William H. (not Henry) Mann died in February of 1995. He would have been 72 if he’d lived until April.

            I was 45 in April of that year and my daughter Amy was 22, a second-year law student in North Carolina. My husband Tom and I had been married seven years.

            That was 16 years ago. We’ve been married 23 years now, a year longer than Amy’s whole life back then. I was 61 on my birthday this year. In ten years I will be the age my father was when he died.

            Amy and her husband were married ten years ago on April 28, my father’s birthday, and their daughter is seven this year. Simone was born on March 25, my husband’s birthday, in 2004, the year my dad, if he had lived, would have been 81, just one year older than Tom is today.

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            Bill grew up in Kansas City, played football, joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, married my mother and flew planes against the Japanese in the Pacific, once dropping a bomb on an outhouse. After the war, he finished college and dental school, went back in the Navy, had two sons and one daughter and drove us across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific four times before 1956, then lost his family to his wife’s eternal bitterness and love of liquor and learned to play golf. He was a meticulous dentist and made fine things out of wood. He had square, steady hands and was utterly without artifice or guile, as unfiltered and transparent as water from the snow-melt rivers he loved to fish. He had hoped to vote for Robert Kennedy in the presidential election of 1968.

            He finally escaped my mother’s spell when he married Margery in 1970 and their adventures began. He retired at the age of 50, taught at a dental school in Virginia, bought and sold a vineyard in Boonville, worked for a decade at the prison at Soledad where Sirhan Sirhan still lives, retired again, bought and fixed up and sold a dozen houses. He made Bill’s Best Margaritas and we drank them. He was always working in his woodshop when I pulled up after driving 435 miles from San Diego. He would walk out, slapping sawdust off his corduroy pants and plaid shirt, say Candy-y-y and drag me into his six-foot hug. I can smell him right now: fresh-cut wood and Camels and wool, pine needles, hot metal.

            Nineteen years. Happy with Margery and the rest of us, mostly grown up and getting on, for nineteen years.

            He could be stubborn. When the pampas grass grew back for the third time, he reached for the kerosene instead of his shovel and nearly set fire to Big Sur. He made me practice putting chains on my VW in the dark in their driveway when it was wet and freezing cold one December night. Twice. Kept saying it would be harder in the snow. Defended me when I called Margery’s nephew an asshole during a tipsy carol-singing Christmas party. Bill had poured me all those brandies, plus, he said, he was an asshole. Kept ripping the genista off the hillside that threatened to overtake his roses when Marge hollered at him (every year) to stop. Insisted to Marge that it was safe to sleep in the back of the Scout with the tailgate down in bear country because he had a loaded shotgun between their bodies. Threw Amy in the lake when he thought she was being a ninny about being afraid of the water. Had what he called “an aversion to water” and refused to get in every pool Margery had built except once when he took the door ramp for his wheelchair too fast and launched it and himself into the deep end. Refused to start a road trip later than 5:00 AM. Hated cats.

            They found a brain tumor when he was 66 in 1989 and took it out. The surgery let him live but just barely. He fell a lot. And joked about it, we all did, but you could see him duck his head, something he had never done, duck his head. He made poor choices, like the time he thought Hannah the Labrador had run away and went looking for her in the Jeep he wasn’t allowed to drive, panicking on Pacific Highway, narrowly avoiding going head-on with a truck, driving into a neighbor’s trees, snapping branches and rear-view mirrors and coming to a stop, dented and frightened and embarrassed, unable to turn the key to Off.

            Amy was a freshman in college and I was 39 when the surgery changed him from Dad and Papa to Different, to Not the Same, to damaged. He lived his slow, brave life for six years until he let cancer take him.*

            Six years is a long imprint. Seeing Bill for six unsteady, fumbling, head-ducking years made me think that’s who he was, Not the Same Bill. I was so relieved when he died and still so damn sad. And Marge was so undone by his absence and her own disastrous decline that she filled my movie screen until she died last September, still missing him, needing him.

            I think it’s because she’s gone, too, that Father’s Day this year is different for me, and harder. It’s not a day to get her through without too much pain, it’s just a day to remember the man I knew for 45 years, before the horrible last six, even before he knew her, when he was just my dad.

            I see him now as he was when I was a kid, a handsome guy with wavy black hair in a khaki uniform, who drove a ’53 Mercury, who let me play with mercury in his dental lab, tiny shimmering silver spheres that magically absorbed each other. The man who wouldn’t spank me though my mother had promised he would, who pretended with the door closed so she wouldn’t know. Who held my hot, tear-streaked face when I said I’m sorry, I said I was sorry, and who said I know. Who made fun of me for pouting, who never let me get away with acting stupidly, who was never petty about anything with anyone. Who played only the Muni course (unless someone else was paying those ridiculous greens fees at Pebble Beach) and walked every hole, carrying his clubs. Who was my refuge, even thousands of miles away, always. Who, in the storms that raged after my mother drove him away, was still my anchor. The man I never doubted, not once, because he loved me every minute that he lived, as much as anyone has ever loved a child. Whose eyebrows I wear and who called me Grace because, well, I’m not. Who was waving his big paw at me the last time I saw him, as Tom and I flew into the sky, standing shakily with Marge and Hannah next to the Jeep at the end of the runway, wrapped in a red blanket.

*I wrote about that here