Who's Counting?

16,787 days.

(Originally written on February 2, 2021)

My father was alive for45 years, 11 months, and 16 days. As of today, February 2, 2021, I have been alive for 45 years, 11 months, and 16 days.

But who’s counting?

After a certain lightness of head and trembling of hands creeps in, the first thing that I have to say about that is: Wow. He was young.

(A friend with whom I play weekly online COVID-poker points out that it can just as easily mean, wow, I’m old. Granted. And see below.)

I would say that I’m staunchly, mathematically, middle-age. Older than the young folk, younger than the old folk. But my general constitution tends, I think, towards the younger side. Sure, I’ve refinanced my mortgage, but I also just received my Jughead Funko Pop! toy (look it up, grandpa), and placed it on the shelf above my desk next to my Cliff Clavin, Tyler Durden, Batman, Weird Al, Abe Lincoln, and Prince (Purple Rain), Prince (Raspberry Beret), and Prince (Third-Eye Blind) Funko Pop! toys. I’ve never had a 9-5 job, my YouTube history is nothing but Will Ferrell bloopers, and I’m making a podcast about Tom Cruise. I lean, one might say, towards the childish.

And while I’ve known that my father “died young,” I think that was always muted by the fact that he tended towards the adult-ish. He was an accountant. He worked for banks. He told stories about being an accountant working for banks. Yes, he was funny, and I think on the scale between dad-funny and actual-funny, he was a few points toward actual. But still, even in the rear view mirror, he was more serious at the age of 16,787 days than I am today.

So what does this day mean? It might mean that despite his suits and briefcase, despite his tales of Bob At the Office, despite his general, solid, fatherly knowledge of all things... he was just getting started. He was still young enough to be surprised at how old he was. He was young enough to wonder what was coming next. He was young enough that a diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma felt as unbelievable to him then as it would to me now. It must have sounded to him like an old man’s disease. Cancer. The thing you die from, but he’s a young man, he doesn’t die. And of course I’ve always assumed that he was shocked (well... decades of smoking...) to learn that he was sick. But maybe today means that this assumption moves from my mind into my body. I don’t just know about the shock. I feel it.

Or maybe my poker pal was right. First of all yes, I don’t raise enough from the button. But more to the point, maybe I am older than I think. Maybe at 551 months, 16 days, I need to think more about what I want from my 60s than what I miss from my 20s. Maybe I need to prepare for the inevitable diagnoses arising in the decades to come. Maybe I need to start saying things like “Today’s kids are tomorrow’s leaders” and “Because I said so!”

But fuck all that. I have no idea whether or not my dad had dreams of any particular kind. I’m relatively sure that he would have been an accountant for another 20 years, then retired. Born in 1946, his was a generation of family-supporters, born to a generation of family-supporters. I’m just not like him. My wife and I support our family, sure (she, with an actual job, me, with a career like loose instruction-less legos, clicked together to form something between a rocket ship and a clown), but I am definitely a dreamer. I’m in the River of Dreams. I Dream a Dream in Time Gone By. And even sometimes of Jeanie. So if you think that the lesson learned is that I’m older than I think I am, or at least should act like I am, well, Dream On.

When I used to (before, say, today) think about him in his last weeks, in that awful hospital bed, what I typically pictured was a Sick Man. Hair gone, weight gained, eye patched, veins needled, voice softened. But that’s just the top layer of paint. It chips away easily and there’s just a young guy under it. Two-and-a-half decades out of college, mid-career, with quite possibly more days ahead than past. He thought about movies and pizza and sex and politics and his kid and wife and mother. He wasn’t just a Sick Man.

He was just me.

So this is the day. It’s the day that I outlive him. Not just in the sense of being here when he left, but in being here longer than he stayed. And maybe it means that he was younger than I had imagined, or maybe it means that I’m older, or maybe it means that I’ll have a new vision of his dying days, or that I’ll check my 401K, or that I’ll dream bigger, or smaller, or buy a briefcase, or stop counting or keeping counting. Maybe it means everything. But I don’t think so.

It’s a moment to reflect, for sure. It’s a moment, apparently, to journal. It’s a moment that takes your breath away, yes, but maybe only for a moment. I’m not going to change tomorrow, the 17th day of the 11th month of the 45th year because of what I recognize about the 16th day of the 11th month of the 45th year. The fact is that all of the milestones - 10 years after his death, 17 years after (when I lacked him for as long as I’d had him), 20 years, 25 years, and this - are just reminders of the One Thing. And what I decided when I began to write these stories, in fact what prompted me to write these stories in the first place, was that I had already made the decision that I didn’t need reminding any more. That One thing - his death - wasn’t going to be something locked in a briefcase, reviewed and relived when the calendar struck an even number. Instead, I was going to think about him, to write about him, and to keep his name plate on my desk. And I’ve done a better-than-decent job doing it all. I let him in, both his life and death, and this next milestone won’t change a thing. And I’m okay with that.

Still. It’s fucking crazy, right?

Oh, and in case there is a God, and he has a sense of humor (or, I suppose, doesn’t), I have a very definite plan of how I’m going to spend this perhaps-meaningless-but-nonetheless-notable day. I’ll spend it just like anyone with both a science-based Hunter Elementary/High School education and an overactive imagination would: I’m gonna lock the doors, avoid sharp objects, and hide under the bed. Dying today would be, admittedly, very very funny. But let’s just tell some knock knock jokes instead.

Today, finally, I’m counting on the decision I’ve already made to reengage with my dad’s death, rather than to take this remarkable moment as a call for change. I’m counting on logic and reason (which mixes evenly with my dream-state) to see this as merely a numerical curiosity, rather than as celestial warning light that needs attention. I’m counting on the law of averages (along with most definitely not going to the doctor today) to keep me diagnoses-less and alive and avoid my inclusion in an updated musical statement of Morissette-ian Irony. And I’m counting on the ubiquitous pressure of 2021 life to keep me functioning in the face of 1993 death.

But then again... (say it with me) who’s counting?

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