Today is my father's birthday

May 22

Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash

He would be 74 if he were still alive.

Even though I knew that it would be about that age, it still strikes me -

Because my father has been gone for 10 years, this coming October.

He was 64 when he died. Barely a senior citizen; I don’t think he ever collected social security benefits.

He cut his life short, but it reminds me that none of my nuclear family lived very long.

I stand in amazement sometimes because my community here in the tiny town where I live, involves an almost 96 year old and an almost 90 year old.

My downstairs neighbor who will be 96 next month, her daughter is my mother’s age. I try to imagine what it would be like to be that age and still have my mother with me.

My mother never even made it to her seventh decade.

I know that many people don’t make it to 70s and 80s, obviously. Cognitively, I get that.

And yet, it’s still so strange, so surreal, when I am made to remember that there are people like my neighbor.

And, that many more people do live to closer to the average life expectancy of Americans - late seventies and early 80s.

When I remember my father, fondly, I recall him during the last few years of his life, when he got sober and I got to see a different side to him.

I remember him for loving potatoes and steak on the grill, playing card games, watching his favorite movies on repeat until we all knew them word for word.

As a child, I remember getting knee-deep in the dirt and digging up potatoes from the mounds that he grew in his garden.

I played so much cribbage and rummy and chess and poker with him over the years. He liked games. He and I are alike in that way - I’ve always been a fan of card games and board games.

And with raspberries - we both love raspberries.

I spent many years angry at my father - his alcoholism, his volatile temper, and selfish choices.

But, years later, when I came home from Indonesia, to a sober man, I got to experience more of who my father was - that his disease had robbed him of being -

That I couldn’t see until then -

He was a sad person - I know he missed his brother.

He was someone who had the world handed to him - with his upbringing, his athletic abilities, his intelligence, his socioeconomic advantages growing up, his name/big fish in a small pond thing -

And yet, for all of that, the times he broke my heart were when he spoke, wistfully, of high school -

Often commenting that it was the best time of his life.

Even when I myself was a teenager, I felt indescribably pity for him, in saying that, in truly believing it.

It’s true his high school years and mine were very different, in that I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Panama, NY, but -

I feel especially sad for adults who believe and accept their lot in life - that their adulthood will never match up to the lore of their high school glory days.

I feel that way about all of my family members, to be honest - tracing their ‘best years’, trying to find them -

I know that mothering was that for my mother.

I never saw my brother happier then when his daughter was born.

But, truly, for all three of them, mostly when I think of their lives, their deaths, the loss of their lives in what they could have been - not in outward success or money, but just in being happier, more healed, more mentally well, then they ever were or were able to be -

It’s heart-breaking. It’s tragic.

There are many aspects of my own life I am not happy with. I am very critical towards myself and where I am now, compared to where I want to be and what I want to accomplish or have already accomplished, but if there is one commitment I have, it is this -

A dedication to improving my quality of life.

A striving toward something better than what I left behind.

I don’t do it perfectly. I don’t always get it right.

But it’s on me. I am single, no kids and no partner, and so my focus is on improving and healing -

I think that this is what it means to be a cycle breaker.

It’s a commitment to yourself, after looking at your family line, and realizing -

I don’t want that for my life. I want better, and more.

And they couldn’t give it to me.

So, the only way that it will ever happen is if I work to make it happen.