Suzy Says

Dad and my brother Jonathan, circa 1965

While the rest of the world is celebrating St. Patrick’s death day, I am mourning my father’s birthday.

I wake up to the raucous clamor of birds in the tree outside my window, black against the white, still morning sky. They don?t do this every day, and my first thought is that they are singing for him. Dad loved birds, and kept track of all he saw from the age of five until he died, aged seventy. I slide my feet into my slippers and go to the kitchen to make coffee, wishing I had the luxury of calling him and saying ?Happy birthday? to him, instead of just in my heart.

Most of the people I know have fathers who are still living, but they don’t particularly want to call them, even though they can. Dads like Mike (and mine) are few and far between, it seems.

I realize how long he?s been gone: six years. I do this minor math problem with the same sense of slight shock and dismay as when I calculate my own age when asked (otherwise, I refuse to think about it and just feel like the permanent teenager I really am). I look back over the years that have passed away since he passed away, and am amazed we, his children, have all been able to weather the storm. At first, I thought I couldn?t survive the pain and loss. Now I think, Really? It?s been that long?

Sipping my coffee in the cold morning light, memories of Dad spin through my head:

When I was a child, waiting for him to come home from work, in his white lab coat smelling of mysterious and pungent chemicals. He’d sweep me into his arms and roll around on the floor, and end up with shaking me upside down, “to shake the nonsense out”, as he put it, though in this he never did quite succeed. Years later, there’s still plenty of nonsense left.

His mother telling me how Dad spent hours concocting exactly the correct proportion of cement dust to coal dust to make briquets that would last longer for heating and cooking during the dark, deprived days of WWII. Dad was about 10 at the time, and he and his family lived on the outskirts of London, where bombings were all too common. Indeed, the bombing once started when Dad was walking home from school one day. He was near the train station, and hid under bodies until it was over, finally walking home, blood-spattered, to his anxious mother.

The long, sunny days in Maine, those long ago summers when death hadn’t touched us and the world seemed a bright, safe place. We’d spend our days sailing, swimming, climbing mountains, having lobster for dinner (at that time, it was cheaper than hamburger, which was, as Dad put it, “the way it should be”).

The long, sunny days in England when death hadn’t just touched us, it had knocked us out, doing all the things everyone has to do when a family member dies, no matter how beloved or unbeloved. At the time, you don’t realize how lucky you are to be in shock and to have so many duties to perform, because once all that’s over and you go back to your newly altered life – the one you refer to as “normal”, though it isn’t anymore and never will be again – the realization hits you as hard as the Reaper’s scythe that it’s true, and this, my friend, is, as Trollope put it, The Way We Live Now.