We Almost Met – #Dads4Oren

I almost met him. When Oren Miller, the founder of my dad bloggers group, announced that he had stage 4 lung cancer, and announced it the very week I joined the group, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never see him in person. As the weeks and months went on, and as the dad bloggers community began to mean so much more to me, it started to dawn on me that this was tragically not okay. And then he posted online that he was coming to Burlington.

Out of the blue, having never spoken or chatted with him in any other way, I reached out to Oren, which is really not like me at all. As crazy, weird, and comfortable as I am with people I know, contacting new people makes me nervous. I mean, why would Oren Miller, the founder of the group of over 1000 guys, want to take some of his suddenly limited family time and spend it with me, a dude whom he had never met, and who was just one faceless name out of 1000? He said of course he wanted to meet me to chat about blogging and family, and he actually seemed happy about it.

When the week came we exchanged several messages, trying to figure out what the best plan would be. We were going to take our families apple picking. And then he had a bad week. His health was poor. He never made it to Burlington. This sucked, but I still believed, from that point on, that we would somehow meet someday. After all, he lived in Baltimore. I started my blog in Baltimore! We were both living and blogging just miles apart from each other for a time! My family and I go down to the DC/Baltimore area every year at least once. It would happen. I would meet him after all.

Oren passed away on Saturday, just a few days after his last post to the group. He told us he had days or weeks left, but nobody wanted to believe that, and certainly not one of us could have imagined that he would be gone so quickly. But then he was. So what do we do now? Well, for now we grieve. We will write posts about Oren, and our memories and experiences with him. We will sing songs. We will laugh, and we will cry. One thing we will do, as suggested by Tommy Riles from Life of Dad, is go on a love walk. Today, since most of us are not able to be at the funeral, we will walk with our children. We will love them, we will appreciate our time with them, and we will bear witness to the legacy of an incredible man that touched so many lives in the cruelly short life that he lived.

Oren, thank you. Thank you for the life that you lived, and the way in which you lived it. I may have missed out on my chance to meet you in person, but I have met you so many times, in so many ways, and you will be remembered for you grace, your dignity, and your love.