He was diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct when I was 19, three-and-a-half years prior, on a Tuesday. That day he went to the doctor for some routine tests after my mom noticed he was jaundiced. That night, he called from the hospital and asked me to come up there and pick up my mom. He didn’t want her driving home alone.

After the initial diagnosis, he was given only a few months to live. His type of cancer was slow-growing and didn’t usually manifest itself until it was too late. By the time doctors found it, tumors had swallowed up his pancreas, gallbladder and half his liver. The doctor gave him only a few months to live.

He started a chemotherapy in pill form that was used for breast cancer, and for a time it slowed the cancer’s growth. He lived longer and had a better quality of life than his doctors could have imagined. He made it to my sister’s wedding, my college graduation, my other sister’s high school graduation and my brother’s 12th birthday. We had a couple more family vacations.

He died at about 4:30 p.m. on a Monday. Two days earlier, we’d gone through the motions of Christmas, unwrapping presents around a miniature tree in my parents’ bedroom, where he lay in bed in a coma. It was a relief when the holiday was over.

I am selfishly using my space in the newspaper to share this because I want him to be remembered, and because his story is like so many others. Randolph Mark Toth was more than the father of a liberal. He went to my daddy-daughter Girl Scout overnighters and scared me with talk of bears. He made donuts with us. He yelled at the TV during sports, particularly when his Cougars were playing. He dropped me off at college and a week later wrote me a letter about how empty the house seemed without me, even though for my teenage years most of our interactions were laced with conflict.

There will always be a hole. But we were lucky. Cancer is vicious, but it gives the gift of time. The shock comes at the beginning. Grieving begins while the person is still alive.

It is this fact for which I am most grateful when reflecting on tragedies like the Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania shootings, the fatal hit and run in Ogden on Christmas Eve and the realities of life in a war zone for so many people throughout the world.

As I have listened to the dialogue that ramped up in intensity after the Newtown shootings, one fact has struck me — we don’t know how to fix the problem. We’re not even sure what the problem is. In some ways, the violence epidemic is a lot like cancer: we know it’s there. We see the deadly evidence of it every day. It touches everyone in one way or another.

Sometimes we can fix it, sometimes we can’t. But we can’t definitively say what causes it or how to cure it. All we can do is live in such a way that we don’t invite it, and even that is not enough for many people.

But that does not mean we let our guard down, either individually or collectively. It cannot mean that we stop trying to find answers to the question of unchecked violence, or that we put it off.

And it has to mean that we love each other now.

To find out how the Girl Scout campout ended, tweet Heidi Toth @leftinutah.