Here We Go 'Round Again

We have these close friends who make a calendar every year with candid pictures of all our kids. When our two families first became friends we each had a lone baby boy. Now there are five children between us. I love the friends and I love receiving that calendar every year. Hanging beside our pantry, it's a daily reminder of the great times we have along the way.

But this morning as my seven-year-old was flipping ahead to preview the pictures coming in the next few months, I momentarily went numb. "Dad, remember when we took this picture? It was last Memorial Day weekend, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game. We went out for ice cream with the L- and the C- families that day. Remember?" The sweet boy has no idea just how much I remember.

I remember that I dropped my wife and kids off at the ice cream place, and as I was looking for a parking space along the cramped and narrow streets of our shore town, my phone rang. Mom was frantic because Dad, who'd already been told to consider hospice, but who until that point had not seemed like he had only four mostly miserable weeks to live, had started slurring his words out of nowhere. It had never happened before. She called an ambulance. That night, the day after Roy Halladay threw his perfect game, the day we went out for ice cream with the L- and C- families, almost fifty-one months after his initial diagnosis, my dad was admitted for the first overnight hospital stay of his cancer experience. A pretty damn good streak was over.

I've said before that before parenthood I had a great memory for dates: birthdays and anniversaries were a snap, and I could remember dates and details about even unremarkable events without trying very hard. Now that I've got some traumatic memories in the mix, I try not to dwell on dates, and I try not to mope just because of a number on a calendar. However, as we're now into June, getting close to the date on which my dad died last year, some date-jogged memories are unavoidable. Here I am doing a lot of the same things I was doing at this time last year, but with my dad simply, irreversibly, missing from the picture. And it was this season, this month, that weekend, when the abstract idea that I would eventually lose my dad became no longer a far off abstraction, but a clear, definite, inevitability.

Any brain can hold only so much info, and it does me no good to devote free disk space to bad memories. When I think about my dad, I'd much prefer to focus on his life than on his death. It's a shame we can't un-remember things.