A year ago tonight, as I lay in bed, reading James Michener’s novel, The Source, my mother called telling me that she and my brother were driving to St. Agnes hospital in Fresno. My father was in an ambulance experiencing major chest pains. At the hospital he would suffer a major heart attack and die at 3:16 the next morning.

As of tomorrow, it will have been a full year of mourning my father’s death. Without question this has been the hardest year of my life. I’ve tried to make sense of death, but ultimately, it is beyond my grasp. My hope in this time is to relish in the memories, press into relationships I have, and to trust, however faintly, Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15.54: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

As the months have passed, I have found a sense of responsibility regarding the dead. I realize now, that in many ways, the dead belong to the living. Their continuation in this life depends on those who knew them telling their stories again and again. If this is true, then I feel a great duty—not to speak on Dad’s behalf, but to present him as honestly as I can. Many of those who read this will have only known my father through the stories I told about him. He is no longer able to create new memories with his friends and family. By words or actions, he cannot contradict or correct what we say about him. Who he is now to the rest of the world oddly depends on what we say about him. It is the responsibility of the living to carry and represent the dead.

I don’t want to air out Dad’s dirty laundry. Neither do I want to write his hagiography. My father was a remarkable man and still a human, full of the wonderful contradictions that give mystery to this life. He was both generous and protective at the same time. He could make judgments of a person based on their appearance and remained open to having his opinions changed. I marveled at his patience and grew frustrated with his short temper.

Early in the grieving, Carey and I promised each other that we wouldn’t put on the “strong face,” but would try to be as present to whatever we felt at any given moment, no matter how against the grain those emotions might seem. Lately, I’ve wanted direct my grief a bit more, without trying to prescribe the process. I’ve begun a gratitude journal wherein I record things that happened during the day for which I am thankful—something Robert Emmons, a psychology professor of mine at UC Davis recommended. I also write down what I am thankful for with Dad, because I believe at its core, my grief exists because I have lost someone who makes me thankful. Dad may not be here to create new memories, but I want him to continue to be a part of my life and I can think of no better way to do that than to remember him to others and to myself as I live.