I wrote this a few years ago and am reposting it on January 11, 2025, the 6th anniversary of my father's passing. I share it today because I will be thinking about and feeling him today and a few more after that. I'll be back to my regularly scheduled programming soon enough, probably after playing some more Wayne Shorter.
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Five years ago my father visited me in the early part of December for one of our annual Christmas time get togethers, something our relationship at a distance permitted on a yearly basis. Usually we went to a restaurant, other rare times both he and his wife would visit me. The joint visits were always dicey; his wife's personality required varying levels of management. But 90% of the time I was a good son and did my best to make accommodations. This particular time my dad was visiting my home and I was making us big salads for dinner.
His limp had progressed (regressed?) well past the walking cane stage to full blown walker by this time. It was no longer a limp but a noticeable disability. In the prior spring I had witnessed him limping on the sidewalk, outside of our quarterly dinner at Tres Hermanas on K Street. It looked like he had a mild foot injury, and at the time he said he wasn't sure what was wrong, only that there was no pain. Over the course of the year his limp got progressively worse. He said that he was going to the doctor, and at various intervals shared a variation of the same reply: they didn't know what it was and they were doing more tests. He once shared that he had insisted they test for aluminum poisoning, and that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was not an injured ligament or a pinched nerve; this was more, and worse.
The full reality of his deteriorating condition surfaced when he attended the funeral of one of my great aunts. As I sat in the middle section of the rounded pews I glanced back mid-service to see one of the back doors open and my father enter. He was using a walker, and my facial muscles retreated in fearful surprise at this sight. Later at the graveside service he slowly advanced through the grass towards the burial site and unknowingly moved right past his own father's grave. (Side note: He told me it was the first time he had been by his father's grave since his death in 1989, a revelation I found both profoundly strange but not shocking. I had visited my grandfather's grave many times, usually by myself, even though I was only 12 when he died.) At this point the shock of my dad's condition continued to bother me, and my brother and I shared a glance that said "this is really bad". Somehow he had the temerity and dexterity to swing himself into a large extended cab truck (and drive!) in his condition. No less than three different times did we warningly wonder aloud to him if he should be driving at all.
By the time of his Christmas visit, just the two of us, he was using his walker and dragging his left leg even more prominently. His steps were labored, and his features even more gaunt. I had become convinced several months earlier that he was hiding his condition, that something more was going on that he had not let on to anyone. My youngest brother was sure of this as well, but we figured at some point it would come out. The funeral service convinced us of it, but my father remained dismissively tight lipped about it to us. "They say they don't know." He had grown amazingly distrustful of doctors and a lot of established conventional health care, and even history, since taking up with his wife. She was (and probably remains) a very disturbed narcissist who's full throated embrace of the most bewildering of conspiracy theories and outright nonsense had ensnared my dad, to the point in which they believed you could cure cancer through a vegan diet. That was the least bewildering of her claims.
Yet this dinner was relatively benign. I was quiet through most of it, primarily out of deep concern for his condition, but also because I feared that probing him for more info would threaten our limited relationship. Truth be told, I had become aware that our visits usually consisted of me asking all about him, him telling me all about everything, him launching into a variety of light diatribes against you name it (administrators at work, the DMV, the food industry, modern medicine, or anyone he was aggrieved with at that time), and occasionally asking me about my mom and brothers. He really didn't ask about me. At some point in my life, probably around their divorce, I became an elder peer to my parents. From that point on I was someone they disproportionately complained to, or vented to, or shared with, about themselves. Rarely was the same space afforded to me, and when it was it felt perfunctory, a set up to provide them the space to relieve themselves of the emotional baggage of the week or month. This dinner progressed along those same lines, and I gave it more space than usual.
But something was troubling my father. I could tell from the way he exhaled through his nose and furrowed his brow and looked down at his food. Unprovoked from a quiet space, he remarked how he regretted that time had passed by so fast. This was unlike him. This level of introspection I was sure he was capable of, but the level of vulnerability of this topic was not typical of him to share. He continued on about how before you knew it years had flown by. Specifically he lamented the loss of his relationship with his goddaughter, Dolores. When she was a child he would visit her and even call her and listen to her share all her stories about her days. My father always enjoyed the company of kids, especially his nieces and nephews, and loved nothing more on this Earth than taking them to watch the latest Disney movie in theaters. He was a beloved uncle and great uncle, and he appreciated tremendously his roles and relationships with all the kids, especially his youngest goddaughter.
He was genuinely sad. Not in a morose kind of way, but in a disappointed and resigned way that spoke as much to lost time as it did to lost moments with Dolores. He was sad that he went from these moments of being a part of her childhood to now not knowing her like he once did, or at all (she was now an adult with her own family). He asked aloud, "how did that happen?" I pulled my punches and told him it was not too late to reach out to her, to re-engage her and get to know her family. But it was a difficult conversation to have, because his regret he had saved for her and not for his own sons and grandchildren (he had five at this point) who were and had always been right in front of him. That disappointment and frustration I buried, out of pragmatism and out of bewilderment. Where did this regret come from?
He left soon after, and I walked him to his truck. I would not see him again until around his birthday in mid-February. A few days after my own birthday (January 8) he told my mother he was suffering from Lou Gherig's disease. And a year and three days later, he died.
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The anniversary of his passing came and went for the fourth time. I'm 47 and I still find something new every year about myself that I can root in him. My birthday since his passing has been and will be inextricably linked to his passing, but moreso linked to him. Being born two weeks after Christmas has always been a curse for me, and it wasn't until my 30's that I took all the effort I could to make it feel less like a hangover from the winter holiday. I would plan three birthday celebrations for myself: one in Sacramento in or around my actual bday, one in the bay area with bay area friends the following weekend, and finally one last one at the end of the month in LA to coincide with the last big football weekend of the year and a big group dinner with my SoCal amigos.
I don't think I could do that any more. I saw him for the last time on Friday January 11th, and during my own birthday brunch the following morning learned that he had passed only hours after I had left him. I told him I would see him on Monday when I left him, a difficult departure because of his frailty and inability to speak. I didn't know that was the last time I would ever see him again, and if I did I would have never left. And my mind goes back to that last Christmas dinner with just he and I, and his regret at missing out and how time had passed.
My birthday will always be a private somber occasion for me, for the rest of my life. I will endeavor, as I did this year, to spend it with my nieces and nephews because they like pizza and cake and wrapping presents and I like sharing those moments with them too. But I miss my father, and I wish he were here to celebrate my birthday with me and our family.
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