Today is my dad’s birthday.\u00c2\u00a0 He would have been 85 years old.<\/p>\n
Funny, when he died at 70, I thought that was a pretty good run.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I’m not so sure.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t marked on my calendar.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t anticipating it.\u00c2\u00a0 But when I placed my watch on the counter yesterday, to time how long I cleaned my contacts, I noticed the date was wrong, that I hadn’t advanced it, hadn’t accounted for the brief month of February.\u00c2\u00a0 And if it wasn’t February 30th, then it was…\u00c2\u00a0 I started doing the math in my head.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it must be March 2nd, which means tomorrow will be March 3rd.\u00c2\u00a0 Why does that date ring a bell?\u00c2\u00a0 Why is it significant?<\/p>\n
Must be somebody’s birthday.\u00c2\u00a0 First I thought of Mark Levy, down the street.\u00c2\u00a0 His was the first birthday I ever remembered.\u00c2\u00a0 But that was April 2nd, well, maybe not the 2nd, but certainly April.\u00c2\u00a0 And my sister’s birthday is March 15th.\u00c2\u00a0 Then it dawned on me, the 3rd is my DAD’S!<\/p>\n
I felt almost sacrilegious forgetting.<\/p>\n
But aren’t you supposed to celebrate the day they die?<\/p>\n
I’m not exactly sure what day my father died.\u00c2\u00a0 You see at dinner, he told my mother he wasn’t feeling well, that he needed to go to the hospital.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother implored him to ride it out.\u00c2\u00a0 But my father INSISTED!<\/p>\n
The last time my father insisted was when he gave up the wheel on the way back from Boston.\u00c2\u00a0 My father could be nodding out, he could have driven for hours, but he would NEVER relinquish the wheel.\u00c2\u00a0 But he had this pain in his back, it was just too much.\u00c2\u00a0 It was cancer.<\/p>\n
Actually, I diagnosed it at Mammoth, where we are right now.\u00c2\u00a0 He went out to pick up a pizza with me and while we were waiting he had no desire to case the real estate, one of his favorite pastimes.\u00c2\u00a0 He just stood with his forehead resting in his palm by the cash register until I became so bizarred I had to remove him, had to take him back to the condo.\u00c2\u00a0 And after returning from finally retrieving the pizza, my father was nowhere to be found.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother told me he’d gone with Jill to the airport, to search for her husband.<\/p>\n
YOU LET HIM OUT OF THE CONDO?<\/p>\n
I had an argument with my mother, I told her there was something wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 She said my dad had just had his annual checkup two weeks before and he was fine.<\/p>\n
That was two months before the drive home from Boston.<\/p>\n
I spoke with my father the night he died.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother put him on the phone in the hospital.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know if he’d taken his hearing aid out, but he couldn’t hear a single word I said.\u00c2\u00a0 He was so very afraid.<\/p>\n
He died hours later, early in the morning.<\/p>\n
So, yesterday I anticipated today.\u00c2\u00a0 Wondered if his birthday would sit with me, unnerve me.<\/p>\n
And it did.<\/p>\n
Because he wasn’t here.\u00c2\u00a0 And he would have liked to have been.\u00c2\u00a0 On a bluebird day, when he could have gotten a glass of wine on the deck and reveled in his efforts that resulted in this lifestyle.<\/p>\n
Last night, just before I went to bed, I was reading a throwaway publication, about Mammoth.\u00c2\u00a0 And there was an article on skiing after fifty.\u00c2\u00a0 It freaked me out, I’m over fifty.<\/p>\n
And just now, lying on the floor of the Mammoth Mountain Inn, doing my back exercises, I remembered that my father thought he’d never make it to seventy, since his dad hadn’t.\u00c2\u00a0 He just limped in, he passed away mere weeks after he became a septuagenarian.<\/p>\n
I used to think his superstition was just that.\u00c2\u00a0 But as I age, I now only count on living to seventy.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s not even two decades away.<\/p>\n
Now it seems like my father was robbed.\u00c2\u00a0 He might not have been cut down in the prime of his life, but he was still alert, still vital, still as sharp as ever, he hadn’t lost a step.\u00c2\u00a0 Can death just sneak up on you?\u00c2\u00a0 As I sit here feeling about twenty eight, can something be mutating in my body, eating me alive, and when I find out will it be too late, will I just slide into home, will that be the end?<\/p>\n
Funny, when you are in your twenties, trying to find yourself, wasting so much time, angsting, you think you’re going to live forever.\u00c2\u00a0 But as you get older, you find your place in life, but you suddenly realize you’re not going to be here ad infinitum.\u00c2\u00a0 Usually you can forget the end, but every once in a while, like today, on the anniversary of my father’s birth, the finality creeps in.\u00c2\u00a0 It looms like some grim reaper in a black hood.\u00c2\u00a0 Does everybody feel this?\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure, but the movie ends the same for all of us.\u00c2\u00a0 Hopefully later rather than sooner.<\/p>\n
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Today is my dad’s birthday.\u00c2\u00a0 He would have been 85 years old. Funny, when he died at 70, I thought that was a pretty good run.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I’m not so sure. It wasn’t marked on my calendar.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t anticipating it.\u00c2\u00a0 But when I placed my watch on the counter yesterday, to time how long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-moe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}