I'm the daughter of a funeral director. Here's what being surrounded by death taught me about life.

• My dad is a mortician and funeral director, which was hard for me to handle growing up.
• He missed birthdays and basketball games because he was always on call.

Death is incredibly difficult to grasp, understand, and accept - but I've always been surrounded by it.

My father is the county coroner, a mortician, and a funeral director. His job wasn't like the other dads' jobs, but my family tried to bring light and humor to it.

At the dinner table each night, I'd ask my dad who died that day and feel relieved when it was no one I knew. And when other kids at school asked about my dad's "weird" job, I'd joke that at least he'd never go out of business.

What else can you do when something so dark is a prevalent part of your existence?

It took a long time for me to cope with death being put above my basketball games and birthdays

Death has no schedule, so my dad was always on call - it didn't matter if it was 3 a.m. or his daughter's 14th birthday.

As selfish as it seems, it never got easier to watch him leave in the middle of movies or skip my basketball games. I felt like his job usually got more attention than me.

As time passed and I matured, I started to gain more of an understanding and admiration for my father and his career.

My dad wasn't just headed to the office at all hours to file taxes. He was on call for moments when people's lives change forever. He was always the first one to help people in our community, no questions asked.

Although I didn't understand his frequent absence as a child, I now realize that he did everything to help others through the hardest time imaginable.

In being surrounded by death, I've learned to appreciate life

My father once told me this anecdote about the dash in between one's birth date and death date on a gravestone. He said that the dash is so much more than an indention in a concrete stone; it's your life. Every laugh, every tear, every moment.

Once we're born into this beautifully chaotic world, we must take advantage of the time we have here.

I often feel myself getting caught up in the business and chaos that comes along with life. Feelings of stress, financial concerns, job problems, family and friend issues - things that no one is a stranger to.

In those moments, I choose to breathe. I look at my surroundings, try to ground myself, and calm down. I must remind myself that feelings of confusion and frustration are temporary. We're all here for such a short amount of time, and no one deserves to live a life filled with burden.

We are the ones who choose how we live our lives.

I've learned to cherish every moment, to smell the flowers, to never sweat the small stuff, to remind those who I love that I love them, to try and resolve issues with friends and family, and to just live life to its fullest.

I'll probably never know all the ways my father's job has affected me, but I do know that I'll never take one day for granted as we're not promised tomorrow.