The day I didn’t want to arrive is here.

A year ago, my family and I walked into my Dad’s ICU room at Jefferson hospital, and Missy, the nurse who had been so compassionately caring for Dad, said to him, “Tony, can you tell your family what you told me this morning?”

She removed his breathing tube and mask, and he managed to say, “I want to go home.”

Missy clarified. “Not home like your house, but…. home, right?”

Dad said yes, and from that point on there were no more needles or tests or treatments. Missy slowly adjusted his morphine to the point where she could take the tubes and mask off for good and, surrounded by his family, at peace with God and the world, he went joyfully where he chose to go.

His death could not have been more beautiful and grace-filled. All the same, it was my first real meeting with grief, and since then the acquaintance we struck up has become an odd friendship, with all the stages and phases of intensity of a relationship.

So I didn’t want today to come. I didn’t want to reach the point where I could count the amount of time without him in something more than weeks or months.

I don’t want to relinquish that special status of the “firsts”—the first Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year with him not there. The pain of those moments was a form of connection, but more importantly, a form of immediacy. Keeping the pain of his passing fresh was a way of keeping him close.

One year is also a turning point in expectation. A month after a loved one passes, everyone gets it if you burst into tears for no apparent reason. A year out and it seems…imbalanced.

The problem is, my emotions aren’t cooperating with the established timeframe. A random memory can still take me from laughter to tears and back again with lightning speed, and I still cry when I hear the Sinatra song he sang to my Mom the last time he was able to sing.

Maybe someday I’ll feel differently about this. Maybe I’ll feel differently tomorrow. But whatever happens next week or month or moment, this is where I am now.

My family is gathered together again today. We’ve gotten away to the shore—a place that was special to my Dad. There is so much joy in remembering him, and so much comfort in the assurance of his continued presence in our hearts.

Each one of us here, though, has her or his own relationship with grief, and we have the chance to love each other better as a family by creating space for that relationship to play out the way it needs to in each person’s life.

The day I didn’t want to arrive is here. I can’t change that, and I’m giving myself the gift today of not trying to change me, either. I’m letting it be, and opening my heart just a little more to whatever I’m meant to experience. I hope it makes me a more compassionate and peaceful person. My Dad would be happy to see that.