How's the Dash Part of Your Life?

While playing mahjongg with friends, they started talking about a book that I ordered as soon as I arrived home. On Saturday night, I read half of Stuff Happens (and then you fix it!) that came in my mailbox earlier in the day. Fate may have intervened when all this happened.
The next day, I went to Fort Worth for my dad’s unveiling. He passed away on December 25, 2007. His tombstone displayed his birth date of February 5, 1931 and his death date. Other than the stone saying, “Beloved husband, father and grandfather,” strangers passing by won’t know anything about him.
Stuff Happens discusses the dash that appears between people’s birth date and death date. Everyone comes to Earth and everyone dies. It’s that time between the two dates that make up who we are.
I decided to speak and referenced the book’s mentioning the birth and death dates. Then I told a Cliff’s Notes version of my dad’s life (paraphrased and added notes I forgot):

He was born in Brooklyn and loved the Dodgers, which rubbed off on me even though the Dodgers were long gone from Brooklyn when I arrived. He loved sports and excelled at it that he earned a football scholarship.

He ended up going into the U.S. Air Force instead of college and served during the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base at the end of his four-year service where he met and married my mother in 1955, the year the Dodgers won the world series.

He had three children and four grandchildren, which of course, he bragged about all the time. Dad ran a successful life insurance and financing business for years and still managed it part-time just before his stroke. He also volunteered right up to then especially at Dallas-Fort Worth airport as an ambassador.

Everyone here [at the unveiling] stands as a testament for the kind of person he was. You cared about him and share many memories of him.

My son mentioned that Grandpa could imitate Donald Duck to make many children laugh. My niece talked about him taking us to baseball games. Both said he was a kind and nice guy. Dad had an office full of Donald Duck mementos thanks to his children giving them to him as presents for birthdays, Father’s Days, and others.
If Dad can hear me, then I would tell him to be very proud of his “dash.” He lived a full life in both enjoying his life for himself and doing for others to make the world a better place.
So, do you want to act as a victim of everything that goes wrong with your life (the economy sucks, lost retirement funds, lost job, can’t get a raise) or do you want to fix it and move forward in making your dash more meaningful?