My father died in 2004. The country was still broken and trying to heal from 9/11. We had invaded Iraq in 2003, and war still hung over us. The abuses at Abu Ghraib had been revealed a few months before my father died, bringing us shame at the unabashed cruelty that had been exposed. We needed the balm of grief. We needed a week to pause, and weep, and just be quiet.

McCain died at a time when our country has been ripped apart by anger, racism and a petulant leader’s noisy, hateful rhetoric. We needed this week to remember what dignity looks like, what reverence for America sounds like, what tears feel like when they fall softly for a life lived with courage, gratitude and honesty. Leaders are not always the ones who hold the highest positions. Leaders are those who, by example, show us what we are capable of being.

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It’s a strange dance, grieving on the world stage. I watched Meghan McCain closely this week; I felt every tear and every caught breath. I knew well the edge she was living on — the awareness that the world was watching and the moments of surrendering to the sorrow that will change her life forever. Her eulogy at his memorial service on Saturday captured all of it — a daughter’s loss as well as the solemn responsibility to own and acknowledge that her father belonged to America, too. Grief is a soft place to rest, but it is also fierce and bold and raw with truth.

I laughed through tears when she told the story of her father making her get back on a horse after she fell off. My father did the same thing, although I was less injured than she was. Both my father and John McCain, who were good friends, imprinted on their daughters the most vital of lessons — when you fall down, you get back up. You don’t give in to fear.

For all the years that I resented America for claiming my father, for winning at what I have dubbed my sibling rivalry with a country, I was so grateful to have the tears of a nation joined with ours as we laid my father to rest. It was like a million arms were holding me above the water line. As we made our final journey back across the country, my father’s flag-draped coffin in the plane with us, I said to my mother, “I wish we could just keep flying around like this. Maybe we could stop in some other cities and have some more services.”

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I knew that the hard work, the lonely work, would begin once he was buried, once the soldiers left and the world went back to its normal routines. Memories would come according to their own rhythm — some hard and haunting, some gentle as rain. When you’re the offspring of a man who lived on history’s stage, the balancing act is never done. You reach for your father amid the larger-than-life stories; you reach through the legacy for the man who held you as a child, while opening your arms a little wider to the millions of people who you will never meet, who feel like he parented them, too. Meghan McCain will always be the young girl whose father made her get back on the horse after she fell off. And she will always be the woman who looked straight into the unfolding pages of history and demanded that her father’s dignity be remembered.