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Four. Eight. Twelve. Thirteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-nine.

Six numbers popped into my head while I was sitting on the rock at my father's grave. The stone has a nice and level ergonomic perch. Had it not been chosen in such sad circumstances, it would be a nice place to relax and reflect.

I recently left a job I didn't care for at all.

It hadn't been my intention to remain with the company for so long. It hadn't been my intention to spend any time there at all.

I started on a Monday in July. By that afternoon, I had been given the world's smallest cubicle, a scientific calculator that scared me as I tried to make sense of unknown letter combinations, and access to an ancient green-screen DOS computer application that was another fount of cryptic codes. I decided I would say, "Sorry, I thought this position held more of a communications aspect to it," and try my luck elsewhere.

Then, the next day, I got the phone call. My father had terminal cancer. It was weeks, not months. The man who had just helped me renovate the kitchen of the sturdy old house my wife and I share with our son. The man who, just the week before, had joined me on a 35-kilometre bike ride down a rail trail.

Two months after that call, a small, square marble box holding the corporeal remains of my father sat on the cemetery grounds, waiting to be committed to a burrow beneath the boulder.

All through that time, all through the decompression and adjustment to the new normal that followed, I whiled away the hours in my little cubicle. My work ethic was shattered. The job was wildly unsuitable for me, and the intense sadness I carried around like a silent albatross made for some difficult Monday mornings.

But it's funny. Just before his end, my father wrote letters to the four most precious people in his life. Mine contained a phrase I've been carrying around with me for the past two years.

He wrote, "It's no use working at something all your life that you don't enjoy." He was right — the perspective on life of a dying man is probably the clearest you're going to get.

Do what you enjoy doing, to the best of your abilities. I took that advice and put it on the shelf marked "good advice, for potential use some day."

It fit beside the soundly ignored investment suggestions and the reasons why you shouldn't take up smoking (I quit, but it was tough).

There it sat until this spring, when I decided to make a timeline for myself and my future. I even applied for college, though I knew a return to the shady glades of academia was the last thing I wanted to do. My wife and I started salting money away, no easy task for a young family in an old house. And in July, I sent my manager a letter saying I was returning to school. My last day there would be at the end of August.

The agony of my decision was overwhelming. Was I a good person? A loving dad? A responsible citizen? Responsible people don't walk away from reasonably good incomes. I had never left a job that wasn't superseded by a better one, both in pay and prospects.

But then I drove into the cemetery, past the rows of orderly headstones, and there on the big rock near the back fence I saw his name: Peter Richard Hood-Morris — 1944-2006. The same last name as mine, so familiar and yet so strange when read in the sunshine, engraved on a metal plate. I staggered over and sat down heavily on the rock's comfortable contours. I held my head in my hands and wept.

I decided to clear my head and walk around the cemetery for a while. As I read the names and dates on the headstones, a thought occurred to me, a vague connection to a lyric from the Doors: "No one here gets out alive."

So be it. Sure, things will be tight for a while, but at least I'm taking a chance on using my skills rather than toiling in the drudgery of something I'm not great at or enthusiastic about.

I walked back and sat down on my father's grave rock, seeing his advice through a better perspective. Life is not a rehearsal, and sometimes risks must be taken. But if those risks are undertaken with forethought and clarity then it's a clear and obvious choice.

Four. Eight. Twelve. Thirteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-nine.

The numbers floated in the sunshine in front of the fragrant pine trees. I'm not a great believer in omens, but it seemed too obvious for me not to take those numbers into the nearest variety store and convert them into a lottery ticket.

Then again, I thought as I sat there, maybe it was just my brain throwing up a game to play. Something to distract me from the business at hand, and the alternating currents of despair over my rash decision and sublime smugness for seeing beyond the here and now to the potential of a better future.

That night the lottery numbers were drawn. I won a free ticket.

Greg Hood-Morris lives in Cambridge, Ont.

Illustration by Lori Langille.