Paternal celebrates Father’s Day with one of its most personal and uplifting episodes to date, examining what it means to risk loss in the pursuit of love, and how one father helped hold his family together during a life-altering set of circumstances.

Ten years ago, Jason Smith found himself in a hospital waiting room in Boston, waiting to see is his wife would live through the night after a dangerous allergic reaction to chemotherapy. Smith, a psychotherapist and father of two, endured that agonizing night in the emergency room and then an exhausting year of parenting while his wife recovered. The lessons learned from the experience reaffirmed his love for his wife and his responsibilities as a father, but also helped him make sense of his own father’s trouble dealing with tragedy.

“I had to make the conscious choice to let myself love her, because in letting myself love her, I was open to the possibility that I would lose her,” Smith says. “It’s worth knowing that bad things will happen, and finding a way to have the courage to live your life fully anyway.”

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