constant: so easy to receive and too easy to assume.
When he got sick, my husband and I packed our car every week and we took more than an hour to London, Ontario, to live part -time with my parents so that we could make the most of any time left.
It was difficult: to raise a baby half of the week away from our own home, wake up at night to help with their pain medications, see it escape slowly. But he taught me that love is a presence, not dramatic or heroic, only appears every day, even when it is unbearably difficult.
Where love ends and starts again
In September 2023, his condition had worsened and wanted to die at home, in the house where I grew up. In those last days, my mother, my sister and I sat next to her bed from dawn to dusk. He had slipped against unconsciousness, lying on a rented hospital bed pushed against his so that my mother could still sleep by her side, holding her hand during the night.
The wait reminded me of Izzy’s birth: the slow and uncertain timeline. The sense of inevitability. Waiting for the first breath. Waiting for the last.
My parents’ room became a place of transition. It was where my dad moved from life to what comes later, and where I crossed a new type of adulthood. For the first time, I understood that his love, regardless of how deep, could not protect me from the only thing I was not ready to face: lose it.
He changed how I see the raising of the children.
My dad tried to protect me from pain, but I have come to understand that work is not to protect his son from difficult things, it is to love them through him. To show them how to live bravely in a world that, inevitably, will break your heart.
I want to raise Izzy with the same unconditional love that my dad gave me, as well as with the resilience that I only found when I had to say goodbye to him.
There is a saying: “Pain is only love without a place to go.” But I know exactly where my love should go.
My dad would want every ounce of not spent love that I have for him poured into the granddaughter whom I named him.
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