He would show up. That was his way of saying he loved you.

Later as my brother and I grew up and moved away, he found another way. He would send newspaper and magazine articles.

They would pile up here, unopened for weeks. He would almost never include a note – something about the way he posted them and the incredibly stringent Royal Mail rules – and I would puzzle over several pages, wondering which thing exactly he meant me to read. Often I’d wish he’d included a few more pages since there was invariably a bit of something that looked compelling.

Sometimes they were never opened. Other times, wrenched open on Saturdays ahead of the weekly phone call and hastily scanned. Then tossed, or, very occasionally, slapped onto a clip magnet and onto the fridge.

One had been slowly turning crisp, taking on a creamy hue for almost a year, facing a sunny window near the sink, when I learned he was ill.

It was a piece about not scheduling up your kids’ time with activities and sports. I’d kept it, I suppose, because I’d agreed, and because, unusually for him, this one had come with a note, written in his staccato left handed scrawl.

I’ll keep it forever.

Especially for those days when my children swirl about me, and it feels like I’m adrift in a sea of choices, with no clear idea which one is right

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.

————————————————————–

M,

Thanks for everything. Happy Birthday.

Love

J

————————————————————–

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

An anniversary my mother would wake up to alone.