I lost my father in June.
I feel lucky that I had my father until I was 43. But at the same time, he was 71. You can also consider that young.
He spent the last three months of his life in the hospital.
I flew to Turkey in April. I knew this was probably the last time I would see him.
That is a strange feeling. You are going to see your father, but at the same time, you know you may also be going there to say goodbye.
I am the first person in my family to go to college, earn a master’s degree and complete a PhD.
But this story did not start with me.
The initial momentum came from my father. He moved from a small village to the city. That decision opened up possibilities we could not have in that village.
Think about that.
For more than 200 years, everyone in my direct lineage was born in the same village. Generation after generation, nobody broke that pattern.
You need to understand the mental challenge of making a decision like that. He was not just moving from one place to another. He was breaking a pattern that had continued for centuries.
My daughter is literally the first person in my direct lineage to be born in a city.
My father was obsessed with education.
But he did not have much formal education himself. He completed elementary school and left middle school in the sixth grade. He had to work.
His father died when he was very young. My grandfather was only around 36 when he passed away. So you can understand how young my father was and why he had to start working.
Maybe that is also why education became so important to him. He did not have the opportunity, but he wanted his children to have it.
I do not want to make this sound like everything was perfect.
It was not.
Our relationship was not always easy, and we did not agree on everything. He made fundamental mistakes in family relationships and finances. He could not make peace with those mistakes. I believe that was one of the main reasons he was often grumpy.
But he was highly intellectual, especially compared to the environment in which he grew up. He had an excellent memory. He could remember an incredible number of details.
If he had been given the opportunity, I believe he would have become an engineer or an academic.
Of course, I also see him in myself. That should not be surprising, considering how genetics works.
I see some of his strengths in me. And, if I am honest, probably some of the things I criticized in him too.
He kept saying:
“Life is a marathon. We carry the flag from one generation to the next.”
And he was right.
He gave the flag to me and my siblings. We will carry it as far as we can, and then we will give it to our children.
That is how it works.