Birthday Party

The birthday celebration is not always what I imagine.

In my 20s, I moved a lot.  So often that no one ever wrote my address in pen.  People with address books complained about how messy I made the A page. 

For one change of address, my dad called and offered to drive from Michigan to Washington, DC to help me move from one apartment to another.  I was touched by his offer, which also seemed preposterous.  At the time, I confided to a friend, “I’m not going to ask a 60 year old man to help me move.”  Sixty seemed like the edge of the universe then, as if he would need a walker momentarily. 

The other day would have been his 92nd birthday.  He died last year at 91, after we helped him move a few times: home to retirement community to apartment to assisted living, with two rehab stays along the way. 

I got to spend his birthday helping my daughter move out of her apartment.  Not too much heavy lifting, lots of cleaning.  As we planned the day, I was grumpy about using up a last, precious vacation day. Then, when I realized it was my dad’s birthday, gratitude came back.  It was the perfect way to celebrate him, to share a small piece of his endless kindness.  I came home smelling like cleaning products, sweaty with the gift of being both a daughter and a mom. 

In her gorgeous book Late Migrations, Margaret Renkl says that she thinks about her late parents and mother-in-law every day. 

“They are an absence made palpably present, as though their most vivid traits—my father’s unshakable optimism, my mother’s irreverent wit, my mother-in-law’s  profound gentleness—had formed a thin membrane between me and the world: because they are gone, I see everything differently.” 

My dad.  My mom.  My brother, David.  My old housemate, Alan.  Mrs. Grant, the stooped over wife of a hospice patient, who informed me after her husband died that we would be friends for life. Who was I to argue?  

You have your own list of people who feel so present.  We carry some of their wisdom, filtered through memory.  We carry their love, and our imperfect understanding of it.  We carry the way they saw the world, and it sharpens our sight for the grace all around us.   

On my dad’s birthday, the gift was for me this year.