This month marks the 27th anniversary of my father’s death. Which is unreal to me. Twenty-seven years seems an impossibly large number of years to be carved out of the belly of my life. How can something have happened 27 years ago when I feel younger than that?
But, in fact, my father died when I was 26. Which means I have now lived without him longer than I lived with him.
My dad was a writer whose chief advice to me was: “Don’t be a writer.” It was a mostly thankless and difficult job, he said, with only occasional rewards. He was also a dog lover, a salami fanatic, a classical music buff and a flautist. I am like him and unlike him in many ways.
I ignored what he said about writing and went on to write. Like him, I find it difficult but, unlike him, not at all thankless. Like my father, I got a dog in my teens (and unlike him, seven more). I don’t eat salami. Regarding classical music, I like to say it makes me joyful, but in truth it depresses me. And as for the flute, I, too, played it, though I only learned so I could go to Mexico City with my high school band.
I don’t often let myself think about what my dad missed by dying at age 61. But it was a lot. My brother had not yet met his wife; their three children were still five years off. He never met my husband or two of my sister’s three children. He missed five of my dogs. He wouldn’t see me become a columnist or publish a book.
About the only thing he didn’t miss was my career as a flautist. That came to an end the day I returned from Mexico City and broke up with my flute.
So why the thoughts about him now? In the past two years, four of my friends have lost parents and one lost her brother. Several, including me, lost dogs. Another friend’s dog is critically ill, and another’s pet bunny rabbit is at the end of its life.
It occurred to me recently that my friends and I are at the age when the human lives that set us in motion, and the animal lives we stepped in to care for, are beginning to wind down. The parents who had us in their 20s and 30s are nearing 80 and 90. The animals we acquired in our openhearted 30s and 40s are at the end of their lifespan.
In my teens and 20s I understood, of course, about death. I knew it happened to everyone eventually, though I briefly entertained the idea that I was immortal, an anomaly, some sort of specially blessed, inextinguishable or constantly regenerating life force, like Moses — or an evergreen. I thought this, of course, because death terrified me.
In my 50s, however, I understand that death is the natural outcome of life. Now the prospect of dying — and of losing those I adore — saddens me rather than terrifies me, and I expect that — hope that — in another few years I will even come to embrace the prospect of demise as less an adversary than simply the cost of living, the natural culmination of lives set in motion — hopefully many — decades before.
I wish my dad had gotten to see everything he missed: his second son-in-law and only daughter-in-law; five grandchildren; my long line of motley canines; the careers we all chose and love (three of us writers) because of, or in spite of, him.
But the anniversary of his death reminds me to look around. To see everything I can possibly see, and to tuck it all away in the pocket of memory and imagination. Just in case things have changed since my father died, and you can now take it with you.
Contact Dana Shavin at danalise@juno.com. Dana’s memoir, “The Body Tourist,” was published by Little Feather Books in November 2014.