CALGARY — It is a date on the calendar he’d rather forget.

"I tried to change my birthday to another day, but my family was having none of it," said Tim Goddard, who turns 63 on Tuesday. "It’s never going to go away, that phone call, that moment."

On May 17, 2006, Tim’s annual celebration came to an abrupt and anguished halt when he received a phone call from his son-in-law, Jason Beam, who lived in Manitoba. Beam quietly informed him that the 16th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan was none other than Beam’s wife of three years and Goddard’s daughter, Capt. Nichola Goddard.

In a split second, the popular vice-provost at the University of Calgary and his family were set on a path of intense personal grief; yet it was a loss that would also be played out on a national, and international, stage.

Capt. Goddard, a forward observation officer in the Canadian Forces and a Royal Military College graduate, had just made history on the battlefield in the last hours of a battle with the Taliban west of Kandahar city.

Supported by her team of three men, the well-regarded 26-year-old had just executed high explosive and illumination fire missions in support of Canadian troop manoeuvres against a known enemy — the first time a Canadian soldier had done so since the Korean War more than 50 years earlier.

Yet that accomplishment would be overshadowed by a first that was better understandable to those in the civilian world.

A chance ricochet of shrapnel, striking her in the back of the head and killing her instantly, put Capt. Goddard in the history books: she was the first combat-certified, female Canadian soldier to die in a combat role.

While Capt. Goddard was also the highest-ranking soldier to die since Canada had joined the United States and NATO in Afghanistan four years earlier, it was her gender that would be spoken of in the House of Commons by then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and by the countless broadcast and print reporters and columnists both here in Canada and around the world.

That glare of publicity, says her father, would have displeased the proud soldier whose entire life was a refutation of gender stereotypes, who strove to be an equal among her male counterparts, both in physical strength and mental toughness.

Still, it’s something that today he believes she would understand. "She was pragmatic enough to recognize that this is part of it," Tim said. "You can’t untie it from the story."

A decade after her death, the name Capt. Nichola Goddard remains arguably the best known of the 158 Canadian soldiers who died in the country’s mission in Afghanistan. The more than 40,000 soldiers deployed from 2001 to 2014 represented the largest since the Second World War.

Throughout the past 10 years, her fellow Canadians have helped cement that fame. After being awarded a Sacrifice Medal and a Meritorious Service Medal (military) after her death, Capt. Goddard has been remembered in myriad ways: the Canadian Coast Guard ship Captain Goddard M.S.M. took its maiden voyage in late 2014; in 2015, two bodies of water in Saskatchewan, Goddard Lake and Lang Bay were named for her and Michelle Lang, a Calgary Herald journalist killed in 2009 while covering the war in Afghanistan.

Calgary’s Captain Nichola Goddard School also honours the young woman in the city her parents called home for more than a decade, an honour both say is the highest praise for a child of academics, a woman who wanted to pursue a master’s degree in English upon her return to Canada.

Along with having everything from playgrounds to a peace summit bearing her name, Capt. Goddard was also the subject of an hour-long Remembrance Day special on CBC’s The National in 2013. She’s been featured in several books on Canada’s soldiers over the years; as well, her official biography, Sunray: The Death and Life of Captain Nichola Goddard, authored by this journalist, was released in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the ongoing attention and fascination with the young soldier led some in recent months to suggest her as a candidate for the 2018 bank note that will, for the first time, bear a portrait of a woman other than the Queen on the face side. It is an honour for which Capt. Goddard doesn’t qualify, having died after the eligibility cut-off date of 1991.

Sally Goddard can still hardly believe that, 10 years after the death of her and Tim’s eldest of three girls, Capt. Nichola Goddard — known as Nichola to her parents, Nic to her friends and fellow soldiers — still resonates across the country.

"Her death didn’t just impact us, it impacted so many others," sid Sally, who with her husband moved to Prince Edward Island in 2008.

The pain of losing her daughter is something Sally has learned to live with, although reminders of that loss pop up frequently. "We have no grandchildren yet," she said. "That is also part of the legacy."

Still, her parents have made sure to have a say in that ongoing narrative, their founding and continued efforts through the Nichola Goddard Foundation (nicholagoddard.com) ensuring that her legacy is also one of generosity and community.

Each year around Remembrance Day, the foundation stages a gala fundraiser that has brought such speakers as former astronaut Roberta Bondar and CTV anchor Lisa LaFlamme. Through its proceeds, the couple has been able to fund such projects as Light Up Papua New Guinea, which to date has brought solar-powered LED lighting to remote medical posts in Nichola’s birthplace, Papua New Guinea, an initiative that now provides much-needed light to more than 1.5 million people in that impoverished country.

"Life as we knew it changed, our role in the social order changed with Nichola’s death," said Sally, who with her husband has also overseen the establishment of several scholarships in their daughter’s name, including one at the University of Calgary. "We’ve long felt that if it can be used for some good, then let’s do it."

Today, Tim, an education professor at the University of Prince Edward Island, is just completing his work on a five-year project in Afghanistan — funded by CIDA and delivered by World University Service of Canada — working with the Afghan Ministry of Education to create a system for certification of teachers and the accreditation of training institutions in that still restive country. Sally, who over the years has worked with First Nations and other communities here and around the world, is currently a curriculum consultant at the Atlantic Veterinary College.

Their second daughter, 33-year-old Victoria, earned her PhD in medieval studies and bought a farm in P.E.I., not far from her parents’ home in Charlottetown; their youngest, 26-year-old Kate, who is set to marry in June, just passed the bar and will begin articling with a Toronto law firm in June. Nichola’s widower Beam, who has since remarried, still calls Manitoba home.

"The girls have kept us grounded," Sally said of her tight-knit family. "I think they are the reason that we got through it."

It will be on the island they now call home, at Victoria’s farm, where Tim Goddard will spend his 63rd birthday. "We’re building a garden there," he said. "I’ll just go out and plant things."

Of course, on that day, his smart, courageous eldest child — her gap-toothed smile familiar to Canadians from coast to coast to coast — will be very much on his mind.

"There isn’t a day I don’t think about Nichola," he said of his daughter, who he said would want to be remembered primarily as a good soldier and a good person.

"People say that, in time, you can become more separated from the emotions," Tim said. "I don’t know how long that takes, but it takes more than 10 years."

vfortney@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/valfortney