When Happy Birthday Isn’t

Michael Levy
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read
My dad and me on December 14, 2005, at the Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, Willemstad, Curacao. My dad passed away two weeks later.

The answering machine light was blinking when I came back to my cubicle. Being my (36th) birthday, I suspected it was either my sister or parents each trying to be the ones to get dibs as the first to wish me a happy birthday as part of our family tradition.

Instead of immediately listening to the message, I figured I’d first check out the caller ID to see who it was and then come back to it later.

The caller ID showed only one call. It was the right area code for my parents, a 561 number, but it wasn’t their number.

When my parents were gone on one of their many Saturday junkets to Atlantic City when I was a kid, panic would set in if they were past the usual time they came home. I would peek my head through the blinds to look for automobile lights down the street, scan the radio to see if there was an accident reported, and even strategize about how to use 411 to find every hospital up and down the Garden State Parkway if they didn’t get home soon. But, each time they would come home, and I would express my annoyance that they didn’t get home sooner.

On that 28th day of December in 2005, however, terror hadn’t enter my mind. My parents were probably calling from the club or from one of their friends’ houses, I thought.

I dialed in to retrieve my message. “You have 1 new voicemail,” the system told me. “Come on,” I said to myself impatiently.

A gravelly voice came on the line. I can’t recall his name or position, only that he was calling from the Boca Raton sheriff’s office. My heart raced quickly as obviously I knew something was terribly wrong.

My initial thought was that my father had been in an accident. Nine months before, when I was down in Boca visiting him for his 75th birthday, in a parking lot he had dinged a car and refused to stop and got agitated after we kept imploring him to do so. And, when he drove me back to the airport I had worried both about his speed and his penchant for switching lanes without looking. I had talked to both him and my mom about turning in his driving license as his father had done decades earlier when he thought he was no longer capable of driving.

The gravelly voice continued, informing me that my mother had come home to find my father dead on the floor of their bedroom of an apparent heart attack.

The blood drain from my face. I felt faint. I was confused. This couldn’t be true. My father looked “old” but rejuvenated just two weeks before when I flew down to surprise my parents for the day in Willemstad, Curacao, while they were enjoying a Caribbean cruise. We had visited an old synagogue—where my father haltingly willed himself up a spiraling dangerous staircase—clinked bottles of the locally brewed Amstel Bright, and reminisced while walking around the port.

The gravelly voice told me my mother was fine and at home. My thoughts immediately flew from my father to my mother. She had lost first her father, then a daughter, then her mother, and now she would come home to find her husband of 47 years dead on the floor in their bedroom.

My dad with me before my bar mitzvah in 1983.

What would I say? How could she cope? How fast could I get there? I honestly can’t remember our exchange on that brief call, only that I would make arrangements and get the earliest flight I could down to Florida from Chicago.

Even before that terrible day, I never was one for birthday celebrations, as much because of my personality as because of the date—wedged between Christmas and New Year’s, few of my friends were ever around to “celebrate.”

But, now, my birthday is more than bittersweet. It’s just bitter. People wish me a happy birthday and my mom still calls me early on my birthday to wish me a “Happy Happy.”

But how can I celebrate my birthday on the day I lost my best friend?

The answer is obvious: I can’t.

)
Michael Levy

Written by

Sometime writer. Full-time Chicago Cubs fan. Extremely amateur soccer player. San Francisco resident. I don’t write fiction. Everything is true. Mostly.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade