My first born, Dempsey, is the original love of my life. She only lived thirty-one days, but I think about her constantly. She impacts much of what I’ve done and what I continue to do. She is my greatest tragedy and my greatest triumph.

So in that regard, I’m not new to this fatherhood thing. However, with Dempsey, I never changed a diaper, put in a car seat, or had to wake up in the middle of the night for a bottle feeding. I never got to let her sleep against my chest as I protected her. Dempsey never left the hospital. Debbie, (my wife at the time) and I lived in the Ronald McDonald house next door to Phoenix Children’s Hospital during that difficult month, where we went back and forth from the side of our daughter to a warm bed nearby. Every morning we’d make the trip back to the hospital with optimism that we’d be bringing our baby home soon, and every night we’d return to our room discouraged and frustrated.

Dempsey suffered from a heart defect known as “Transposition of the Great Vessels,” which means that her heart was plumbed backwards. Blood pumping from her lungs was routed to her heart and then right back to her lungs, never allowing oxygen to flow out to the rest of her body. She required major heart surgery and was blessed to have the hands of one the top pediatric heart surgeons in the country working on her to repair her condition, however even then, a full life wasn’t in the cards for her. Thirty-one days after Dempsey came into this world, she left us. Those thirty-one days are my complete and total experience with fatherhood, and what resulted from her life, death, and subsequent burial was something that I could have never predicted. A foundation that emerged based on one simple visit to her graveside at the Larkin’s Sunset Gardens Cemetery; A visit that revealed to me how many babies were buried without headstones. Dempsey’s foundation continues to provide headstones to families across the United States who have bared a similar loss but do not have the luxury of having enough money to provide the one last thing that a grieving family must provide their son or daughter – a permanent memorial. So in that regard, Dempsey, my daughter lives on. She continues to inspire. She continues to teach. She continues to give.

One of the strange things about the fact that I will be a father again soon is, though this will never take away the pain of losing Dempsey, it does begin to fulfill a mission that I set out on nearly 9-years-ago. A mission I had nearly forgotten – misplaced in the fog of Rock-n-Roll and Hollywood. I’m excited to explore this part of me again – the dad part – and I’m optimistic that this time around everything will be different.