One January a few years ago, in spite of nasty weather and snowdrifts on the ground, our family gathered from far corners to celebrate Grandpa Smith’s eightieth birthday.  We pulled out all the stops in a bittersweet celebration.  The cancer he had wrestled with a few years earlier had crept back with a stranglehold.  The doctors shook their heads and said he had a few months or less.  Some of the grandchildren made a banner out of a bed sheet and wrote in huge letters for the entire world to see, “Happy 80^th Birthday to the Big Cheese.”  We strung it across the front porch before dawn and left it up for a week.  With a morphine pump banging around his neck, he blew out all the candles while we sang “Happy Birthday” so loud it must have echoed at heaven’s gates.

A few days later Grandpa gave away most of his important stuff to make sure it all went where he wanted it to go.  Then, with the good nature of one who is about to take a much anticipated journey, he sat down to wait.  Hospice workers brought in a video that talked about “seasons” and “passages.”  Grandpa said he thought it must have been written by a professor somewhere.  Always planning ahead, he told Grandma she would find him waiting for her just inside the pearly gates.

Spring went and so did the morphine pump.  Now and then we helped Grandpa sneak off for a few hours in his boat on his favorite lake. (Dying people aren’t supposed to be out fishing..)  By the end of the year the hospice workers pulled out.  Apparently Grandpa wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The next January, we crossed off the “80” on the birthday banner and added an “81.”  Not as many people stopped by this time.  The morphine pump had been traded for little purple morphine pills.  We weren’t so careful about storing the banner since we assumed it would not be needed again.  After all, Grandpa’s supposed departure date had been six months earlier.

The following year we found ourselves frantically searching for Grandpa’s birthday banner.  We crossed off the “81” and added a few 82s.  That day it rained really hard and the “Happy birthday” and “Big cheese” dissolved into puddles of red and blue marker.  A few of us gathered and sang “Happy Birthday” two or three times.  His memory wasn’t so good any more.  He kept asking if we had sung the birthday song yet.  Every time he asked, we sang it again.  The morphine kept him a little confused, but he still managed to beat his friend Harry in a few games of checkers.