The Dead Dad Diaries

"I wish ... "

Dear Dad

Happy Birthday. You would have been 75 today. I was going to write something for Sunday, but you hated Father’s Day, thought it was commercial nonsense, though you were gracious about any cards, presents or phone calls. You were always gracious, actually, except when you were impatient because I was speaking slowly or parking badly.

A year ago today, I came here to Belfast to visit you for a few days. You picked me up at the airport and we went out for a celebratory supper at Coco (your treat of course). It seems like a very long time ago, I suppose because a lot has happened since then. You died, I left the US after nine years, and now it looks like I’m selling your house (though, as Mum wisely says, we won’t pop the Champagne until the money’s in the bank). Mum got a new hip and certain people are having babies in above average quantities and I know you would be deeply interested in all these goings-on if you were here.

I am fine. I miss you very much and sometimes I have a little weep. I’m really glad that I was here on your birthday, and for Christmas, and that in fact we spent quite a lot of time together in 2009.

Wimbledon has just started and I wish you were here to watch a bit of it and eat strawberries. It’s not as fun now as when I was younger and had a crush on Pete Sampras and you used to call him Frisky Pete and we both agreed that he looked rather like my horse, Gypsy, because they both had a floppy lower lip.

I know you wouldn’t have wanted me to feel too much sentimental attachment to the house or to life in Belfast when you wouldn’t have done yourself. But I think it’s been good to spend some time here and to be surrounded by the things that upholstered your life before I let most of them go. It was very much “our” house and it’s full of happy memories. It’s strange to think of new people here, making their own memories, while I will move on to a new home that contains someone else’s invisible history. But it’s definitely time.

I got a cat, Dad — well he found me, really — and you would absolutely adore him. Don’t tell Soraya and Pebbles I said this (I assume that if you are anywhere they are with you), but he has a better personality than either of them, lovely though they were. He is sociable, highly opinionated and rather naughty but never ever bad-tempered. Although the vet thinks he’s about a year old, he destroys toilet paper like the Andrex puppy, chases his own tail, and is so fascinated by water that he patrols the edge of the bath while I’m in it. Unlike Lady Macbeth’s “poor cat in the adage” (catus amat pisces sed non vult tingere plantas), he is not afraid to get his paws wet, even without the promise of fish.

For a little while, I think I was semi-consciously trying to assume that the cat would not stick around (unlikely — he knows he’s onto a good thing!) or that something would happen to him (still possible), as if I could brace myself against the next loss. But of course that would never really work. You’re either in or you’re out. The shadow of loss makes love possible, and possibly necessary. I’m in.

Love

Lyds