thanks for everything

My parent’s birthdays are a day apart in July.

I’ve never been able to remember which was first. Every year, I’d get it wrong.

Three years ago, knowing my sensibilities on gender equality, my father suggested a way to remember would be that, since I knew men were the superior gender, his birthday came first. I cackled and tutted. But he was right, I never muddled them again.

His birthday, then hers.

This year on his 73rd birthday, just months after the amputation of his left leg and hip, my father had been readmitted for tests and a scan.

He was desperately anemic, and exhausted.

“I’m like a dormouse,” he’d whispered on the phone some weeks before. “I sleep 70 percent of the time.”

He also, it turned out, had a tumour encircling his heart.

The gentle oncologist, hunched at my father’s bedside, curled like a comma. Not days, but not months either. Weeks he’d said.

Their final birthday cards to each other were spare, while utterly revealing. As I stood at their mantle reading them days later, I felt like an intruder in a private conversation.

J.

We’re with you all the way.

Love

M.

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M,

Thanks for everything. Happy Birthday.

Love

J

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They were in their 45th year of a companionable marriage.

An anniversary my mother would wake up to alone.