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Dad on a Lark

It's been a stubbornly cold April in New England, but we're assured that spring is in fact almost here. That means Molly and I will soon be taking Larkin in the stroller to Elizabeth Park, a lush rose garden with a gazebo on the grounds of a former estate. The park is one of our most cherished places in the world, a place of delight for us, and of sorrow, too.

Starting parenthood this late in life — I'm 48 — has its challenges. There's some daunting math (I'll be how old when Larkin graduates from college?), and there's my right knee, creaky from decades of basketball, that makes getting up and down off the floor two thousand times a year a bit dicey. Late-onset fatherhood also means having a brand-new baby at a time when illness and death are already making inroads into the ranks of your parents, in-laws, and old family friends. Vitality and mortality go hand in hand in a way they wouldn't if you were 28.

Even so, 2006 was quite a year for us. Larkin was born in January. In June we scattered the ashes of Molly's brother, who died of lung cancer at 45. My mother, meanwhile, was in the final stages of succumbing to the same awful disease. And in the middle of all that, I myself was handed an unwelcome diagnosis: a little thing I'd gotten taken off my back turned out (surprise!) to be a melanoma. A two-and-a-half hour surgery relieved me of a chunk of my lower back, along with lymph nodes in my groin and armpit.

So the joy of our first summer of parenthood came mixed with much darker strains. Dread at my diagnosis, grief over my mother's approaching death: we felt like we were living between the frying pan and the fire. We'd drive to the nursing home, bringing Larkin and also something for my mother, like the basket of fresh raspberries she greeted with a whispered, "They're fabulous!" Back home, we'd retreat to Elizabeth Park and a favorite spot by the rose gardens, where we'd spread out a blanket, listen to music and play with Larkin, as I drank enough beer to jumpstart some badly needed courage. One of those days I'd had a PET scan, and — because of the radioactive tracer — I was advised not to hold the baby for three hours. I joked feebly, "Daddy is glow in the dark, that's why he can't play with the Lark!" and kept a steady bead on my watch, waiting for 6pm and the all-clear to hug my laughing, oblivious daughter. The pressures of those days were immense, and I wanted desperately to escape, but where? There are times in life when you just have to wait for what happens.

What happened was that the doctors sliced and diced my lymph nodes, they scanned my body head to toe and found nothing nasty. A 90% cure rate, my oncologist says. I can live with that — at least, I hope so.

But my mother is gone; she died in July, only a few days after we brought her those fabulous fresh raspberries. I miss her terribly. As a work-at-home guy who is also the family cook, I had more points of contact with my mother than most men do. We would chat two or three times a week, about books, dogs, recipes, dinner parties. And after Molly became pregnant, my mother and I would talk about the great adventure to come. "I'm just so happy for the two of you!" she'd say, laughing. As it turned out, her life and my daughter's overlapped by exactly six months. Aching knees aside, my only real regret about waiting so long to have a child is that Larkin will never get to know her grandmother — an exceptionally generous woman with eccentric flair and a rambunctious, delighted laugh — except through our stories.

We've already begun telling her those stories; and who knows, maybe something gets through. At 14 months Larkin is changing rapidly. She's at that point where almost every day she can do something she couldn't do yesterday. She walks, she dances, she speaks a lively Infantish, the syntactically rich babble that is the precursor to talking. She hands us things when asked. We'll say, "Could I have that, please, honey?", and she thrusts forth whatever she is holding, with an enormous grin.

We dress her in a pair of tiny purple sneakers that my mother gave to her. They're like the footgear Mary Ann herself wore, colorful, with Velcro straps that were easy on arthritic fingers. And the way Larkin stands, holding onto the edge of the living-room coffee table and wobbling slightly, resembles Mom in the last year of her life, when she became unsteady on her feet. She's Mom reincarnated, right down to the grin.

What is this new parent's rapture that is part sorrow, part ecstasy? I'll watch as Larkin ransacks the bookshelf, sending books plummeting to the floor and clapping her hands in glee, and it is as if I physically feel the passage of life itself, flowing from generations past, through me and into the future. My mother, who tottered toward death; my daughter, tottering now to her feet; and me, right smack in the middle, literally middle aged. We humans tend to believe we move through time, but really, time moves through us; and becoming a parent allows you to feel it happening. Only after Larkin was born did I realize how meager my sense of the future had been. A child demands a future of you, but she also gives you one, changing your place in the procession — not only the ancestors behind you, but now the descendents in front of you as well. It is a terrific enlargement of your life, and a comfort.

I think a lot about how this year, 2007, began for us. The day before, on the very last day of 2006, a group of friends and family had gathered to scatter my mother's ashes into the waters of Long Island Sound. That morning, as I'd poured the ashes from the funeral-home box we'd had since July into a purple raku urn my mother loved, out tumbled a small shard of white bone. Aghast, I'd set it aside, not knowing what to do with it.

The next day, New Year's, was mild and rainy. I put a spade in the trunk of the car and made the short drive to Elizabeth Park. The park was deserted at 9:30 in the morning, and I walked to the spot by the rose gardens where Molly and I had spent those horrible, wonderful late afternoons in July. In the nearest rose bed I dug a hole, and buried the shard of my mother there.

And sometime this week, when the weather finally yields and the breeze turns warm in the trees, I will revisit the spot and let Larkin loose to frolic, wearing blue jeans and her little purple sneakers and smiling that Mary Ann Cooper smile — my daughter, walking in my mother's shoes.