You might have noticed that it was very quiet on this blog during the last months, nearly for a whole year.

Last year my dad was fighting lung cancer. It was an intense time, my parents live a 1 hour car ride away from me. So, beside family and work there was not much time left for blogging.

But I’m thankful that I got the chance to say Goodbye. I took this picture last summer when we said us everything that we wanted to say to each other:

In 2 hours we laughed and cried and then we took the picture above. We also talked about his funeral, and in all the upcoming months we knew, everything was said, and we can just talk about everything we want, including unimportant things like soccer. :)

When he passed away in November, my mother, my sister, and I were there, and I realized more than ever how much I love my dad.

My dad grew up in a small village where I grew up too. He lived his whole life in that village and he did a lot there. He was organizing carnival for children for more than 30 years, he was santa claus in kindergarten for more than 30 years, he was in the soccer club, musician club, fire brigade and more. He had amazing friendships that started when he was six years old and that lasted for his whole life.

All of this sounds amazing. But his own life and especially his childhood was never easy. His mother passed away when he was 9. And maybe that’s the origin where his talent started to grow, because there was always the huge wish of making a great team of a group of people. That team that was impossible anymore at home without his mother and other circumstances that happened at that time.

The team talent
I think my dad had a huge talent to build up a great team spirit. I noticed his talent already early in my life, for example when he was organizing carnival for children. It was always amazing, he was able to form a big team of all the children participating. During my whole life his talent popped up multiple times, and it seemed to me that his talent grew with his age. I remember especially the time when he had prostate cancer at the age of 58. He took a cure for 3 weeks with other cancer patients in the area where I live. He was leading a group of 50 people to a normal evening in a normal restaurant. The evening started with sad people. My dad started telling jokes and later they sung one song after the other. My dad knows many songs. The evening ended with laughing, singing and very happy people. Incredible happy people who forgot for an evening and some even for a few days about their cancer. My dad got letters from the friends he made there years later, where they thanked him for the great time they had while taking the cure, some even wrote it was the best time of their life.

But he never got the chance to use his talent in his job. He spent more than 40 years in a paper factory pushing some buttons on a machine to wrap huge paper rolls. No personnel responsibility, no team responsibility, just pushing some buttons on a kind of stupid machine. He did it to make a living.
We never had much money, and because of that also no computer at home. But my dad/parents gave me the most important things you can give to your kids: time and love.

Thanks dad, I hope what you believed in is true and you’re taking the chance to use your talent on the other side,
Thomas