Forgiveness before too late

This is not the first time the message of forgiveness has been laid on my heart.  And I'm starting to think that it's like in school, if I repeat something it's probably important.  So I feel like this message must be important and I must have missed something the last time.
The hardest ones to forgive are the closest ones to you.  The ones who's hurts have cut the deepest and the most often.  For most of my life my dad was not an easy man to love or to get along with.  And I do have to say that most of the rough edges of my personality come straight from him.  For so much of my life I remember being so angry and so hurt by him.  I felt abandoned, unloved, and unworthy.  Even many years later when I started to understand my dad much better, from the stories he told and from the fact that my personality seems more likely like his all the time, I still harbored those feelings.  That deeper understanding was able to strip away the raw edges of that hurt, but true forgiveness wasn't there.  That's why even to the day he die, even with as much closer as we got, I still tended to avoid my dad.  Deep down I wasn't able to forgive him and let go of those hurts.  I think even more than my hurts was watching the way those same hurts had affect my sister three years my junior.  Watching the struggles that she has gone through, so many of which I feel like stem from his rejection, kept that last layer of bitterness in my heart even after my daddy was gone.  My father became a much better man before he died and I loved him dearly, but I wasn't able to forgive him for the hurts of my childhood.  I have realized that slowly after losing him those feelings have ebbed away.  My heart focuses on the good times and slowly I have forgiven those deepest of hurts.  It saddens me to know that I couldn't do this while he was still with me and it makes me wonder what I missed because of it.  What moments that I could have had with him did I miss out on because I clung to my hurts? This has made me contemplate the other hurts I've been holding on to and the ones that I have slowly been able to let go of. All I can do is pray that God will take hold of my heart and remove the bitterness that remains.  Forgiveness is hard work, but thinking of what could have been can be quite the motivation.