From the moment we’re born, our identities are tethered to our parents. They are the anchors, the roots from which we grow. And while I’ve experienced a lot of weird, unexpected things in my 43 years on this planet, events or decisions that reframed how I saw myself, nothing has so shifted the ground beneath my feet as losing my dad.

My family is close. Even when my sisters and I were young and spent most of our time driving each other crazy – or rather Megan spent most of her time driving Erin and I crazy – we were always around each other. My sisters and I are far enough apart in age (four years for each of us) that we didn’t share friend groups, but in many cases we were friends with siblings. As we got older, we realized that perhaps maybe we did actually like one another, and in what my 13-year-old self would call nothing short of a miracle, my sisters have become some of my closest friends. As I’ve gotten older and fully inhabited my introvertedness, my sisters and their husbands, along with my parents, form the inner ring of my social circle. Before my dad got sick, I’d tag along with he and my mom on their Friday night Chipotle dates on the weeks M was flying. My sisters and I took weekend shopping trips to Chicago a few times a year (note to Meg and Erin – we need to resume these). Between my sisters, our husbands, and my nieces/nephews, there are no shortage of birthdays to celebrate. Mom makes brunch and we stuff ourselves silly, just for fun. Toss in holidays and our annual pilgrimage to Cape San Blas, and my family is the common thread weaving the years together.

Because my family has always been so present in my day-to-day life, my favorite memories of my dad aren’t so much of these grand, seminal moments, but of regular life-stuff. They’re of going to work with him on Saturdays when I was a kid. He’d work on the Monte Carlo he was restoring, and I’d help him sand for a while and then spend the rest of the time wheeling myself around on his creeper. Eventually, those Saturdays evolved in to actual work for him, and I’d file repair orders while he toiled in his office. They’re of riding along on my bike while he’d run, which when I was 11 turned into us dropping my bike off mid-run so I could run too for a few miles, which then evolved into just going out for runs together. We ran around Abingdon, we ran with my Uncle Bill at the beach, we even ran a half marathon together in 2002. We ran the Indy Mini-marathon, because of course it was the incentive of running on the track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway that got my dad to run a half even as his back was protesting. More recently, they’re of the time he built a ramp for my old-lady dog who couldn’t climb stairs when we stayed with them for a few months upon moving back from Colorado. They’re of lunches at Red Robin where we’d enjoy cheeseburgers – his always cooked with lots of pink, topped only with American cheese, and open-faced – with diet cokes and talk about nothing.

My dad’s ability to fix literally anything, and because he was essentially unflappable, meant that he received a lot of bizarre phone calls from me and my sisters over the years (to be fair, my mom receives her share of these calls too). We called him with car trouble, house trouble, after car accidents, and in my case one time when I trapped a wasp in my bathroom and didn’t know what to do about it. He’d talk us down off the ledge and help us figure out what to do next. He and mom could have wrote a book with the phone calls they’ve gotten from us over the years. I don’t think it’s so much that my sisters and I can’t figure these things out ourselves, but when you have Mike and Renee Tolle as your parents, why wouldn’t you call them when shit is hitting the fan? They’ll help you solve the problem, make you laugh, and then remind you that you’re lucky. A good blueprint for navigating any crisis, I think.

While I treasured the everydayness of my relationship with my dad, there are a few times in my adult life where a conversation between us reorganized how I saw myself or what I prioritized. The first time this happened was 15 years ago or so when I vented to him about some problem at work. I managed a medically-based wellness center and led a staff of 35. I was frustrated about a situation with a colleague, a situation that revealed a lack of integrity and laziness in my coworker. I felt irrationally irritated by it. In talking with my dad, he apologized with humor and said I got that particular brand of impatience from him. There was something comforting in being able to make sense of the frustration, to know where it came from. And when that same frustration would pop up repeatedly in the years following, I could see it and recognize it, which made it much easier to navigate. I loved knowing where it came from, that it was a trait I shared with my dad.

More recently, it happened again as he was being diagnosed in August of 2015. I was an administrator at the same hospital where his doc was and he stopped by my office after one of his appointments. My family isn’t prone to talking about stuff, so he caught me off guard when he mentioned that he regretted how much he worked while we were growing up. I was so grateful he said it though, because I could reassure him that my sisters and I had an amazing childhood. I could tell him how I never once felt like he was absent from our lives. The conversation was a short one, as we moved on to other topics fairly quickly. But it stayed with me and has factored into most of the decisions I’ve made since. At the time, I was knee deep in an autoimmune flare that was taking over my life. The job I was in was making it worse, much, much worse. Six weeks later I’d walk away from it. Until this point, I’d prioritized my career. I’ve always enjoyed my work, but when a stressful job triggered the flare in 2014, I had a hard time making the necessary sacrifices to get better. That conversation with my dad was the start of my making the changes I needed to recover my health. And work has not held the same prominence in my life since. That might mean I may never hold a job with a fancy title again, but if I can be healthy and participate in life on my own terms, it will be worth it. When I was sick, I couldn’t run like I wanted, I was too tired to ski, traveling was A LOT of work, and the brain fog made even reading a book difficult. It was a really high price to pay for an office and set of business cards, and my dad unintentionally revealed this truth, a truth I desperately needed to see.

But for almost a week now, I’ve been living in a world without this man. This quiet, stubborn, practical fellow who formed one of the two earliest anchors of my time on this planet. I’ll forever be his daughter, but I’ll miss calling or texting him with my latest house or car drama, I’ll miss sharing a cheeseburger with him at lunch on Mondays. The world will never be the same without him in it. I have moments where I think if we could just go back to a week ago, to ten days ago, then he’d still be with us. But when I remember how sick he was, how much pain he was in, I realize we have to go back further. Even last summer, the cancer was slowly staking its claim. Two years ago, things were pretty good, but he still had a devastating illness. So if we go back four years ago, he was healthy but the tumor was there, waiting to make its presence known. So now we go back six or seven years, and well it becomes obvious of how ridiculous an exercise it is. This is all we have, today. Right now. And that means making sense of a world without my dad in it. Reorienting myself and learning to live with the tremendous void left in his wake. But I won’t be doing it alone, as I’m surrounded by an army of people who miss him as much as I do. Who knew what a character he was, who understand how lucky we were to call him dad.