“And liberty she pirouettes
When I think that I am free”

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Today is my dad’s birthday.

Each year since he passed away the day has gotten easier. What I remember most about the first Dec. 6 without him is the hideous juxtaposition between that birthday and the one he celebrated just the year before. We threw him a surprise party in the midst of the urgent treatment to shrink the tumor on his pancreas.

That night he was so vivid. He toasted the group, people who really and truly loved him, and declared it his mission to live through his 54th year.

You see, that was a magic number. His mother and brother both died at that age.

He didn’t live to see 55, and this year he would be 62.

We try to do something fun on that day each year, me and my little band of merry makers. We usually go out to dinner, someplace a step above the usual burger joint. This year we were all too tired and weary of restaurant food to leave the house. I had an errand after work and the kids ate early.

I drove through the darkness to fetch my eyeglasses from the doctor’s office and felt tears well up in my eyes as I thought about my dad.

But the tears, they did not spill over.

***

This year hasn’t been easy for me. Some of it was my own making–or, if I am honest, a lot of it was. But I’ve found a rope to the future and I’m slowly but surely pulling myself into that brighter moment, session by session.

This fall, during a particularly difficult hour with my headshrinker, she pressed me and pressed me about something, I don’t even remember what. I do remember telling her this story:

Just before Christmas in 2003, I went to my parents’ house after work. My dad had just undergone surgery for prostate cancer (yes, he had two kinds, he was an overachiever) and he was wearily wrapping gifts. I don’t remember why I was upset, but I do remember weeping a little and telling my dad that I didn’t deserve all the blessings in my life.

He took me by the shoulders and led me to the sofa. He was still heavy then, full and round in a cheerful kind of way. He pulled me into a hug and said, “But you’re the best person I know.”

I shook my head and brushed it off as hyperbole.

But in that session, it came back to me, that sincere, loving and spontaneous compliment.

My dad thought I was good. And that is good enough for me.

***

I didn’t write my dad a letter on his death day this year. August 26, 2011 passed without comment. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say to him; quite the contrary. But this time, it finally dawned on me that he isn’t going to answer.

At least, not in the literal sense. As Joan Didion said, grief leads to a lot of magical thinking. And because of my complications, I was still mired in that grief as recently as this fall.

But after being gently forced to face those feelings, to pull up the new carpet to reveal the rotting boards beneath, I could see what happened.

When someone is suffering from complicated grief, it usually centers on a regret: A moment in time, a decision made in the eye of the storm, something you did or did not do with, for or because of the deceased.

In my case, I thought it was because I didn’t go out to the Mayo Clinic to see him in the two weeks he was there just prior to his death. That’s what I told her, but after thinking more about it on my own, I know what my regret is.

I did not–in fact I refused–to acknowledge that my dad was dying. He knew his death was near, he even said it directly to me, and in my heart I knew it, too. But I sidestepped that critical fact because I was already thinking magically.

That the chemo would work, that he would be well.

It didn’t and I knew it wouldn’t. But I did not take that opportunity to talk to my father while sitting side by side with the fact of his imminent death. I did not ask him the questions, tell him what I needed to. I didn’t get to tell him how profoundly I loved him and how much he had influenced my every thought and action.

How I was a better person, a good person, because he helped make me that way.

I know today that he knew that. I know he knew the depth of my love for him. I know that he understood my fear of the way his face and eyes looked in those last months, and why I turned my own eyes away.

And so today, the tears, they did not spill.

Happy birthday, Dad.