Friday's Child

Friday is finally over. Goodbye, and good riddance to it.

As hard as I try to wish that day away, it just keeps coming, like some nemesis out of an old, dusty myth. And, like that nemesis, it is as equally unforgiving. There have been thirty-four of these days so far but, I think, the ones that arrive on their yearly date on a Friday are the most poignant.

My father died on the third Friday of May in 1976, a Friday just like yesterday. Thirty-four years and, somehow, the scar tissue never formed, that wound is just as raw as the morning I found his body in our living room. Since I looked into his eyes and saw eternity staring back at me, the impossible, bottomless emptiness of forever.

That morning he taught me the last lesson he would ever teach me, and perhaps it was a lesson that no child should ever learn. As God wills, insh'Allah, maybe it's all just random chance, maybe it's not. When my friends and peers were still safely living out the last days of their childhood, I was pondering the last of our days. Personally, I would have preferred to remain blithely ignorant for a while longer.

All that remains of my father are a few old photographs, and a warm, vaguely comforting sense of great warmth. I remember specific incidents, but I have long ago forgotten what his voice sounded like, the smell of his aftershave, even the features of his face. I remember him holding me in his arms on the deck of a car ferry travelling to Michigan, the irrational fear that he would drop me over the side, his reassurances that he would never do that. I remember sitting in a back room of his office suite as he saw his patients, surrounded by model kits to keep me busy. I remember him walking me to school every morning and that day, shortly before he died when, with a wisp of nostalgia in his voice, he lamented the fact that I was probably too old to kiss him goodbye. And I remember talking to him on the phone every night, before I went to bed.

I talked to him the night before he died, too, and the bitch of it is that I knew what was going to happen. It would be easy, I suppose, to write that off as hindsight, as the confusion of a long-ago memory, but for the fact that when I hung up that phone, I knew that I would never speak to him again.

I wanted to call him back, to tell him, to plead with him to do something; what, I don't know, and what exactly does a child say to a parent at that moment? I wanted to call him back, to hear his voice just one more time, but I talked myself out of it, shook that cold feeling of dread off, and went to sleep. Perhaps the last peaceful night of sleep I ever had, for the next morning, on that Friday, the world irrevocably changed for me.

I should have done it; I should have called him back, and I will bear the burden of not having done so until the day I, too, shall end. Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not, but it is real and just as heavy as the one Atlas bore. My father would have been 91 this September, and maye he would have been if only I had been a better son.

Thirty-four years, and that knife still twists just as exquisitely as the day I found him. I miss him terribly, and I've spent a lifetime trying to redeem the irredeemable. But, somehow, I've found that while I can put the broken pieces of other people back together, the shards of my own soul have been shattered beyond recall. My father would have hated that, which means I've failed him yet again.

Of all the days in the year, I detest this one the most. Some people wonder what they would do if they only had the time to correct just one mistake. I've never had to ask myself that question. I love you, dad, and I miss you, and I'm sorry.