As the family counts it, my father narrowly escaped death's clutches some six times over the course of his life. One of them, as the legend goes, went like this: my father had a heart attack at work, in a factory in another city. They put him in the ambulance and he, mid-heart attack, spent the entire ride arguing with the driver — he was to be taken to hospital A, not B, because B had more traffic lights along the way and would take longer. The driver gave in. He arrived at hospital A with his heart already stopped, and had to be resuscitated several times before he came back. He would not have survived the three extra minutes (three minutes, I checked on Google Maps) to hospital B. My father lived because he argued, and because he knew how many traffic lights there were along the way. That is the most "my dad" story I could tell.

When my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I read the statistics and, in a burst of optimism that surprised even me, I thought: "if 1 in 100 survives, he's going to be that 1." In some quixotic way — in a hubris that foreshadows the Greek tragedy to come — I convinced myself that if I were clever enough, if I cleared every path through the bureaucracies, if I assembled the best doctors in the country, if I read the right scientific papers, I would find a way. That I could save my father from pain, from suffering, from death. I could not.

The last time my father came back from death was at the beginning of the treatment. He had one session of chemotherapy and ended up spending weeks in the ICU: emergency surgery, cardiac arrest, intubation. The ICU psychologist, with the same finesse as those guys who throw water on your windshield on the street, told us: "now it's time to think about the good memories." My mother was outraged. I thought: you people don't know my father. He came home 17 kg lighter, unable to stand, unable to speak. Twenty days later, he was walking. Two months later, he was driving.

My father wasn't only strong and stubborn. He was clever, self-reliant, inventive — I grew up in the firm belief that if he couldn't fix something, that something simply wasn't fixable. He was cheerful and very funny: looking at the photos from our birthdays, he was always more excited than whoever's birthday it was. He was affectionate and paranoid (like me!). Since I moved to another city, fourteen years ago, EVERY SINGLE DAY, without ever once failing, he texted me before going to sleep, to make sure everything was all right. He wouldn't sleep until I answered. When I left home, the goodbye was always the same: "be careful with everything."

My father didn't only show me what a good father should be. He showed me what a good husband should be, a good professional, a good person.

My father was over the top about everything, comically incapable of moderation. Ever since he retired and took over the dishwashing, my mother complained that she couldn't keep up with buying dish soap, that he used too much of it. The other day, when I started washing a plate, my mother took the sponge out of my hand: "you're exactly like your father, you're going to finish off my dish soap." Lately, the only thing that makes me happy is hearing that I'm so much my father's daughter. There could be no greater compliment.

A farewell to my dad