Eulogy For Father

My father has always been in the military. He has been for 25 years now. I have been so lucky to stay in Yellowknife for 8 years, to be in one place for longer than 4 years. So lucky that my dad decided to choose his family over his job, put us first, and became a reservist in the air force. This means that he stays wherever he is, and doesn’t get posted anywhere else unless he wants to get moved. The other reservist guys have been here for 15-20 years. As such, my family has not moved out of Yellowknife. This has allowed me and my sisters to have a childhood, to have friends and be able to keep them, to do extracurriculars, to say that we have a home. A place we grew up in and say we’re from, a place where we all spent at least of half our lives. But this is only one side of the same coin. The other side is the fact that my dad has to go on a lot of trips, usually two week ones in November and April, and little 2-4 day ones all throughout the year in

The loss that comes 10 times a year when your dad or mom goes away for weeks at a time. They don’t get that no matter how many times they go away, the feeling of missing them never really does. In simple terms: it sucks. If their away for long enough, they miss their kids growing up, the day to day lives of their spouses, talking to their friends in person, having a nice bed to sleep on. This isn’t really a specific time of difficulty I’ve tried to leave behind, but it’s a difficult period of time that reoccurs many times in a year. No one really reacts to it in any way. They think they know about what it takes to be a military kid, to be a military parent, to be a military person. They haven’t seen firsthand how much we kids miss our parents when they go away. On the outside it looks normal, I mean, parents go away all the time right? But when it adds up over time, you miss them more and more each time, because they’re missing something every