There’s no one that would appreciate the irony of the fact that I’m hiking the Canadian Rockies in his honor more than my father. It’s just too bad he’s not here so I can tell him face to face. My dad was a real outdoors kind of guy, a boy scout. When I was little, he taught me how to compost vegetables, mow the lawn, make a bonfire. He taught me to climb trees, ride a bike, do the backstroke. He taught me to tie a knot, pitch a tent and throw a baseball. Of course, all I wanted to do was watch MTV and listen to Madonna mix tapes on my boombox.

It’s fitting then, that on the last lucid day of my father’s life, as he dozed in and out of consciousness, he started talking about wanting to walk in the woods. We were in the ICU. His hospital cot overlooked the East River. He asked me to call my mom.

“Ellen,” he said. “I can see the river from here.”

I held the speakerphone away from his face. His stem cell transplant had taken place a week and a half earlier, and he had virtually no immune system. He was masked, gloved. Nothing from the outside world could touch his skin because of the risk exposing him to a germ that could kill him.

Twenty years earlier, when I was a junior in college, my dad started experiencing fatigue and numbness in his toes. After bouncing around from doctor to doctor, he was diagnosed with polycythemia vera (PV), a rare form of blood cancer that causes your bone marrow to make too many red blood cells. For 20 years, he lived relatively symptom free.

But in the summer 2018, out of the blue, his PV converted to leukemia. He moved to Manhattan and prepared for a bone marrow transplant. The goal was to blast the bad cells with chemotherapy, replace the good ones with blood transfusions and prep his system for surgery. Eighty percent odds that all would go according to plan. That he’d survive.

Four months later, he was dead.

My dad loved rivers. He loved lakes. Classic Midwest man, saltwater was just not his thing. We grew up spending summers on Lake Michigan. When I was in college, he took our whole family to Oregon and recreated Lewis and Clark’s journey down the coast via canoe and hot plate. Pretty much my worst nightmare, his personal slice of heaven. It was 1997. I wanted to be at a club in NYC, wearing a Fiona Apple belly shirt and making out with male models.

The East River was frozen over in ice the day my Dad took his last breath — the entire city on Manhattan blanketed in a blizzard — but I took solace in the fact that he was close to nature, on his way into the wild.

The outdoors is where I find my Dad now. I know he’ll be with me — with all of us — on our journey.