The problem started with my dad’s announcement at dinner last November.
“I know what I want for Christmas,” he said. “I want each of you to write my obituary.” My brother Gerard took another sip of his beer. “Huh,” I said. This was unexpected. We have a family gift exchange where we each select a name. I’d drawn my dad. He asked me for a book. I’d already bought the book.
My dad’s request wasn’t unreasonable. He is 86. As the eldest of five siblings, he had outlived two of his sisters, and exceeded the age at which his father had died. He once told me that he thought he’d die before fifty. I reminded him that all five of his kids have lived beyond fifty.
We discussed the obituary request later in our sibling text group, Party of 5. “Is this some sort of weird contest?” Possibly. He had once invented his perfect child, the imaginary Maura Grace, who had excellent grades and exemplary behavior and with whom we all competed. Our imaginary sibling stayed with us into adulthood, sending cards, giving odd gifts, and taking credit and blame on family issues as needed. We considered our potential responses to his request. Maybe we could have one person write the obituary and four others submit a single sheet of paper with “ditto.”
The author and her dad. Courtesy of Celine Boyle
James, our youngest brother who wasn’t present at the meal suggested that since he wasn’t there, technically Dad didn’t ask him to do it. Someone, maybe Susan, suggested that Maura Grace write it.
As we continued our text discussions, I realized that each of us had experienced a different father.
As the firstborn, I knew him as a young father with five kids under the age of nine. He could be more frustrated than calm as he tried to solve the equation of more kids than money and time. He yelled. But he also could be super fun. One of my favorite memories is when I was seven and I asked him to take me on the bumper cars with him. “Sure,” he said. I drove, gleefully smashing into other cars. When we got off, he rubbed his lower back, looked at me and said, “Huh.” A few years went by, more babies showed up and things between us changed.
His requests that I behave, set a good example for my brothers and sisters, and stop touching his things were foreign to my childhood skill set. By the time I was in high school, my relationship with him had deteriorated. He refused to sign the form required for me to test for my driver’s license. I liberated his moped from the garage and raced off wondering if his refusal had anything to do with the bumper car experience. I went to college without a license, leaving behind siblings in high school, middle school and elementary school. My dad bought a motorcycle.
In my twenties, I focused on my education, periodically informing my dad of my superior understanding of the world. This did not lead to closeness. In my thirties, I started to understand things from his perspective. We developed a friendship studded with humor and grace. When he turned 80, he said “I always meant to go to Alaska.” Sharing the experience of orcas and icebergs sounded amazing, so I said “Dad, let’s do it.” It was super fun and I felt like we left decades of conflict behind us in the wake of the ship.
On Christmas Day, I handed him the beautifully wrapped book he requested. My sister Janine, the good one, gave him a Christmas letter about what he meant to her as a father. I checked in with the rest of them. One sibling was thinking about the obituary, one was working on it. One responded with a non-committal grunt.
His unfulfilled request stayed with me, but somehow the words, or maybe the desire to write them, eluded me. I ran my dilemma by the Quaranteam, my four friends from our pandemic pod. Two of them had already experienced what I dreaded. I explained that I didn’t always have the easiest time with my father. Did any of the hard times between us matter now? Was I totally into magical thinking, that if I didn’t write his obituary, he wouldn’t die? They listened and gently shared their wisdom with me.
“How’s it coming?” they asked a few weeks later. “Working on it,” I replied, having yet to capture anything of significance on paper.
Mostly, I resisted working on it. Instead of writing the obituary he wanted, I visited more frequently, bringing lottery tickets and baking his favorite foods. But in the spring my father voluntarily decided to stop driving. I started seriously writing. My siblings and I drive him anywhere he needs to go: doctor’s appointments, the grocery store, his friends’ funerals. We buckle in knowing that this ride won’t last forever while hoping that it does. He hasn’t mentioned it, but I suspect that he thinks that my driving skills have markedly improved since our bumper car days.
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