What We'll Do For Dad On His 91st Birthday

By Patti Davis

Feb. 6 will be my father's 91st birthday. The country and much of the world will be more aware of the occasion than he is. He has already passed a historic benchmark; he has lived longer than any other President.

What would he say about this? He might cock his head, smile, and say, "Well, this isn't exactly what I had in mind." Or perhaps something like, "All in all, I'd rather be horseback riding."

We will commemorate his birthday, speak of it, but the word "happy" won't be put in front of it. We are, after all, marking another year of distance, of slow departure, of eyes that look beyond us now more often than at us. Another year of sifting sand. Celebration was left behind years ago--a part of other birthdays. But I think a mysterious sense of contentment has moved into its place. As we lean toward him and kiss his forehead, there is a feeling that we are exactly where we are supposed to be.

Everyone who has gone through a long illness with a loved one knows that a tiny community grows up around that person's bedside. People you might never have met otherwise become folded into your life, bound to you forever. It's an intimacy of hearts. The women who help my mother care for my father have soft voices and gentle hands. Together, we are experiencing the closing of the circle.

My father was born at home, at 4:16 a.m. on Feb. 6, 1911, after a long and difficult labor. He will spend his birthday surrounded by the lull of the soft voices and eyes that speak more clearly than words. We come to his side quiet as fawns now.

I've started to think of death as a shadow in the corner, waiting patiently for its time to move forward. The first time I thought of it like that was almost exactly a year ago, when my father fell and broke his hip. The general expectation among doctors is that an elderly person, particularly one who is not well, won't live more than about three months after a hip fracture. But my father's bones mended, a year has passed, and Alzheimer's has devoured more of him.

You get used to waiting--for the end that will inevitably come, for another wave of grief. Waiting winds its way into your days and nights, into your psyche. It's hard to remember when it wasn't there.

I've gotten used to other things, too, like tracing the outlines of my father's face with my hands, a caress that neither of us would have been comfortable with before. And talking to him in a loping, melodic tone, a parental tone, one meant to soothe and lull. This is the man who lifted me onto a horse when I was small, whose strong swimmer's arms moved him confidently through churning seawater. His grip is still strong, but his hands and arms are thin.

He famously used to spend hours trimming back the branches of trees at the ranch--for more of a view, and to get firewood. Now he looks out a large window at a thick bank of oak trees standing like silent green witnesses to the life on the other side of the glass. Hermann Hesse wrote, "A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening." What does my father think of when he looks out at the oak trees? Does he dream? Feel old longings stir somewhere in him? There are pictures of horses around his bed. Does he fall asleep and dream about riding? I'll never know.

There is a theory that newborn babies stare into their mother's face as a sort of mirror, which helps them form a self. In that mirror of their mother's gaze, the infant is assembling a reality, a landscape of feelings. It occurs to me that when we are leaving this world, something similar, and just as intricate, may also be happening in the long exchanges of looks.

Once, nearly a year ago, I whispered to my father, "I'm here now. I'm not leaving." So much of our history is pockmarked with my absences. I've missed birthdays when "happy" was still an appropriate word to toss around. I've missed many things; it's the knotted chain I sometimes hear clattering behind me. My whispered declaration was followed by a long look between us, and a quiet knowing took shape in that silence. I have never repeated those words to him. I don't need to. He knows.

Patti Davis is the author of The Way I See It: An Autobiography and several other books