Nancy Davis Kho - The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time

One summer day in 2016, I climbed the stairs to the guest room in my parents house, where I had been staying for three weeks. I sat down at Dads deskthe guest room, when unoccupied, was his home office and his Official Golf Channel Viewing Room. Directly in my line of sight was a thank-you letter Id written to him earlier that year. My father loved the letter so much, he had immediately framed it and hung it over his desk so he could see it every day.

January 15, 2016

Dear Dad:

As you know, because you probably drove me home from the hospital, 2016 is the year I turn fifty. I have had such a fortunate life that I decided the best way to commemorate this Golden Jubilee year is to write thank-you notes to the people, places, and pastimes that have enriched my life along the way, and this week its your turn. You and Mom had to be the first two people to get these notes, for reasons large and small.

Thank you, Dad, for being such an involved, interested, and supportive father to me. Your years of work at Kodak to support our family are the tip of the iceberg. You were, in a word, present: there to pop flies in the driveway in a largely unsuccessful attempt to help your youngest kid get better at softball, there to comb and untangle my long hair after a bath while I sat transfixed by Gilligans Island, there to drive to Syracuse and deal with a rental car when I got stranded en route between Rochester and Philadelphia during college.

Im also grateful for the ways in which you were hands-offletting me screw up and fix smaller predicaments often enough when I was living at home that I didnt feel overwhelmed when the big ones happened to me as a grown-up. Sally, Larry, and I all knew that our successes were ours to claimyou never made us feel like you were taking credit for them, which these days is a rare parenting trait indeed. I think your granddaughters are probably grateful I had you as my role model in that sense.

As a dad, you set the standard for men in my life. Which is why it never occurred to me to date losers who treated me badly (well, one guy in twelfth grade, but you didnt know about that, and it only lasted one date) or anyone who tried to cut me down. You were always, always supportive of my ambitions, and your faith in my ability to achieve my goals, especially in my work life, was at least half the reason I ever did.

When I think about my fondest memories with you, Id have to stack our road trips on topback and forth from Rochester to Philly so many times in my college years, and the time we went to Disney World for your job when I was twenty. Even our last road trip, as we drove from Oakland to Mendocino in a blinding winter rainstorm, caravanning behind Andrew with Mom and the girls up Highway OneI thought wed get blown into the ocean, but you just kept saying, This is so beautiful! Wow! Youre doing great! until my nerves settled down. The time you showed up in Munich with almost no warning, when I had just moved to Germany for my first job out of college, and you gave me what I was too stubborn or proud to admit I needed: a big fat dose of home and validation (that I worked for a nutcase). Sitting in the pre-dawn hours with you in February 1998 as you timed my contractions when Maddy was on her way. And I dont know if you remember this, but I loved when I was little and wed walk around the block together at dusk and sing Me and My Shadow and do our best fake tap-dance steps.

Even as we all get older, you continue to teach me things and set a standard Id like to follow: downsizing and moving into your lovely townhome while you and Mom can really enjoy it; helping Aunt Noonie with her finances and household, daunting as that can be; continuing your volunteer work at camp and the fire department; and all the other millions of ways you help people around you without expecting anything back in return. Let me reassure you: we will ALWAYS need you and have handyman projects for you at our house, whenever you come.

Maddy and Lucy are so lucky to have you and Mom as grandparents, and I especially love how you and Maddy have your engineering studies in common. God knows Andrew and I dont know what shes talking about.

I love you so much, Dad. Thank you for being so good to me, always.

Love,

Nan

Then, I opened up my laptop and typed EULOGY into a new document.

Six weeks earlier, while playing golf in his Friday morning league, my eighty-one-year-old dad had fainted. He got up, finished the eighteen holes (of course), drove himself home (of course), and waved off my moms concerns. Though my moms worsening dementia made it impossible for her to adequately sound the alarm bell over Dads fogginess and uncharacteristic confusion to any of their three kids, it was clear in retrospect that Mom knew something was off with her husband of fifty-eight years.

My older siblings, Sally and Larry, both of whom live near my parents, figured it out anyway in their regular phone calls to Mom and Dad that weekend, as did I across the country in Oakland. On Sunday morning, they called me to say they were driving to the house together to take Dad to the ER, thinking he had perhaps suffered a concussion. By Monday morning, we all knew what had instigated the fainting: an enormous, heretofore undetected brain tumor caused by Stage 4 metastasized melanoma, a merciless disease that had staked its claim via tumors in his lungs, kidney, and bones. There was no humane cure for a man his age at this stage of this disease. We could only make him comfortable for what would turn out to be the numbingly short remainder of his life.

Throughout the quickstep assault of Dads deterioration from cancer, because Id had the foresight to write my thoughts down and send them in a thank-you letter, there was one simple but fundamental worry lifted from my shoulders: I did not have to worry that my father would slip away without knowing how much I loved him. Not a moment needed to be spent in self-recrimination or doubt. I could put my energy into caring for him and helping him transition peacefully, surrounded by his family, in the home that he loved.