This article was first published December 31, 2018, by Radish Magazine.

I’ve always been a person who makes New Year’s resolutions.

I’ve also always been a person who rarely keeps them.

For 2019, I’ve decided not to make New Year’s resolutions. Well, not exactly. Instead, I plan to just do life differently.

On Oct. 1, my father died. He’d had a minor heart attack and by the time I got to the hospital, he was sitting up in a chair. His skin glowed. He was alert and talkative. He told me he couldn’t wait to get out of there the next day — because they were telling him he just might get out of there the next day — so he could “tip a beer.”

But just before 5 the next morning, his nearly 87-year-old heart stopped. The medical crew tried to revive him, but except for a momentary flicker of a heartbeat, that was that.

My pops had left the planet.

After he died, I remember coming up the stairs at his home and seeing his canvas shoes sitting right where he had left them — neatly side by side, right next to his computer desk, waiting for him to come back.

After he was buried in his hometown of Maquoketa, I spent a week with my stepmom, helping her to settle back into a home that no longer held her husband. While we plotted her “next,” we began to go through some of his belongings. I packed up books and a few other things and shipped them off to my siblings. I kept a few things for myself, including the watch with the Air Force logo I slipped off his wrist and onto my own the morning he died.

In the basement, my dad had been working on two small engines, both situated under giant magnifying glasses. Macular degeneration had made it nearly impossible for him to tinker, but he had found a way to continue doing what he loved.

As I made my way through my dad’s workshop, his office, his home, what was clear to me was that he never stopped living — despite eyes that didn’t work well; despite a heart that left him breathing heavily when he exerted himself. While he used devices to help him read his morning newspaper and work on those engines, he wasn’t willing to let his failing heart keep him from going upstairs to his office or downstairs to his workshop.

To do so, I think, would have been to give up.

When my dad was in his 40s, he bought a coronet and proceeded to try to teach himself how to play it, much to the dismay of his six children and our mother. He would sit out in the living room and blow into the instrument, sounding very much like, well, someone who was learning how to play an instrument. I was in my early teens and had zero appreciation for his willingness to try something new despite being “old.”

I do now.

While I made my way through my dad’s belongings, I saw that coronet — and another. He also had guitars, a ukulele, an organ and a keyboard. He had instruction books and videos on how to play them and sheet music, too. I also found an art kit with colored pencils and paint, a purchase he made when he and my stepmom moved to an apartment for a short time before they bought their house. He wanted to have something to do in the apartment, my stepmom said, since he didn’t have a workshop.

My dad flew airplanes. He restored cars. He rode motorcycles. He could wire a house and build anything. He went to college to become an eye doctor, but most of what he knew in life, he taught himself.

Unlike me, he didn’t tell himself he couldn’t do something. He read. He took his time. He swore — a lot — but he did it, whatever it was.

He grumbled about his aging body, his poor vision and hearing. But he didn’t take to a rocking chair or recliner or set up camp with a TV remote in hand.

He didn’t let what many see as limitations keep him from doing, from trying, from learning.

My dad didn’t live life perfectly, but he lived it.

So, while I’m still here, while I’m fortunate enough to have another new year to welcome, I’m going to do my best to follow my dad’s example — to teach myself something new and not say “I can’t” before I’ve even tried.

To do life differently — because I can.