2005 was the last time I spent Christmas with my whole family. That year, I gave my father something I knew he would love and could appreciate - an entire case of Snickers bars.

My father had spend the past 10 years struggling with a degenerative brain condition called Lewy Body Disease, often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's and Dementia, because it mimics the symptoms. We had watched him slowly deteriorate from the athletic, brilliant, funny engineer to a bedridden shell of a man who desperately hoped for death, but never lost his sense of humor. Always tall, active, and slender at 6'6", he slowly went from a healthy 185 pounds to just over 100 pounds. He was going to die soon, racked with pain caused by his infirmities and paranoia caused his medications, and food was one of his last few true pleasures in life.

He opened the present and, taking a few moments to register, he slowly looked up at me, a big smile struggling to spread across his face. He strained to form a word, and we all waited patiently. Finally, he said: "Yum!" We all laughed. It was good to see him happy. 

He died five months later.

I miss my father. He was one of those rare people that everybody liked, one of the lights in the darkness of life. He was on the one hand the geek stereotype - a bit of a hermit who enjoyed spending endless hours hunched over circuit boards with soldering irons, or laboring over computer code that would create a silly program to entertain the kids and grandkids. On the other hand he was outgoing and friendly, always ready to meet a new friend, never afraid of making a fool out of himself in public if he could make people smile. He always had a good-natured, wry joke to make, and didn't really like dancing but never refused to dance with me (which he did rather badly). His hair was always combed, beard neatly trimmed, teeth flossed, shirts pressed, shoes freshly polished. There were always endless stacks and piles of books and magazines and newspapers and schematics and old electronics in his home office, and even though it seemed unnavigable, he knew exactly where everything was. He was brilliant at math, and there was literally never a math problem he couldn't solve, and he was endlessly patient with my torrent of tears as I struggled through calculus, something it turned out I was pretty good at (at the time), but hated (still).

People liked him because he was honest - not just about things in general, but he was honest with himself about who he was, and in turn was honest with other people. He was kind. He had a perpetual, honest smile that emanated from a place within that was deeply satisfied with himself, his place in life, and what he had accomplished. Only one person didn't like him, and that person turned out to be something of a con artist who, if I recall correctly, ended up in prison.

Any of my siblings or I can tell you stories about times that my father helped us in troubled times, sometimes even without any words so that our mother wouldn't know he was helping us, so as to preserve the whole network of relations, allowing us to do what we felt was right for us, while not making a big deal out of it with our mother, whom he deeply loved, and who stayed by his side caring for him until the bitter end.

So perhaps you can understand why it didn't seem fair that this brilliant man was diagnosed with a disease that would rip away from him and his family almost everything that made him who he was. To slow the deterioration of his brain, he had to take medications that made him intensely paranoid and gave him terrifying hallucinations. They changed him in horrific, emotionally debilitating ways. He would cry out suddenly, squirming and shifting his trembling body under his blanket, as all the pilled fuzz on his blanket shapeshifted into tiny insects crawling all over him. He'd wake up in the middle of the night, terrified, and ask my mother what all the people were doing there, pointing to the foot of the bed toward empty space. He was convinced that the dog was being trained to steal things and ruin the family. He started distrusting members of the family in his cloud of paranoia.

For someone with a brilliant, logical, and down-to-earth outlook for so much of his life, seeing him crippled mentally and physically was tremendously painful to watch. Even more painful was thinking of how unconceivably horrific it must have been for him. He finally decided to stop taking these medications, because their side effects were far worse than the benefits. He couldn't choose walking and being able to bathe and dress and feed himself over trusting and loving his family. He sacrificed his dignity for us.

Mother's Day was the last day he had any lucidity, and it was also the last day I spoke with him. We had a heart to heart, and he was able to speak in complete sentences for the first time in a long time. I told him I loved him, and he told me he loved me. We talked about my schooling, we talked about the man who is now my husband, and we talked about what it means to die. We sang songs together, because even when he was unable to speak, he could still sing with perfect pitch.

A week later, he finally died of pneumonia, essentially, as his lungs filled with fluid over the course of several days, and during that time I learned where the phrase "death rattle" came from, his long, heaving, involuntary breaths punctuated by a ghostly, gurgling rattle. I sat by his side for hours, singing old hymns that he had treasured, telling him it was okay to let go. Then early one morning, when everyone was out of the room, he finally slipped away. 

Christmas hasn't been the same without my father. We've carried on some of his traditions, like making sure to fold the discarded wrapping paper instead of crumpling it ("it takes up less space that way, it's more efficient!") or making sure to save all the bows ("we can use these again!"). And every year, around this time, I think about how unfair life is, and how people talk about there being a "plan" or "things happen for a reason" or talk about karma and so on.

I have come to believe that this is bullshit.

Now don't get me wrong, I am just as likely as anybody else to say "everything happens for a reason," but when I say it, I mean something different. I don't mean that there is necessarily cause and effect for something bad happening to you when you've done everything "right" or have been a good person. I don't mean that there is some "divine plan" for your life. What I mean is that if something good or bad happens to you, it's not about what happened in the past or what is going to happen in the future - it's about right now, and what you are going to do to make it count, and make it matter.

I don't think my dad got sick "for a reason." I don't think that this was part of some divine "plan" for his life. I think that he had a job that exposed him to things that no human being should be exposed to, and because of its classified military nature, we may never know what exactly he was exposed to. We often didn't even know what he was doing for a living because it was classified. I think he was unlucky and that he, like so many of his co-workers, got sick. Or if it wasn't the chemicals, if it wasn't as simple as his job causing the problem, that it was just a really, terribly unlucky thing that happened to him. Period. The end.

This depresses some people. They think, how can I live with this kind of randomness and uncertainty? But I think, how can you live thinking that somebody else is pulling invisible strings, leaving you helpless except for faith that there must be some unknown reason for your struggle?

To be honest, I find randomness completely empowering. Okay, something terrible happens. Well, shit happens. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to curl up in a ball, or are you going to do what we humans do best, and deal with it? I am a deeply spiritual person, but part of that spirituality is believing that the divine exists within us, inside of us. The more we can do to help each other, understand each other and ourselves, create a better world for ourselves and our children, the more we honor that divinity. But that divinity includes the randomness of life, in all its frightening beauty.

Essentially, all these things are manifestations of randomness. What we choose to do with them, how we react to them, how we learn and grow because of them, is how we manifest and express divinity. This is just how I see it.

It's randomness that took my father, but it's also randomness that brought him together with my mother, and what they decided to do with that random meeting - plunging into marriage after just a few weeks of knowing each other - gave me life, and gave them 30 years of happy marriage. It's randomness that brought my husband and I together, a random illness that ended up in me going to an event that I would not have attended otherwise, and some kind of divine spark that ignited within us when we saw each other and started talking. 

None of these things happened "for a reason," but we gave them meaning through our actions and reactions. We took the opportunities that came, and we made something wonderful out of them, or we learned something from them, or we helped others through being honest with our struggles and our pain. 

My father is dead now, but so much of what he was lives on in me - his dorky sense of humor, his sense of principle, his curiosity and scientific way of approaching the world, his sense of wonder at the universe. Yesterday I got out of the shower and sat down to put my socks on, and found myself running the socks between my toes to get rid of moisture ("this is how you avoid getting athlete's foot," my father would say, and it would lead into a story about his days stationed in Guam during the Vietnam war, when he'd joined the Air Force to dodge the draft), and laughed, as this is something that my mom used to make fun of my father for doing. And here I am, doing it every day, finding it incredibly useful. I am more graceful because my father taught me to be aware of the way one's body moves in the world as we would skip over boulders on our hikes, and he'd caution me to be careful of harming living things around me with careless footsteps. I am more thoughtful because my father taught me to step back and look at how something works before trying to deal with it, or to see how my words and actions would affect people before leaping in and doing or saying something that might be hurtful. I find things more easily because my father taught me to stand back and always look under things, and see the larger view before delving into details. And I am a more caring person because my father taught me to love fully and fiercely, and not be afraid of anything. Even death.

So today, as another Christmas approaches without my dad, I miss him terribly. But the horrible randomness of his disease and death no longer make me angry at the universe. Instead of living asking why he died, I live asking why he lived, and how he lived, and it makes me a better person. Embracing uncertainty means being more open, and being ready for anything. It means approaching life with open arms, and always being ready to learn. I can't think of a better gift that anyone has ever given me, than that.

Happy holidays, dad.