Beach Day

Tomorrow morning I leave for a week’s vacation in Mexico. I’m going to sit by a pool, steps from a beach, for five days. Time will slow down, and then when I return it will feel a million years ago that I was away.

This month marked the 19th anniversary of my father’s death. He had been hospitalized for months at Mass General in Boston when my sister called me at school just before my holiday break. The good news was that Daddy was coming home for Christmas. The bad news was that he was not expected to get better. It was just a matter of time.

The hospital bed was set up in the annex off the living room we called the “sun room” because it was surrounded by windows on all sides. Fittingly, I suppose, it was a remarkably sunny day on the day he died. I was 18.

This year marked my now having lived more than half my life without him.

The summer before I began 8th grade, my family moved from Brussels to a small New England town. Our house was four miles from the ocean. We all embraced this new, luxurious, proximity. The back of the station wagon soon housed the beach umbrellas, chairs, towels and gear to accompany a leisurely day at the beach. We quickly adopted habits of regular beach goers, shaking the sand out of all nooks and crannies in the sweltering parking lot before getting in the car, learning the shortcuts that enabled us to bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic heading back to the highway. We proudly became the locals.

Two weeks before my father was hospitalized, never to recover, he and my mother dropped me off at college in Illinois. We had driven cross-country with all the belongings I deemed too precious to leave behind. My assigned dorm room was tiny, my allotted half allowing for a fraction of the boxes I had packed. In my mind, my father’s stature filled the remaining space. It was the last time I saw him standing, and the last time he hugged me.

Tonight, hours from my early morning flight, I’m thinking of my father at the beach, his toes digging into the sand with an ill-fitting sun hat barely keeping his forehead from getting too red. Tomorrow I will take a walk along the Pacific Ocean in his memory. Just maybe, time will slow down enough for me to remember him in ways I haven’t in a long, long time. If that happens, maybe it won’t feel like a million years ago since he went away.