A Different Father’s Day Call

The first time my father didn't know who I was

I heard someone fumble with the phone before it was answered. Then my father’s voice called out to my stepmother.

“It says Eva Marie is calling.”

“Talk to her,” she answered.

Then, tentatively, he said, “Hello?”

I was calling to wish him a happy Father’s Day.

That was the first time I realized my father didn’t know who I was.

Once I began talking, he was very sweet, but I’m not sure he ever knew who he was speaking to. When I asked how he was doing, he answered, “Fantastic!” as he always does. He laughed when I told him my husband and I were traveling around Europe for a while like a couple of teenagers.

I asked how his new pacemaker was doing.

He said he knew nothing about it, not remembering that only a month earlier, he had been hospitalized with pneumonia and had a pacemaker implanted. Maybe losing some of those memories was a blessing.

It’s the moment so many people fear when someone they love has dementia, the realization that you’ll lose them long before they’re physically gone.

And this may have been that moment.

He’s a blissed-out ninety-four-year-old who spends his days watching reruns of Gunsmoke. He rarely goes outside anymore to feed the birds, something he always loved.

I’d be remiss to say we’ve had the closest of father-daughter relationships, because we haven’t. He was an alcoholic, and that took its toll. For much of my childhood, I feared him.

But there were also years before the drinking fully took hold that I remember with remarkable clarity. I can still summon the adoration a little girl has for her father. Long days in the surf at Newport Beach, where he taught me how to build drip sandcastles. Learning to ride a bicycle. Birthday trips to Knott’s Berry Farm every year until my parents divorced when I was six.

I was the cuddly little girl who cherished her father. Then the wild teenager who moved to Los Angeles with my mother, and later to London for high school, while he found sobriety, God, and a new wife.

Now he is a gentle old man who lingers somewhere in the waiting room between here and there. He watches television, still loves Mexican food, and, when asked, can still sing a song in Spanish.

But I’m no longer sure he knows who I am.

It’s one of those quiet gateposts we cross in life, a marker that tells us nothing will ever quite be the same again.

Today, we crossed another one.

Before we hung up, I thanked him for being my dad.

He said it had been his pleasure.

Then he told me he loved me.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.