My father and I would nap together during his final days.

Sunday afternoons were my mother's only break. She wandered thrift stores in search of the third vacuum cleaner we didn't need, while I stayed home to care for my father.

We'd talk for a while, but he tired quickly — nothing like the man who once held us spellbound with his stories. Pancreatic cancer had left his body so weak that he no longer had the strength to turn himself over in bed. So before closing my eyes, I made him promise to wake me so I could help him.

He never shook me. Never called my name. Never made a sound. Instead, he rubbed my back gently and waited — the same way he had woken me for school all those years ago.

If I could sum up my father's essence in one word, it would be this: gentle. Gentle in his words. Gentle in his movement. Gentle in his spirit.

My dad is one of my favorite people and one of my best friends. I am absolutely his mini me, although somehow I inherited his competitiveness and sarcasm but not quite as much of his niceness. Genetics are mysterious that way.

We share a love of volleyball, the same sense of humor, and an extensive, highly practical knowledge of movie quotes. I can throw out one random line with absolutely no context (usually a Ghostbusters quote), and he'll usually know exactly what movie I mean. I can do the same with him. It's basically our own language and arguably our most useful shared skill.

Long before fantasy sports became an industry, we invented our own version of fantasy basketball. We would pull out our NBA trading cards, each choose five players for the week, and track how many points they scored. Whoever's players scored the most won. There were no apps, no automatic scoring, and definitely no participation trophies. My dad was far too competitive to let me win, and honestly, so was I.

In Kabul in the 1950s, my maternal grandfather, Mohammad Salihjon, owned a radio store — a dukaan-e radio furoshi — on a bustling commercial street that was later converted into a royal park. The businesses were given very short notice to move and make room for the park. They had given my grandfather a letter in Farsi and he had signed it with a thumbprint.

He ended up losing his entire business. He went from living very comfortably, with a car, a rare thing in Kabul in those days, and a nice house, to moving to Old Kabul near the hing (asafoetida) factory. It was a drastic move. He had lost his business and his livelihood.

Among the Turkestan community in Kabul, he was known as Salihjon Sarigh, or "blond." Sarigh was used for people with light hair; here we might call his hair light brown.

His children and his wife read signs for him, and everyone believed he was illiterate. He later became a real estate agent for the Uzbek and Turkmen community and made a precarious living this way.

Some lives are measured in titles and awards. My father has always taught me to measure a life differently: by the good we leave behind, and by the kind of person we are while doing it.

That lesson might sound surprising coming from him. Geir Helge Ommundsen has spent much of his life doing things that, by almost any measure, matter. He has built water systems, health clinics and vocational training programmes in some of the most underserved places in the world.

And yet, when he speaks about what makes a life worthwhile, he rarely talks about achievement. He talks about kindness. About how we treat other people.

My father was born in 1952 in a simple hut in Congo-Brazzaville, where his Norwegian parents were working as missionaries. He grew up surrounded by Congolese children and spoke Lingala more naturally than Norwegian.