So today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Sixteenth. Half my life has been spent without this man, and the way I carry on, you'd think it happened yesterday. I must have had some extreme psychic bond with this man who sired me at age 65, died in his armchair at age 81, and left behind a teenage daughter who had spent every waking moment of her childhood scared to death that each day would be THE DAY, the day that daddy, an old man, would inevitably die.
That day was July 17, 1992.
I wasn't going to write anything about this, because I've already said all that needs to be said about it. I'm even getting tired of the whole dead father trope of my life. But in yesterday's Statesman, a story about a 59-year-old woman in our area who gave birth last month predictably stuck in my craw.
First of all, fuck the Statesman for failing to report that this woman had to have taken every fertility treatment known to man to get pregnant. Fifty-nine year old women don't get oops preggers ever, unless they have been chosen by God to birth the Messiah. This "oh, well, this little miracle just snuck up on us!" tone of the first paragraph is total bullshit, and the fact that they had lost a child made it even more apparent to me that someone was doing a little in vitro behind their grown children's backs.
The big bullshit is, of course, the last part of the article, the part where they concede that at their age, they may not be around to see their baby through to adulthood. Such light is made of this. Hey, their grown kids will undoubtedly step up and finish raising the kid! No sweat there! Forget the trauma that a child with old parents goes through every day! I promise you that kid is going to be clinging to his mother's leg crying hysterically when the time comes for him to go to school. At age 65.
Some shithead kid is going to get up in his face and tell him that his parents are going to die soon and that's going to be it for him.
I fucking hate these misguided, selfish people.
Posted by Zerd at July 17, 2008 07:55 PMMy dad died when I was 21, and my mother when I was 35, and I still don't consider myself an adult. But yeah, part of planned parenthood can be "how long can I expect to be around to responsibly love my child."
Posted by: K. at July 19, 2008 07:28 AM