Cheating Death
In between the fun and filled-up diapers there are quieter moments in parenting. They hit you when you let your guard down. You’ll be tucking your kid in for bed or sitting on the couch watching your child watch one of your favorite shows from childhood. He’s laughing with you. You look at each other like old friends. And in an instant, there’s a coaction between life and memories. The past and present are hugging.
This feeling sneaks up on you as fast as your kids grow up. Life is a VHS tape on record. Rewind, fast forward — there is but one tape per life.
I wish I could say I’m riding the wave of fatherhood like a plump bodysurfing seal, but I’m sinking into these murky waters. I look at my sons and I see them living beyond my lifetime, like I have surpassed my father. He was taken too early. This is something I can’t repeat.
We watch the moon in the sky. I tell Finn about the constellations, as my dad did with me, and we see the moon. I tell him the moon grows and disappears. He asks why, as he does with all things, and I explain that light plays with shadows to create an illusion, a trick. We are deceived every night by luminescence and darkness, waxing and waning. And it dawns on me that our lives, in these states of fullness and retreat, are simply illusory.
The continuum of birth+life+death is so boring and cliche. I know I’ll die before my kids and then they’ll have kids and grandkids. That’s how it’s done. I get it. But only halfway.
I wish for immortality now that mortality’s auction price is at its highest. But maybe these kids are my immortality. My name. My genes. My beliefs. My wife’s, too. And uniquely their own. Lasting in memories that I get to make, looking forward, backward and inward. I get to hold their hands until I am but a thought, an inside joke and a heartbeat.
Andrew says: 
Jessica 
cassie 
