My birthday was last week. It was a major one, too. No, not the 40 or even 50 rollover. Instead, I turned 57.
O.K., so it’s not a big one for most people. But this is the age my father died. He never made it to 58. In fact, he didn’t even make it to 57.1. He died within a month of his birthdate.
To be fair, my mother made it to 89, so at least from a DNA aspect, I don’t have too much to worry about. I am feeling relatively fine these days, outside of the usual creaks my old bones make, so I can’t complain.
Still, it’s been a nagging factoid in the back of my head. I remember back when my father passed. I was 23 years old and had just started my adult journey, graduating from college just a couple months before I took dad to the hospital for the last time. My daughter had been born that July and I can still remember the few times he held her, laying in his bed in our home, soldiering on bravely while his body slowly ebbed away.
He seemed so old to me then. And yet, here I am, his age, still writing checks that I hope the morning will still cash, still running around this world like Peter Pan, refusing to grow up or to ever let life – and it’s often difficult path – get the best of me.
It doesn’t help that my mom passed last November. I guess I really did look forward to that birthday card with the dollar in it that my mom always sent me. It was a family tradition that she kept up until she died. When she was a bit younger, she would iron the dollars. All of us kids, grandkids and great grandkids got the same gift – a nicely ironed dollar.
I didn’t get one this year. Yes, there were times in my past when I didn’t get them either. My mom and I went through a period when we didn’t talk, so there were years when there were no dollar-bearing birthday cards in the mailbox. Still, there was a chance one could show up.
But this year, no card and no call from my mom to wish me happy birthday.
As such, there has been a bit of a pall cast on the event. I didn’t really plan to make a big deal of it – part of me didn’t even want to acknowledge it. It’s a bit hard during the holidays to deal with the fact that you no longer have any parents here on this earth. You’re alone.
Thankfully, I’m not really alone. I have Kat and she has even been through this part of life already, saying goodbye to her mom the year before. So she gets the moodiness and the occasional looks off in the distance as I come to terms with the fact that in some respects, I am now an orphan.
Oh, sure, there are those who will readily say, “But you’ve got lots of great friends here for you. And family.” Yes, I do, but they aren’t your mom and dad. And as we all know, I don’t really have brothers, at least ones that I speak to, and I haven’t had any contact with my nieces and nephews for decades. So, at least in my mind, I am something of an orphan.
Thankfully, this is all passing along nicely. It comes, then it goes. Then it comes around again. It wasn’t until I was riding the bus the day before my birthday that I realized that I owed it to my mom to celebrate this day in both of our lives. After all, she was a really busy girl on May 28, 1958, ushering the last of her four sons into this world. To pass on honoring that day, in reflection, seems a bit shallow and even selfish. It’s not just my day, but a day my mom and I shared in a very intimate way almost six decades ago.
It’s funny how in life you think you have everything figured out, then you find you don’t. If I were to tell you what set me on the course of rebounding you’d laugh, perhaps in a pathetic way. Maybe I will share it at some point in the future. But suffice it to say, it made me realize that I have carried an undercurrent of pain with me for a long time, pain of loss, a pain that has been at the root of some of my most fantastic and ill-conceived ventures, ones that have left my friends and often my family shaking their heads.
Turns out, I am far more complex than I ever imagined.
The reasons become ever clearer. The fault and blame that I once exclusively owned and which I bravely accepted, wasn’t all mine after all. Shit happens. It lands everywhere. And it’s not always your doing. Sometimes you’re just dealt a crummy set of cards in a long game of life and you’re too stupid or stubborn to fold, choosing instead to go all in and hope for the best.
The miracle isn’t in the hand you’re dealt, but how you play the game over the long run. To paraphrase Kenny Rogers, I’m getting a lot better at knowing when to hold them and when to fold them these days.
Reveling in the past doesn’t change the fact that I am turning my father’s last age this year. It is what it is, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Wait, there is something I can do – I can refuse to let the past control or even guide me and continue to live a Peter Pan life and relish the fact that I’m still living life – this life my mother gave me 57 years ago – to its fullest with few regrets. A life well lived and worth living. That is the best way this orphan can ever honor his mom and his dad.
In the Emerald City, hoping no one tries to spank me,
– Robb