There are lots of family members I miss terribly, they were all taken from us prematurely. The one person I miss most is my Dad. He was the person who partly created me, and who shaped so many of my views about life, religion, and so many important things. I was a married woman with two small children when our family lost him, but I felt like a child at that moment because the loss totally winded me. It was like someone turned me upside down and shook me. Nothing was ever the same again. I could not even begin to count how many good times my family shared with my Dad. Some memories are so dear I keep them alive and recount them with our family. My father's sense of humour was unprecedented, you could hear the same story over again and still laugh. He always embellished every story, and took random events in our lives to make them side-splitting anecdotes that kept people entertained for years.

Losing a parent is never easy, however prepared you may have been for their departure. However, when it is sudden, it is even more traumatic. We were sitting down talking that day at the kitchen table. We had some rare quality time that afternoon, my two little ones were having an afternoon sleep, not buzzing around as they normally were. I could sit down and enjoy my father's company, we could have an uninterrupted conversation. Almost a decade has passed since that day, however, I am so glad I was given that opportunity to speak with my father and I've gone over that conversation a thousand times.

I have to also mention my grandparents and aunts and uncles among those people I miss very much. I missed such simple things we did together as a family, and you sometimes wish you could have a time machine that could take you back to some special moments you may have shared with your long lost family members. There were some relatives I won't forget from my childhood. I remember that I was very young and I had a favourite uncle. He actually had married into our family, he was married to my Dad's youngest sister. He was a young man, yet his body was ravaged with cancer. Losing him devastated all of us, and at seven years old it was one of the first times in my life I'd known the pain of losing someone I'd loved very much. I used to still look up in the sky and wonder where he might be for a long time after.

Nobody ever talked about the kind of cancer my uncle had, and at the time I didn't know how precious our time with him would be. I do remember him one day smiling

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