My father’s birthday was last Friday. He would have been 74 years old. I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about last time we got to celebrate the day with him. The venue for the man’s 70th and final birthday? The VA facility in Lyons, New Jersey. He had injured himself in a fall earlier in the month and was there rehabilitating.

I remember the day well. They let us use a sort of “all purpose room” to stage the party. Countless family showed up. It was a Sunday. There was a TV. We had the Giants game on. They lost to the Jaguars because of course they did. 25-24 was the score. What I remember most about the day was of course, my dad. He looked better than he had in at least a year. He moved around with renewed vigor. He just seemed so happy and healthy and the thought of him being anywhere but with us was the furthest thing from my mind. The future held promise.

He died in his sleep a month and a half later.

Life has been full of so many moments chiseled resolute into the granite of my mind. The memory of them are equal parts haunting and healing, full of happiness and grief, some make me cry and others allow me to still laugh as heartily as ever. All serve as the music and lyrics to a song about him that I’ll spend the rest of my life composing. Truth is, the man was a work of art unto himself. The finest teacher I’ve ever known. And he started pretty early…

***

When I was about 7 years old and my younger sister, Julianne, was about 4 we were playing outside on a summer day with a bunch of the neighborhood kids on our front lawn. Super Soakers were real popular and some of the other kids had them but my sister and I just had those cheap little water guns you had to refill like every 30 seconds. Suffice to say, we weren’t having a ton of fun.

My dad comes outside and says he has to go to the store and asked one of the neighbors to keep an eye on us while he was gone.

He came back fifteen minutes later and asked my sister and I to come inside the house. Inside he shows us what he got at the store: two gigantic, if not generic, water guns, bigger than anything any of the other kids had. These things were great! We ended up making one of the other kids with a Super Soaker cry because the “water hurt him”.

He just knew what we needed in that moment. We didn’t ask him for anything. He just knew.

***

In 2006, my Grandfather passed away. I was 21 at the time and it was the first time I had to grapple with death in my young adulthood.

The day of the funeral my father asked me to help cover his father, my grandfather, with the shroud and watch the undertaker close the casket. I didn’t understand why at the time. Why ask me to do that? Shouldn’t he have? I spent a truly difficult month or so processing that.

***

Dad died on January 17th, 2015. Two days earlier I had just gotten home from a trivia night with some friends when he asked me the following:

“What are you going to tell people about me when I’m gone?”

“Come on, Dad, you’re going to live well into your 80s! Why are you asking me this?”

“These are the things that I think about at my age, Junior. I want you to tell them about our relationship as father and son. In many ways, you are my best friend. We’re more alike than most people realize, ourselves included.”

Two days later, he was dead.

The next week I delivered his eulogy and I shared that exchange with everyone. I didn’t have to write it out, he’d already done that for me. I made sure to make everyone laugh, because that’s what I know he wanted.

Then came the day of the funeral. I covered him with the shroud and watched as the undertaker closed his casket. It’s what I needed to do in that moment. I just knew, it had to be me. He told me years earlier without saying it. He knew what I would need in that moment, I never asked him, he just knew.

I’ve always referred to the day he died as the “Day the Music Died”. Because it did. For quite some time. You lose both a father and a girlfriend less than two years apart and tell me what kind of music you hear in your life. I’ll tell you, it’s a deafening and maddening silence. You can’t hear the birds singing. You don’t pick up your guitar and just play. You hear nothing until you’re ready.

I hear the music again these days. I wouldn’t be able write about these things if I couldn’t. Sometimes I hear it faint, off in the distance. Other times it’s blowing out my eardrums. But I hear the birds again. I pick up my guitar and play.

The music never dies. I hear it now. I do.