My dad was 59 when I was born. He was often mistaken for my grandfather and died when I was just 28.

Publish date: 2024-07-12
2024-02-02T11:22:01Z

I was 5 years old the first time I was made aware I had an older father.

"Anna, your grandpa's here to collect you," said my teacher. I felt an unfamiliar rush of emotion — a mix of anger and shame.

Dad was 59 when I was born and 65 when my little sister arrived. Throughout my childhood, he possessed the energy levels that I rarely see in my peers, let alone among retirees.

When his friends came to stay they'd describe it as like being on an Outward Bound course, as my dad took them sailing, cycling, and hiking, often all within the same day. I was his faithful little shadow. I'd feed him cans of cider as we sailed together, race him across the beach, and scabby-kneed, pedal furiously after him on bike rides. He'd done all of this before with his first family, and there was practiced patience in the way he taught me to row, sail, and give up the comfort of my bike stabilizers.

I was aware of his mortality

I idolized my dad, but the older I got, the more I became aware of his mortality. When you have an older parent, and by default, older grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends, you begin going to funerals at a very young age. Growing up in a rural part of the UK, I went to my first funeral long before I'd ever been to a theme park.

At age 12, while my friends and I took to prank calling local fast food outlets, a girl in my class called my home phone repeatedly. "Your dad looks like he should be your grandpa, and your grandma looks like she should be dead," she hurled into the receiver.

Just weeks later, my grandma died. It was unsurprising; she was well into her 90s. Not yet a teenager, I found myself at the funeral of a close family member for the second time. By the time I turned 30, I'd have lost all my grandparents, several aunts and uncles, and my own father.

I was 28 when he died

I was 28 when dad died. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, he was so riddled with secondary cancer that they couldn't even identify what the primary had been, and he had little more than a month to live. But, according to one particularly emotionally inept family friend straight after my father's death, I should have felt lucky that I had him for so long.

No one feels lucky when a parent dies. In an age where absent or inadequate fathers are the rule rather than the exception among my peers, however, I feel enormously lucky to have had my dad. My dad had encyclopedic knowledge — all the more so after more than eight decades on the planet. My dad made the most of the extra time afforded by retirement to kick a football tirelessly around the garden with his tomboy daughter. My dad, who, as he aged, defied all stereotypes by becoming increasingly left-wing.

Having a child later in life is often considered selfish, but the fact that my dad had done it all before meant he was able to communicate his emotions much more easily with my sister and me than he had done with my older half-siblings, or so they tell me. My dad had no difficulty in telling me how much he loved me, he expressed it every day.

It was painful when he died, but I was grateful to have a present, engaged, loving father for 28 years of my life.

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