Happy Birthday

The day began with a soft smile and a quiet, “Happy birthday, Dad,” followed by singing Happy Birthday to You at a level barely above a whisper. My father, born 97 years past, always seemed to particularly enjoy my singing that song for him.

Born on the ides, the day that marks the approximate middle of a month, he was gently amused that his birthday fell on the ides of March. Eight years earlier, exactly one week after his birthday -- one week after the ides -- he died, unaware of the day or the date, the birthday or of anything else; his brain had turned to figurative mush and literal plaque slowly and progressively over the prior few years.

A slow and inevitable demise prepares the mourner for the final outcome; grieving is plodding and unrelenting, innumerable pinpricks each drawing a drop rather than a single deep thrust. Dementia’s course kills before death, the victim disappearing into a nothingness. When final biologic departure occurs it is almost as if an afterthought.

The pain of my dad’s passing was real enough but he had left us, left me, much earlier. I did not cry at his death, or any time before. I wanted to cry, tried to cry, but no tears. I am not the crying kind, I suppose.

A few weeks later, in a dream, I saw my dad, embraced him, and then I heard myself cry, an agonizing wail exactly as my crying sounded when a young child and most upset. It was a sound I had not heard either aloud or in my mind for more than fifty years. But somewhere in my brain it had been stored or filed or recorded and somehow summoned during the dream. Even now if I try to recall that sound I cannot. It is gone, returned to a dusty corner of my mind behind some neuron in a blind axonal alley in which it had been so long hidden.

My mom never was one give up, to surrender. A year or so before his death she casually, or so it seemed to me at the time, remarked on her disappointment when learning that a certain perfume was no longer being made. I soon found a half-filled small bottle of L’Orignon available on eBay; it was being sold for the collectible bottle rather than the contents. I bought it for a few dollars and gave it to her on my next visit.

Her elderly face ignited with joy, her eyes sparkling with a hint of a tear. She rewarded me with repeated hugs and kisses, excited to tell me it was my dad’s favorite for her to wear when, years ago, they went out for the evening. I realized then that she hoped that the familiar fragrance would somehow activate in him some amyloid encrusted memory. She wore it on their 63^rd wedding anniversary but of course he gave no hint of recognition of the fragrance, of her, of me.

“I’ll never get over it,” my mom surprisingly told me one day in her kitchen a few months after my dad’s death and a year before her own. She was not one to verbally dwell on her grief, at least to me. My expectation was otherwise; I had grieved inwardly and for so long while he dissolved into naught that even if his death was not relief I would certainly “get over it.”

These eight years later it is unclear just what “get over it” means. There are still moments of visceral anguish, prompted by a random thought, a sound, a smell, an odd association. I suddenly think of him with a sense of painful longing, of deep sorrow at his absence, sometimes with a touch of guilt for some word said or, more often, not said. Recalling happy times or knowing that he enjoyed the greater part of his life does not, at those moments, remove the visceral sadness I experience.

Which makes me think of my own death. I am not at all bothered by the thought of being dead. Instead I think of the grief my own sons will experience, a sorrow similar to my own, and wishing I could spare them from that, accept that I cannot.

First appeared in Inscape