The Last of the Firsts

It’s my birthday today. By the time the afternoon rolls around, I know the drill: the inevitable, slightly cringey family FaceTime where the phone gets passed from hand to hand like a hot potato so I can individually say hello to everyone in the room. It’s a tradition, it’s out of love, and today, it feels heavy.

Because today marks the first birthday without my Pappa.

As we inch closer to November, marking a full year since he passed, I realize I’ve reached the finish line of a very specific, agonizing kind of milestone: the last of the firsts. The first birthday, the first holiday, the first ordinary Tuesday without him.

Dementia is a thief. The final few years of his life stripped away his ability to form clear sentences, and when I sit with that, I am struck by how terribly lonely it must have been inside his own mind. He didn’t deserve any of it. I remember the sting of watching people around town whisper or give him pitiful looks, forgetting who he used to be. We had to watch a man who was once capable of absolutely anything slowly become someone who needed a mountain of help just to get through the day, even if he accepted that help with fierce, reluctant pride.

I know he’s with Jesus now. I know his brilliant, capable mind is restored, and that he wouldn’t have wanted to carry on trapped in a body that wouldn't cooperate. Knowing all of that doesn’t stop it from hurting, though.

It’s the end of the firsts in this brutal first year, and the hardest part is knowing I won't see his smile. In the end, when the disease had taken so much and I felt so helpless, the only thing I ever really wanted to do was just make him smile. It felt like the last real way I could connect with him.

If he were here right now, seeing me sit around dwelling on it all, he’d probably tell me to snap out of it. And maybe I will. They say it gets easier once you cross the threshold of this first year? I'm holding onto that. Thirty-one years of having him here, and this is the very first one without him. What an incredible gift those thirty-one years were, even if letting go of them breaks your heart just a little bit more today.