I knew my dad for exactly 19 years, 5 months, 9 days and those were the best days of my life. While I was in the ICU with him, a weird thought hit me. In the show HIMYM, the main characters father unexpectedly dies, and the episode revolves around his father’s last words to him. I started thinking, what were his last words to me. I decided they were: “I’m pulling up to Dairy Queen now to get grandma a blizzard”. Then the standard love you bye. This story requires some background, his mother, my Grandma Jackie, has been in a nursing home and essentially unresponsive for over a year now. But anytime my dad had 3 hours free, he would jump in his car and drive to see her, and every time he would stop and get her a heath bar blizzard. She didn’t respond too much, but she always responded to that, being a lifelong chocolate lover. He would sit there and feed her the blizzard while telling her about his life and her grandkids, and reading her favorite book “Charlotte’s Web”. He would sit there, sometimes alone, for hours and appreciate the women she is and was. This is an example of what I would call some of my dad’s superpowers: Super patience, enduring love and dedication. I use the word super power because I have considered my dad a super hero, ever since I was a little kid. Unlike most hero’s that as you grow bigger, they grow smaller. As I grew bigger, he continued to become a larger then life figure. As I grew older I gained the ability to appreciate more of what he did, more of his super powers. He managed to balance working full time as a doctor with coaching every single one of my sports teams. He planned camping trips and neighborhood dinners, family hikes, lodging at the mountain and all sorts of other activities us kids called “Tripel F: Forced Family Fun”. He did this all while dealing with cancer and the side affects of his medication. Maybe because of this, he always kept his priorities straight. He never passed up an opportunity to be with his family and friends. He loved his job, but he made sure it never interfered with “family time”. Whether it was the nightly family dinner, or trips down to the farm, or up to the mountain, he always put family time before anything else. Another one of his super powers was something that he might be better at then anyone on the planet. Over and over again we have all heard the same thing: when you were talking to him, he made you feel like what you were telling him was the most interesting thing he had ever heard. We don’t think he was pretending either; he was interested in literally everything, from stars to knots to the history of bananas. No matter what you were telling him, he loved it. His genuine interest combined with his patience made him a super listener and everyone’s friend. Scott Lawrence Mader was the greatest man I have ever known, he will be missed greatly. But his legacy will live on in me, in my family and in the thousands of people whose life he impacted. He has set an example of patience, love, endurance, and balance and it is up to us to strive to follow his examples and reach the super levels he did.