The Dead Don't Eat Birthday Cake

It was your birthday today. You would have been ninety-nine. However, your counting of time stopped when you died in 2018. Still, getting to 95 was a good run because you were born into a world of harsh working-class poverty; five years after the first Great War.

You did much better than your eldest sister, who died, at the age of ten, from TB in that slum you were born into. You outlasted your other sister, Alberta, who died in 1973 at the age of 53 -ground down by those early years of hardship. Even mum, you outlived by twenty-five years. Regretfully, you even outlived your son Peter, who died at 50 from diseased lungs.

I won't see the same score of age as you did. I survived a major heart attack in my 40s and rectal cancer two years ago. I am not complaining. The allotted slot of time left to me on this earth is gravy because these are unsettled times.

It's your birthday today, and the dead might not care, but I do. There will be cake, good food, wine, music and laughter. Your journey across the ages was remarkable and deserves a glass raised to celebrate your existence.

Birthdays, however, were never your thing. You just didn't understand what all the fuss was about. Your last big birthday party was when you turned 5O. There was a big party at our house, and guests for your party gave you cartons of cigarettes and whiskey as gifts. A friend who was born in Egypt quoted Arabic poetry to you while you did shots of vodka with your best friend, a Pole who had walked across five countries in search of refuge after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

You didn't like parties in your honour, and when your 60th birthday arrived, you asked mum to stop throwing parties for you. You knew time was short, and you preferred to spend those precious moments in her company. You believed it was your clock running down and that you would be dead soon. You didn't know that it was the timepieces of those you loved that was coming to an irrevocable stop.

The penny finally dropped for you on your 76th birthday. You cried after blowing out the candles on your cake. That day, I did not understand why you wept. I was thirty-six, and thumb wrestling, my way through a bitter break-up. I was too concerned with my fragile grasp on happiness to be overly concerned with the tears of others.

You wept on your 76th birthday because you sensed your dance to the music of time would soon be for one, and you weren't wrong. Mum was dead four months after singing Happy Birthday to you. Cancer killed her in a brutally quick and painful fashion.

On your 80th birthday, I drove you and Peter to the house in Scarborough that we lived in during the 1960s and 1970s when we were a young family. Later, we had fish and chips over a pint of beer. We remembered the past and felt good about our futures.

In 2008, you and I were in Albufeira for your 85th birthday. That day, you walked the beach. As your stroll neared its end, you took your shoes off and dipped your feet into the cold Atlantic surf. You were silent for a bit and then smiled at me and said, "I’ve come a long way for a lad born in Barnsley in 1923."

But the joy at survival was short-lived because, by October 2009, your son, Peter, my brother, was dead. After we buried him, we fled back to Portugal to lick our wounds of grief.

Your 87th birthday was lugubrious. We had spent the four months leading up to your birthday trying to avoid our sadness over the death of Peter. We took to bad habits like drinking for me and cigarettes for you. We argued with each other a lot. I could not come to terms with Peter's death, and neither could you. At a restaurant above Albufeira's old city, we sat on a table like two people at a railway station cafe, waiting for trains going in the opposite direction.

That night, you looked like someone done with living.

A week after your birthday dinner, you almost died from a blood clot in your leg. I rushed you to a private hospital in Porta Mau. Somehow, you pulled through, and we flew back to Canada. In Canada, I helped restore your physical health to what it was like before Peter died.

By your 88th birthday, you were happy to be alive again. We had spent that past year tilling the soil of your early life. I had given you a reason to live by encouraging and working alongside you as you wrote your first memoir. It made you realise that your life story was the story of early 20th century working-class people the world over. Five books were written because it was a tale that needed to be told. It was a warning to this generation that bad times were ahead if we didn't strengthen the Welfare State with the same vehemence that we strengthen our military. Perhaps, it was just tilting at windmills. It was worth the bloody try considering how far the world has stumbled, since you died, into extreme right-wing politics, intolerance towards refugees and economic inequalities not seen since the 1930s.

By your 95th birthday, you were dying. I wept on that day as you did on your 76th birthday. I knew you didn't have long to live. I knew that soon I would be left with ghosts of you, mum and Peter to keep me company and spur me on to preserve your legacies. You were dead nine months later.

Today, there will be cake, wine and good cheer because in keeping you alive dad, I also kept myself alive. Being part of your last stand odyssey made me better understand myself. I became a better human being.

Harry Leslie Smith

February 25, 1923-November 28, 2018