The day before my father’s birthday, I bought him a card. You might, quite fairly, point out that this was a waste of three quid. I’m not really sure why I did it, only that it felt as strange not to do so as to do so.
Choosing a birthday card for someone who’s dead is, it turns out, a difficult task. Every candidate I picked up seemed to declare some version of “Another year older, another year…” “You’re one step closer to a nursing home,” jibed one, alongside a picture of a Zimmer frame. “Not saying you’re old but if you were a wine you’d be really expensive,” quipped another. Only Dad does not get to grow older anymore. In the end, I chose a plain, inoffensive “Happy Birthday Dad” number.
I wrote the card, though it seemed a rather pointless exercise. Not just because Dad is no longer alive to read it, but because I have not, in the thousands of words I have written in this column, or in many more private ones, managed to conjure anything that comes near to expressing the hole his loss has torn in me, never mind condense it down to a paltry side of A5. Nonetheless, I filled the card, sealed it, addressed it, and propped it up at the back of my desk, where it remains, meaningless and meaningful.
Perhaps I will write to him every year on his birthday, and together these unsent cards will be a kind of annual diary. A time capsule, of sorts. If no one will ever read my words, is there any point in writing them at all? The answer must be yes. I wrote long before I was paid to do so, long before anyone other than my parents read what I wrote, and I will do so long after. I don’t really feel that I have a choice in the matter; I simply cannot think without writing. The card may be addressed to Dad, but it is for me, in a way I do not yet fully understand.
We began the day itself by sorting through his things. Thanks a lot, I imagined him saying, you’re celebrating my birthday by nicking my stuff? In his bedside table we found fishing flies; various guitar paraphernalia (a tuning fork, a string winder and cutter, a whole folder of instructional CDs); his Darwin College cufflinks; a leather-encased imperial tape measure, from his first job at an architecture practice. There were a series of framed photographs of my eldest brother receiving Little League trophies, and the model penguin I made, aged four, out of tissue paper and a plastic bottle (it was dreadfully conceived at the time, and age has not been kind to it). Someone pulled out a string of negatives, and my 15-year-old brother had no idea what they were, and I suddenly felt extraordinarily old. I found Dad’s wedding ring from his marriage to my mother, and have taken to wearing it on a chain around my neck – for which M— immediately dubbed me “Bilbo Bailey”.
We each keep some items of his clothing, mostly band T-shirts. My eldest brother laid claim to his very handsome leather jacket. I took a few pieces I sewed for him, a jacket and a shirt. I don’t know why I took them, or what to do with them now. My intimate knowledge of how many hours they took to create leads me to feel they should be worn, but they are too big for me, and in any case I want them to remain his, not be assimilated into someone else’s wardrobe. For now they sit, folded, on my sewing desk – the place they were made, and to which they were never supposed to return.
Later, we went for a pizza, raised our glasses of Moretti to him. When my eldest brother got up to go to the bathroom, Dad’s stiff leather jacket, which had been tucked in behind him in the banquette seating, remained upright. We laughed; I posed for a photo with my arm around its shoulders. None of us is sentimental or spiritual enough to believe it a sign, and yet…
I found the whole day more difficult than I’d anticipated. I had, naively, thought that being among Dad’s possessions would make me feel closer to him, but it only made me feel emptier. When I got home that evening and laid out my little haul on the bed, I could only think: he is not here. No number of these small fragments adds up to make a life.
[See also: My cherished camping inheritance]
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This article appears in the 10 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fight Back
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