My dad’s birthday is today. Was today? I don’t know how to phrase that anymore. He should have turned 68 today. I use “should” because that’s how I feel.
I’ve been trying to write something profound or helpful about grief rooted in today being my dad’s birthday, but I finally realized at almost 1 a.m. last night that it’s hard to do that when you are angry at a dead man.
I know the traditional Kübler-Ross five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So according to those, I’m at the anger stage. But we know grief isn’t linear, and those stages were never meant to be a sequential process you complete and then, ta-da, you’re done grieving. And maybe that’s the crux of it. It’s knowing I’ll never be done. And that pisses me off.
I’m in the second year of my dad being dead. I prefer the direct approach of using the word “dead,” because eventually, I hope I will rewire my brain to remember that dead equals gone forever. Same for my mother. They are dead. Death is permanent. For some people, euphemisms are easier, and I understand that. Saying their loved one has “passed away,” “gone,” or “went home” lands more gently. What I’m having a harder time with is the verb tense change. Using “was” or “is.” Because every part of me still wants to call him, text him, send him a stupid birthday card, and my mouth can’t seem to form the proper verb at the proper time to fit his nonexistence.
C.S. Lewis said it better than I can: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” That’s the part nobody warns you about. Not the sadness. The fear.
My dad was the most stubborn, hardest-working person I’ve ever known. Growing up, I saw him as the tough guy, the one who never showed much weakness. I never saw him cry. He hated complainers, self-pity, and laziness. He respected his own mother and father deeply, and he honored my mother by taking care of her until the day she died.
He certainly had his faults. He drank my entire childhood, and depending on the day, he was either an obnoxious drunk or an angry drunk. Combined with my mother’s alcoholism, our household was chaotic.
Then one day, he just stopped. Cold turkey. The alcohol and the cigarettes, both. I asked him why he quit drinking, and all he said was, “I got tired of waking up with a hangover every day.” Sounds reasonable enough. A few years later, he quit smoking too, after I battled an illness that nearly took me out. He made a promise to himself and to God. If God saved my life, he’d never smoke again. That was 2010.
Most people don’t just stop cold turkey with alcohol and cigarettes both. But that was my dad.
So in October 2024, when he told me “it isn’t good,” my expectations didn’t land anywhere near “my dad is going to be dead in two months.” Even when the terminal diagnosis came. Denial? Maybe. But my dad could do anything. Cancer-schmancer.
I quickly realized the hardest part of all of it was watching my dad deteriorate. Cancer is an asshole. It’s greedy. It’s like a really bad roommate who not only doesn’t keep their room clean, but gradually destroys the entire house with their trash and clutter until the whole place smells like old French fries and burned Hot Pockets.
The reason he found out he had cancer in the first place was debilitating back pain. For him, that wasn’t unusual after 40 years of walking a concrete body shop floor. But it got to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed. After testing, the doctor told him he had a roommate in his lungs, and that roommate had started leaving its trash in his spine and his brain. The whole place looked like a dump.
When he told me the doctor’s exact words, “I can’t cure you, but I can try to give you more time,” I understood, all at once, that time is the one thing none of us control and the one commodity we all waste the most. I became desperate for more of it.
Obviously, the first year was hard, but it came with a lot of distractions. There’s all the administrative stuff you deal with when someone dies, and my parents weren’t exactly planners. So when we found out about Dad’s cancer and its terminal prognosis, I put myself through “LegalZoom school” and made sure he signed everything that needed signing before he died or got too sick. That then required notaries, witnesses, and what felt like a blood oath sworn on a lizard. I lived three hours away. My husband and I made 13 round trips back and forth, car-sick new puppy in tow. We’d gotten him a month before finding out Dad was sick, right after we’d put our 11-year-old lab down. Yep. It was a time to be had.
Then there was his house, his bills, his ashes, his car. The first few months, the calls and texts came in full of support and prayer, and then they gradually stopped. People move on. It wasn’t their parent who died.
All the firsts happened. Holidays, birthdays, the anniversary, the day he died.
Then year two came.
All the distractions were gone. I was left with my feelings, which I’d bottled up and tossed aside to get through year one. When my mother died in 2020, not only during the pandemic, but with my dad handling everything, I mostly took on the job of worrying about him. Whatever grief I had about my mom, I stuffed into a box, wrapped it up, and threw it into the deep end of my mental ocean, telling myself, “That’s a later issue.”
The problem with later is that sometimes it comes unannounced. My dad’s death forced me to look at my mom’s, both literally and emotionally. He’d kept her ashes, so when he was cremated, I had both of my parents sitting on my kitchen table while I tried to decide when and where to spread them.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to articulate the feeling that comes with staring at two 12-inch containers holding your parents on your table.
Which brings me back to the anger, because that’s where this started, and it’s where I still live most days. I don’t think the anger is always about him or directed toward him. Sometimes it is. Sometimes I’m angry that he didn’t take better care of himself. Sometimes I’m angry at God for who is still alive. My dad is gone, but you’re letting THAT guy stick around this long? Sometimes I’m angry that I don’t hear people say his name. Sometimes I’m angry that I can’t send him a stupid meme that only he would appreciate. Sometimes I’m angry at family, at friends, at strangers, and myself for a hundred different reasons.
But today, I’m angry at all of it. I’m angry that he should have turned 68. That he didn’t get to enjoy retirement. He literally worked until he couldn’t work any longer. He painted tens of thousands of cars that are still on the road. He’s not.
So no, I didn’t write anything profound today. I wrote angry. Maybe that’s the most honest thing I could’ve given you because grief doesn’t clean itself up in time for birthdays, anniversaries, or blog post deadlines. It just shows up as whatever it is that day. Today it showed up loud. Tomorrow it might show up quiet. Either way, I’ll still be here, still doing the math, still missing a man who should be turning 68.
My dad, Mike.