I became a parent, then my dad died. In between were firsts, lasts and lessons on love

This First Person column is the experience of Jessica Huras, who lives in Toronto and Stratford, Ont. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. 

The year my daughter, Isabelle Josephine, was born was the year I learned my father, Joe, was dying of cancer. Welcoming a child and losing a loved one both have a way of collapsing time, pulling you into the past even as life barrels forward. 

After Izzy's arrival in January 2022, my parents unearthed old photo albums, marvelling at how much she looked like me as a baby: the same bald head dusted with reddish hair, the same sparkly, squinty-eyed smile — a trait I'm pretty sure we both got from my dad.

But after his diagnosis that fall, I couldn't look at those photos the same way.

Joe Dawdy was 42 when I was born, and the pictures show him grinning at the start of fatherhood, his hair thick and dark. Those images were such a contrast to the man in front of me: just a little grey in his hair but older and fading, facing the end. 

The contrasts began to play out in real time. The joy of Izzy's firsts was mirrored by the pain of my dad's lasts. 

Her first wobbly steps just weeks before he needed help getting out of bed. Her first bites as he rapidly lost his appetite. Her perched in his lap to hear The Night Before Christmas for the first time; him giving the final performance of an annual holiday tradition that began when I was a child.

Learning to love, unconditionally 

When Izzy was born, I didn't feel the instant, overwhelming love some parents talk about. Moments after delivery, she had an apnea episode and stopped breathing. She was rushed to the special care unit and hooked up to a breathing machine. I didn't even get to hold her for more than a brief moment. She spent her first week in that unit, tucked into a clear plastic bassinet under harsh lights, wires snaking across her tiny body. 

I loved her, of course, but it felt scary and distant, like I was watching someone else become a parent.

That burst of love didn't come in the delivery room. It came quietly, weeks later, feeding her at 3 a.m. in our dimly lit bedroom — her small body curled against mine, both of us half asleep.

It was the same thing I felt sitting in my parents' bedroom, watching my dad die.

These were the first times I truly understood what it meant to give unconditional love. 

I'd grown up surrounded by it. My parents loved me fiercely, protectively, smoothing every bump in the road they could. When I became an adult, my dad kept every manual for my appliances and tech items neatly filed in the basement, so he could be ready to swoop in and fix anything of mine that broke. When I visited in the winter, I'd find my muddy boots cleaned and polished the morning I left. 

He worked at Canada Trust, later TD, in one of those jobs you don't totally understand as a kid. I used to think he was in HR. After he died, I saw his title listed as "call centre supervisor" on a form at the funeral home. 

But it didn't really matter. His work didn't reflect what he loved, which was reading and learning.

He was my first editor and, even a decade into my career as a writer, he'd send gentle notes with tweaks to my published work. Sometimes he worried about overstepping, but his edits were always thoughtful, always kind. I find myself wishing he could 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 take for granted.

When he got sick, my husband and I packed up our car every week and drove more than an hour to London, Ont., to live part-time with my parents so we could make the most of whatever time was left. 

It was hard — raising a baby half the week away from our own home, waking in the night to help with his pain medications, watching him slowly slip away. But it taught me that love is presence — not dramatic or heroic, just showing up every day, even when it's unbearably hard.

Where love ends — and begins again

By September 2023, his condition had worsened and he wanted to die at home, in the house I grew up in. In those final days, my mom, my sister and I sat at his bedside from dawn until dusk. He had slipped into unconsciousness, lying in a rented hospital bed pushed up against their own so my mom could still sleep beside him, holding his hand through the night.

The waiting reminded me of Izzy's birth: the slow, uncertain timeline. The sense of inevitability. Waiting for the first breath. Waiting for the last.

My parents' bedroom became a place of transition. It was where my dad moved from life into whatever comes next, and where I crossed into a new kind of adulthood. For the first time, I understood that his love, no matter how deep, couldn't protect me from the one thing I wasn't ready to face: losing him. 

It changed how I see parenting. 

My dad tried to shield me from pain, but I've come to understand that the job isn't to protect your child from the hard things, it's to love them through it. To show them how to live bravely in a world that will, inevitably, break their heart. 

I want to raise Izzy with the same unconditional love my dad gave me, as well as with the resilience I only found when I had to say goodbye to him.

There's a saying, "Grief is just love with no place to go." But I know exactly where my love needs to go. 

My dad would want every ounce of unspent love I have for him poured into the granddaughter who I named after him.

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