“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” ~Oprah Winfrey

My father died at forty-nine.

I was young when it happened, still soft in the way grief makes you when you are not yet equipped to hold it. I was so consumed by the loss itself that I never stopped to do the mathematics of it. Forty-nine years. That is all he got. Forty-nine years to do everything he wanted to do, to become everything he wanted to become, and to say every word he still had left inside him.

I did not let …