Your birthday is a dreary, bone chiller this year. My hands—your hands—felt the intensity of this Midwest January day as I filled the birdfeeders at dawn. My aging skin is thinner than ever this year in winter cold, and although I venture out every day with my dog, I curse the clinging of winter to my bones and the hour or more of residual shivering.

Where are you today?

Did you pop into Tracy’s kitchen to rate her birthday chocolate cupcakes with that boiled caramel frosting you loved? She says the frosting is harder than it should be. But lots of things are harder these days. Do you know the planet is on fire? That the party you always voted for is waging war on truth and decency and American democracy? That cruelty is trying to best compassion once and for all?

Goodness, I hope you can’t know, that you don’t know. I like to imagine my beloved dead oblivious to the sorrows the living must witness in 2026.

On what would have been your 82^nd birthday, I choose to see your spirit on a golf course in California. I do that sometimes, see you somewhere, the details as vivid as a picture. Your twenty-five-year absence has not dimmed my imagination, and Mack’s eleven-year absence has made me something of a professional daydreamer writing living scenarios for you both.

So, yes, it is a golf course for your spirit today, 36 holes with Mack. I see it as clearly as if I was standing on the tee box behind you. You in your Gilligan bucket hat and Mack in Old Navy flipflops. It is 78 degrees, and the sun is sparkling off the cerulean blue pond to the left of the fairway. You are drinking a Pepsi from one of those tall glass bottles and making a complicated wager with Mack about your respective shots to an emerald green.

It is both a wondrous and a disconcerting place here in this humble and quiet life (back in Illinois where you first brought me in 1979), now uncomfortably sandwiched as a human living between a lost father and a lost daughter. Yet here I am, breathing and searching, always searching, for myself and humanity. Two of my greatest teachers are now spirit guides, but I have found my way home.

Do you think I have needed my dad for too long? Is it a bother to be a member of the spirit committee of a skeptical and too-serious woman when you were ever the optimistic, joyful child? I hope watching the passing of my time and my imperfect life unfolding isn’t too much of a downer, but you must watch because I wish it. The living carry all the sorrow, and therefore we get to make all the rules for our honored dead.

I know this truth because I am older now than you. You may have noticed my hair is pepper and salt and there are these lines on my face that I thought I would outrun because I always looked so much younger than my years. Like you always looked younger than your years. But there they are, those lines, mocking my hubris; and there you are, no longer aging.

I am wiser now, too, I promise. But would you believe that I am also more tender? Do you see that these lines on my face mirror the cracking open of my heart? It took a lifetime and the weight of grief to learn it, and Mack still must remind me most days, but I am easier on myself and on the world than I was back in the days when you warned me to loosen my death grip on living.

I did come ‘round to your way of thinking. Eventually.

Thanks, Pops. For the freckles and the Disney vacations. For the silly games and the Ding Dongs and the Twinkies. For the smarts and the sarcasm and even the crooked pinkies you gave me. But I do wish you would have kept that fivehead to yourself. It didn’t bother me for most of my life, but it turns out it gave the sun too easy a target. Did you hear me cursing our fiveheads last week as the dermatologist dug out a small spot of basal cell carcinoma from the top of that great expanse of exposed skin you gave me?

Nothing in life is perfect or easy and that, I suppose, is the lesson. We get what we get and we do what we can do to survive it. These days I am holding my own. I have my previous Savannah. I have a lovely family and brilliant friends, adorable dogs, and a peaceful home. I have work that feeds my mind and yoga that nourishes my soul. Yet for all that is good, the milestones, like these missed birthdays, weigh heavy on my bones.

So, hey, Dad, since it’s your birthday, please pop in today while Tracy and I are shooting pool at the bar while eating your birthday cupcakes. Check in on Savannah from time to time, will ya? And please, please, please, will you remain on my spirit committee so long as I keep Mack as committee chair?