Too late

I started this post on October 18, 2014.

That's a birthday card I made for Pops way back in the summer or spring during one of my marathon nights of creativity.  Carefully collected Beatles images perfect for his 61st birthday.  

I had the card out and on my desk when we left for the Outer Banks last summer.  The week we were there would include both our 9th anniversary and his birthday.  In the last minute scrambling to remember All-the-Things, I forgot it until we were in the car already and I never went back inside to grab it.  I'll give it to him when we get back since he's staying with us for a few weeks after vacation. Pops won't mind.  He's the most laid back, understanding guy... he'll appreciate it anyway.

On his birthday, he didn't get a phone call or any acknowledgment from someone close to him.  I noticed how sad it made him, even though he only mentioned it a few times and even though he was trying to embrace the joy of the day.  I wished I had remembered the card I made him months before. 

After we came home and he made our home his base for a few more weeks, I forgot time and again to just finish writing a note on the inside of the card and send it to him.   I'll just mail it to his house, I told myself.  There's plenty of time.  I mean, isn't a birthday card months early/late even more fun because it's unexpected?  Maybe?  Sure.  No big deal.

Then, on October 16th,  I got the phone call that Pops had passed away.  And there, in my desk at school, was the card I made, toted around, left out, brought to school to write out and send when I got the chance.  But that's the problem.  I had the chance hundreds of times, literally, to write and send that card.  And in the blink of a phone call, the chances were done.  Time was up.  Over.  No more birthdays, no more opportunities to write about how valuable those porch front conversations were, no chances to say thank you for everything from good cheese to bourbon to encouragement and defense to advice to love to Mexican dinners and burned CDs.  

All of a sudden, it was the most too late anything could ever be.  

There's a lot wrapped up in the symbol of that unsent card.  For me, it's much about the pain and regret I feel about not taking the few minutes or half hour to write out a heartfelt rush of words for my second father and dropping it in the mail.  It's about knowing he never got a chance to hear it again --  the love and the gratitude and appreciation.  Because hearing those things in a sincere way never gets old, does it?    It's about grief and what death means.  But it's also about the pain and the shame of believing I have unlimited time to do the things I want to do for other people, heck, even for myself, in this life.  That there's a point of ultimate finality.  That one-more-chances and next-times are finite.  So very finite.  

That card haunts me sometimes.  I value it, all pain aside, for the tangible reminder that it has become that we don't have all the time in the world.  We can't even count on having a little more time, a reasonable amount of time, an average life expectancy.  It reminds me that patience, virtuous as it is, isn't something to bank on.  

I miss Pops but I know he taught us all a great deal about ourselves and how to love.  He taught me a great deal about waiting.  It's a lesson I hope I don't have to learn again.