Sharing Your Day with Your Dad
My father passed away on my birthday and I wouldn't have it any other way
Tomorrow is my birthday. It’s also the anniversary of my father’s death. When it happened, eight years ago, I was in San Luis Obispo packing for what I thought would be a quick trip up to Tahoe for the MLK holiday. There was new snow, and I was eager to spend a weekend somewhere besides the couch in my parents’ condo just north of Davis—close to the hospital where my dad had been getting chemo.
My sister, who lived less than 10 minutes away from them, had been shouldering most of the in-between times, visiting almost daily, running errands, helping translate doctor-speak, and providing emotional support to both parents in a time of a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. All this, while trying to balance a law practice and being a spouse, and mother to two teens. I knew it wasn’t easy for her, but now I don’t quite understand how she or my mother managed on the front lines. I don’t know how anyone does.
She called me around 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, late for her but not wholly unexpected. That’s about the time their house settled down, and she could pour a glass of wine and recall the day’s events.
I thought it was maybe an early birthday call or well-wishes for my upcoming trip, but it was just static silence followed by (a-hem) dead seriousness. “You need to get up here now.”
Her voice was the kind when people have been crying a lot, and they sort of are able to stitch it back together before the next wave hits. I remember saying something like didn’t she remember I had plans? Didn’t she remember it was my BIRTHDAY?
“Now,” she said, this time quietly. There was no arguing.
I got up there around 2 a.m. Both she and my mom were still up. The TV was on mute, and they were sitting in the living area. I could hear my dad breathing. It wasn’t shallow or subdued. It was a bone-shaking gulp of air, like coming up after two waves push you down, and then back under, count to twelve, and up again, big breath. “My god,” I said. “Is this it?” No reaction.
My sister went home, exhausted, and my mom went to go lay down. I turned on HBO and watched all of season one of How To Make it in America, which was just not great to begin with but tinged with an air of death surrounding you, took on a whole new wild and frivolous meeting. Big recommend.
In the morning, my sister came over, showered, holding her Cal alum mug filled to the brim. My father’s caregiver arrived and started to help in the kitchen. My mother got dressed as if she were about to head out to lunch and started making coffee. I stood around in basketball shorts and a torn up T-shirt, not knowing what to do, so I went in and sat next to my dad.
He wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t awake. His cheeks were hollow and his eyes frozen, affixed to a point on the ceiling beyond what anyone could see. I talked to him. This is it, right? Say it now. But nothing good came out.
A flood of disconnected memories overtook me, like the one afternoon he was home from work before I got back from school, just because, and we went down to the baseball field and played catch—like he’d planned it that way. The time he showed up from work on a random-nothing Friday night with Chinese take-out and a rented VCR with a copy of the just-released Superman III. My sister and I thought he’d won the lottery. The time he stayed up all night with the family dog, Smidgen, her on her bed convalescing and convulsing after within a stomach full of snail bait (which he put out earlier that day) and him in his chair next to her, weeping. (She was OK.) How I felt when he grabbed me by the shirt collar and pitched me out in the Tahoe snow when I rolled in to his home unannounced at 4 a.m. with a crew of five or six drunk dudes on New Year’s Eve. Red-faced, he told me to, “Grab your shit, and you and your friends get the fuck out of my house.” He rarely (if ever) said fuck.
So we went.
And there I was after all that life just fast-forwarded by. Another birthday, the last of my thirties, the last I’d share with my dad. The Golf Channel was on—volume low, a re-run of some third-tier PGA event. I hate golf. I squeezed his hand because that’s what happens in movies. But I didn’t feel much. I went and changed into my running clothes and told my sister and my mom I’d be back in a few. I went out for an hour, through the fields of Yolo County, past the roadside detritus of spilled tomatoes from big trucks, pacing well below my usual under the hypnotic undulations of power lines. It was flat and hot and it stayed flat and hot. And then, at some point, something told me to turn around, and I did.
I got back just in time.
My mother and sister were in the room on one side of his bed, standing up. I took a post opposite them. My mom had brought out the old photos in a shoebox, the ones that were all mixed together. Christmas 1978 here, Disney 1989 there. Some A’s games, some Giants games, some trips to the beach. This was Hawaii in ’81. This was your great aunt’s house in Minnesota, her first house, they later built another and then got a divorce. This was the year I was Charlie Brown for Halloween, and this was the year I was a clothes hamper.
And then, it happened. The room shook off its foundation, and all the air went out of it, all the way, deep down into my father’s lungs. He held it there. My sister covered her mouth, and big tears formed in the corners of her eyes, at the ready. The four of us were there, just the four of us. Our little family, for one more, very long second. My sister cried out, “Dad?” And he shouted out his signature, “Ha!” And she let out the biggest laugh I’d ever felt—straight from her belly. And then, that was it. An exhale. Stillness. Then he was gone.
On the birthdays that have followed, I get some strange mash-up texts from family and close friends; they’re obligatory, I know, but still comforting. It’s always something like, “Happy Birthday, also thinking about your Dad.” Or like a picture of me and my dad with “Happy birthday. Missing Craig today too.”
The day I arrived here is now inexorably and undeniably linked to the day my father left. And you know what, I have embraced it. To me, it will always be a time to pause and not only think about what I did (and, more likely didn’t do) what I accomplished (and what I ignored)—a parent-teacher conference with myself. Did I meet or exceed expectations, or did I fall short? But in that audit, there’s also the questions that will forever be unanswered of a man I lived with for decades and hardly knew. What was he really like, especially when he was younger? Did he like me, as a person, beyond the obligation? And where did he go?
I do know this: He was funny and kind and a little bit lonely and too sentimental for his own good. He had the sort of luck he always misdiagnosed as a fork in the road. He always had a joke handy but never any advice. He was underestimated by design. And he was loved, oh boy was he.
Great story and happy Birthday.
D Shan here. just a really affecting read, Pridgen. thanks.
Katie was born on the same day her dad's mom passed away. every one of her birthdays is an uncanny mix of elation and sorrow for him.
take care buddy, and happy birthday.