Today is my dad's birthday. He would have been 57. For the first time, I couldn't go buy another golf shirt or John Grisham novel or WXPN-type CD. Five months ago, on June 12, my dad passed away after fighting renal cell cancer for over two and a half years.
I wanted to write a column about him -- some sort of tribute to his memory, maybe -- but I wasn't sure how to do it. I knew that if it was for my dad, it couldn't be trite or sappy or melodramatic. The thought intimidated me, and so I came up with alternate column topics, things like "Why we should respect the Fine Arts Department" or "The ineffectiveness of campaign ads." I tried to make these work, to avoid the honesty of writing about my father.
But something kept gnawing at me, telling me to write about him. I gave in, not sure if it was for him or for myself that I was writing. Deciding to write was the easy part. Deciding how to write it was numbingly difficult.
I started with the premise that they teach us at our columnist introductory meeting -- that every opinion column should, of course, have an opinion. At Penn, we columnists too often try to politicize our opinions, and I found myself wanting to rant and rave about why it annoys me when people say that cell phones cause cancer or when the news tells us of yet another study proving that exercise and eating your vegetables will prevent cancer. My dad ran the D.C. Marine Corps Marathon, always ate his vegetables to show a good example for his two vegetable-ambivalent children and avoided cell phones at all costs. I thought I would write about how it worries me that one day the disease will become stigmatized, to the extent that people will say, "If you had only used a regular phone, you wouldn't have cancer." Of course the news isn't always right, and people will never actually say these things. That's just my irrational fear.
So I thought that maybe I could write a column about legacy instead. Legacy is a term we toss around a lot at Penn. "Oh, she got in because she's a legacy," we say of students whose parents came to Penn. But what is legacy, really? Is it what we inherit from our parents? Are my blue eyes and curly hair my father's legacy? Or is it deeper, the impact people have on others after they're gone? Perhaps my dad's legacy is his infamous sense of humor, which everyone but his family thought was incredibly funny, or his ability to listen to any problem and instantly have the perfect solution, or his enchanting quality of making every person he met feel as if he were important to him.
In writing about legacy, I suppose I would have felt the need to insert a quick moral. It probably would have been something about understanding the magnitude that the lessons our parents teach us have on our lives. How we're so busy trying to be independent that we don't even realize this. I absolutely wouldn't have tried to convince you to value what you have now because of the vague "you never know what will happen." There's nothing worse than someone trying to force you to value something out of guilt.
But who am I to preach about legacy? It's only been five months. I don't have any real perspective on the situation or even any real grip on my emotions. Usually, I'm just fine. But I'm never sure if watching a movie or having someone ask me if my parents came for Parents Weekend or sitting down at my computer to write this column will set off tears I didn't see coming.
And so I end up with a column that is scattered, disjointed, unpredictable and difficult. As is mourning. There is no easy way to do it, there are no simple answers and there is no direct path. Today may be the first significant day he isn't here for, but really, every day is significant. I'm only beginning to understand what his death means and how I will begin to get over it. So, in lieu of a birthday card, I offer this column.
I miss you, Dad. Happy birthday.
Rebecca Rosner is a senior English major from Lawrenceville, N.J.
