a gift from my father — Summer of Rove

I’m holding an unopened card from my dad. Today is my birthday. He has been gone for nearly a year. The story of this card, and the gift that came with it, are part of the story of my father.

It’s so easy nowadays to rely on Amazon wish lists or launch straight to gift-card mode. But as he did with so much in his life — endearingly, maddeningly — Dad insisted on doing presents his own way. Gift cards? For him they were a hard “no.” He ignored my emailed Target link suggestions for his grandkids and instead went and found things I wished I had thought of: a “Chess Queen” tote bag, with a queen chess piece in place of the word, for his chess-playing granddaughter; a cozy Star Wars throw blanket for his superfan grandson; spring flowers for our planters on the balcony, which he called “Lu’s Garden” for my daughter Lulu. Last year he started an email chain about what to get my mom for Christmas — in August. Every winter he’d gift a bottle of Prosecco to the woman who cut his hair at a local barber shop. You get the picture.

Despite his habit of compulsively early gift-planning, it knocked the wind out of me when I got a present and a card from him on my birthday last year, four days after he’d slipped into a coma from which he would never awaken.

Looking back, I can trace the stages of my life through my cards to him, like my own less visually poignant version of The Giving Tree. As a child, they were hand-drawn. Then written in wobbly letters. Once I had spending money in my pocket, I honored Dad’s fondness for funny, off-color cards. I’d spend time looking around — at neighborhood card shops when those still existed, and later at big-box stores — settling on one I thought might get a chuckle and later commiserating with him about the increasingly lame selection. At first, I delivered them in person; later I sent them from whichever city I called home at the time. In recent years, with fuller-than-fulltime jobs, two kids and 2,500 miles between us, I’d often forget to think ahead and hastily mail a (particularly lame) card a day or two before whatever holiday, then call on the day and say sorry my card wasn’t there yet. He never minded.

From a storybook I made in kindergarten or first grade, after my parents separated.

Many scenes were like this, just me and my dad.

Last fall, my father was living in Portland, Oregon, where he’d settled a decade earlier after spending his entire adult life in Manhattan. He was coming east for the wedding of his dear friends’ daughter near D.C. and planned to spend time in New York before and after the wedding. The latter coincided nicely with my birthday. He remained close friends with my mother 40 years after they split, and stayed at her apartment — his apartment too, a long time ago — when he was in town. He would sleep in my childhood bedroom.

Me with my father and mother, who was pregnant with my sister, in 1978.

Dad was going to take me out for a special birthday meal when he was back from D.C. It was a tradition he’d started when my sister and I were little. Each of us would get a solo dinner with him at a restaurant where money and location were no object. Fancy French, trendy Italian, lively Tex-Mex — whatever we wanted. These were standout occasions for kids who were used to seeing their single dad once a week and every other weekend and, always as a trio, eating his homemade burgers, spaghetti carbonara, or chicken Lillet (a dish I’m pretty sure he invented using his favorite French aperitif; it never really caught on with me) at a fold-down table in his teeny studio apartment.

Back to 2019. He emailed me a list of choices — a blend of trusty favorites and new options his internet research had led him to consider worth a try. But he never made it to the wedding. He was rushing to the Port Authority to catch a bus to D.C. when he collapsed in an Upper West Side subway station. He had suffered sudden cardiac arrest and, though EMTs got his heart started again, he was unconscious and in critical condition. Among the personal effects they handed over to me in the E.R. when I arrived: his neatly packed weekend duffel and a large reusable bag containing a carefully wrapped present and card for the soon-to-be bride and groom.

So I spent this day last year in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. Dad was coming off a treatment called therapeutic hypothermia, which is often given to cardiac arrest patients in an effort to essentially put the body into a deep freeze. The hope is that it will halt and reduce inflammation and give the organs a rest so as much healing as possible can occur. Under heavy sedation and paralytic drugs (you don’t want to wake up during this most unpleasant process; doctors don’t even want you to be able to shiver) there was still a glimmer of hope that he would pull through and — not for the first time — defy a grim medical prognosis.

I bought a box of cookies from a local bakery and shared them with the ICU staff. My appetite at that time was gone, obliterated by terror and sadness, and I couldn’t get myself to eat one. But there was something highly satisfying about seeing those hard-working, overtired medical residents dig into that box of birthday sweets. My father would have liked that.

My sister, who had flown from California to be at my dad’s bedside, walked with me to my birthday lunch at a restaurant near the hospital. My mother joined us. She was carrying a present and a card, from my dad. He had gotten it all ready at her apartment, before his weekend trip, so he could give it to me at our meal.

In recent years, in addition to cookware — a nod to my sad but well-meaning attempts to be a better home chef — and the occasional book he loved and thought I’d love too, he liked to get me clothing from my friend’s amazingly special boutique in Portland. I think he did this as much for a chance to stop in and socialize with her as to pick out something for me. (She’s a smart, talented, warm, funny woman — he loved those.) As a fellow journalist, he knew there was never much of a dress code in any of my workplaces. But as I ascended the corporate ladder in my traditional uniform of choice (jeans, T-shirts), he liked helping to build my clothing collection, one office appropriate-but-not-stuffy piece at a time.

When last year’s birthday rolled around, I was enjoying funemployment for the first time in my life, having left my job at a big weekly magazine that March and traveled around Europe all summer with my husband and two kids.

I opened the present while Dad lay in a coma. It was a departure for him. He got me sweatpants from Northwestern, my alma mater. They are purple (both the school’s color and a favorite color of his; he loved to remind me and my sister how this factoid horrified us when we were little). They are very soft and they fit perfectly. I’m guessing that if I’d had a chance to talk to him about it, he would have made a joke about this being my most appropriate work outfit for the time being.

The gift he had planned to give me at our birthday meal.

With Lulu, who’s wearing the Marvin the Martian shirt he bought her to match his.

My sister and I said goodbye to my father after a 25-day crash course on the blessings and curses of modern medicine. While his EKG scans showed brain activity and his brain stem was intact, allowing him to cough and gag and move his feet when doctors tickled them with an instrument to test reflexes, he never woke up from the coma — even when they stopped all the sedatives and pain medication. Making the decision to let our father leave this earth, when all I wanted was for him to be alive, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But knowing him as we did, what he would want was never in question. In a way, though it was excruciating for me and my sister, we gave him a gift that late October day. We sent him off with his favorite tunes playing on a bluetooth speaker, toasting him with vodka gibsons after smuggling the ingredients of his signature cocktail into the hospital and mixing them up after the doctors left us alone.

A few weeks later, I shipped his wedding gift to the then-newlyweds in D.C. The bride, who’s known my father her whole life, told me she was surprised at how traditional he went: wine glasses. But he was right on target. She loves her red wine, and thinks of him whenever she pours a drink.

As for the card — in a purple envelope, naturally — that came with last year’s birthday gift to me, I still haven’t opened it. I thought I might today, but now I’m not sure. It’s comforting to know I have something new and undiscovered, something hand-picked with love, something to look forward to, still coming to me from my dad.