Happy Birthday

Today my father would have turned 75, the sort of age that I always thought of as ancient when I was a kid-mostly because it sort of was back then.

Nowadays with the advances in healthcare, the mostly better understanding people have around nutrition and self care, 75 is not an age with the same proportion of people tottering into utter fragility. I’m astounded at the number of amazingly active and healthy people I met who are in their 70s and beyond. My father, the Old Man was never going to be one of them.

7 years ago he died of a heart attack that served to thwart the lung cancer that had reduced his life expectancy to weeks, or the imminent liver failure; not to mention the prospect of the 5th stroke being the one that did for him. A lifetime of addiction and substance abuse caught up with him. It caught up with us all.

Watching him go was awful- seeing the way the body and spirit break down is intolerably cruel, because you spend so long pushing for more time while lounging for an end to it all. Then they leave and you learn the awful enormity of the word forever.

The Old Man is dead, and will be forever. I will never be able to shower with him, hug him, smell the strange blends of wine, cigarettes and gold dust infused clothing that I used to hate, that market of smell of his years as an abuser that I long to share again. Forever is too much to deal with, but if course there’s no other option. So happy birthday to him, and to me too I suppose.

Hardest of all is that he died alone, in the Old Country, and I have never returned. There was no funeral, no moment with his body. 7 years on and I’ve never seen his grave except in a photo taken by my adult daughter- the only one to visit his final resting place. Some days it feels like I never will get there myself, though I dream about it all the time. Instead he visits me in my dreams, strong and kind and loving, the way he could be when he was not drinking. That’s the best gift of all I suppose- no revelations will come at his grave.

For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.

John Scalzi, Old Man’s War