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The entire month of May I have thought about my baby turning one year old. The first year of life is made up of a million other firsts, and the first of anything feels very consequential. But the closer I get to Ida’s first birthday, the closer I get to the first phone call from my dad telling me he was sick. A moment in time that set off a year of measuring the weight of firsts and lasts. When my dad called to tell me about his cancer diagnosis, I compartmentalized, just a bit. I was far away in Amsterdam, I had a newborn––I had things to choose from if I wanted a distraction. When I thought of my dad, I continued to imagine him how I wanted him to be: Extremely alive, riding a motorcycle, baking, mowing; exactly as I had left him only four months before. On the phone, I could hear that his voice was decidedly different during our daily soft-voiced check-ins, but his image was secure in my head, and that was an image of a person who was not sick. When I saw photos of my dad shortly before flying home to be with him, my memories were no longer enough to add the weight and the hope and the normalcy back onto the person I loved so much. Even when I closed my eyes, I could only see him this new way: Terribly close to death. The first time I saw him in person, I realized I was seeing my dad exactly how he would look when he died and it got only incrementally easier to bear during the month I was with him. Even now, I cannot revisit any photos of him while he was sick––the last photos I have of me and him together. The timeline of those last five months of my dad’s life flowed seamlessly alongside the first five of Ida’s. All her first moments were confoundingly, crushingly matched up to the last of everything with my dad. In hindsight, the first experiences I shared with my dad and Ida together feel like they are essentially right on top of our final goodbyes. And I barely remember the firsts, but I replay the lasts––vividly––on a grief-stricken loop. I can feel the strange fall weather, I can hear the creak of the boardwalk where Ida and I would pace back and forth, I can smell my dad’s house and I can instantly see his gaunt, happy face light up when I would bring Ida to see him. Every month since my dad died in October, has marked a solemn first holiday, first season, first milestone without him, right next to an inevitably joyful first holiday, first season, first milestone with Ida. This has made for a tender, often confusing, cluster of emotions. Experiencing a first and a last simultaneously, over and over for a year has been––sometimes hysterically––painful. Between becoming a parent and losing a parent, the death feels sharper than the birth. Holding my dad’s hand for the last time takes up more space in my memory than the first time I held Ida. The lasts feel more powerful than the firsts. The first time my dad saw Ida was the first time I saw him sick, too. He had just come home from the hospital and we knew he would be resting at home for however long he had left. It was dusk and it was warm out. I walked quickly to his bedroom door, holding my three-and-a-half-month-old baby close, willing her happy warm body to calm my nerves. I opened the door and took him in before he opened his eyes. Nothing could have prepared me for seeing him so corpse-like. And in the thick of whatever first this event would qualify as, I felt a grin spread across Ida’s face. My dad’s eyes had opened and he and the baby were smiling at each other. Over the next month, I realized that there was no other way I could have endured losing him. I could not have felt the permanent ache of a series of lasts unless it was nestled against the gentleness of a series of firsts with my baby girl.
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