perennial

My mom texts me at six in the morning fretting over how thin my dad has gotten since the surgery, since the chemo, since the radiation. With all the IV punctures he’s gone through in the past year, it’s hard to pinpoint a cause. A Jewish mom to her core, she wants to bake him oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, fatty food the bandaid through which suddenly, magically, the malignancies will melt away and he will be restored to us. My bedrock of a dad. Her cantankerous ex-husband.

The man, however, is dinged up but also thriving: Schrödinger's cancer treatment. He’s panic crying at sunset in the 168th street New York-Presbyterian parking lot because the valets who took his car keys are nowhere to be found and he just wants to go home. He’s going to Paul Simon concerts and spending weekends in Southampton with his new girlfriend. He’s tired and nauseous and losing weight. He’s having minion-themed retirement parties thrown for him at school and planning trips to the annual Jewish Genealogy conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He wants to do a PhD on Jewish immigration quotas in the US in the 1920s. I ask him if he intends to draw any parallels to the present day; he tells me they write themselves.

My dad turned sixty the year I graduated from college, and in the Toyota Camry that was two Toyota Camry’s ago, as we packed up my hastily swiffered senior house and drove my overflowing collection of wrinkled bar coasters and oversize thrift store sweaters to the Extra Space Storage, he told me that this was the first birthday where he’d thought about whether or not he’d live through the decade. I was in no state to hear that then, and I’m in no state to recall it now. He turned seventy last month.

This father’s day, we walked around the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens in the light rain. He was excited about the lily pads and admitted that he was probably a bad parent for a few years after he started teaching. I reassured him, reflexively. We’re having tough conversations these days, gently. There is a finite amount of time in which we can say everything that needs to be said. I know that now. Watching him teach has shown me the best of him; his empathy, his pedantry harnessed into teaching his students how to open a bank account and avoid phishing scams. I met some of his students once, when the school did a trip to Broadway and I snagged an extra ticket to Hadestown, and they seemed to genuinely like him. They’re sad he’s retiring and even though I want him to have fewer stressors in his life so that he can focus on his health, I am too.

He is entering a period in his life where he no longer belongs to us, to any of us. His time now his own; his body will carry him for as long as it can. I took a picture of my dad in the garden, amongst the roses, so I can always remember his snarling thorns.