I feel vaguely guilty whenever I leave this bench. It’s a white bench, made of marble. It sits along a pathway through the campus of a private school in a suburb of Seattle. On one side of the horizontal slab, black carved letters in a swooshy font spell out my son’s name. His birth date. And the date of his death, almost 10 years ago.
Brain cancer. Sixteen.
I come here several times a year. Today’s occasion is what would be his 26th birthday. To me, it IS his 26th birthday, and I celebrate the same way I did before his death, by baking him a cake, his favorite cake, yellow cake with a batch and a half of dark chocolate icing. I come, I sit, I run my fingers over those letters. On other occasions, I bring flowers, usually a single long-stemmed white rose. On his birthday, I brink a big hunk of cake, on a plate, with a fork.
So today, I climb several flights of stairs between campus buildings to come to his bench. When I first glimpse it, my eyes search for something left there. Perhaps a bouquet of flowers. I’ve found them before. Today, I get to the bench and there’s nothing there. I sing “Happy Birthday” in a quiet voice.
I put the cake down on the bench and then take a picture to document the occasion, just as I have all the other years I’ve been here. Then I sit down, next to the cake, and say, “You better hurry up Andrew, it’s looking pretty good.” Today I notice the extra-thick icing that had piled up in the middle of the cake, like a tsunami of dark chocolate just waiting for Andrew to engulf it. The slice is about a sixth of the cake. I pick up the fork and pick up the plate and plunge the fork in and take a bite. That’s kind of what I always do, kind of a joke between me and Andrew. I swear a couple of times I’ve heard him howl in protest.
Today’s cake is scratch made, as usual, but I’d tried something different. I’d foolishly tried to make the cake a little better for you. I used brown rice flour instead of regular baking flour. That’s pretty crazy when you consider that the cake and the icing combined contain 4 cups of sugar, three eggs and two and a half sticks of butter. What was I thinking?
The consequence was an extremely fragile cake. Without the wheat, the cake didn’t have whatever regular flour provides to keep a cake together. So it crumbled coming out of the cake pan. The bottom half came out in pieces that I had to fit back together on the serving dish, like a jigsaw puzzle.
After pulverizing the bottom half, I had do to something different to get the other half out its pan. Better than yanking it out of there. I decided two pieces cut neatly would be better than 20, so I cut a line down the middle of it with a sharp-edged spatula and managed to lift two half-circles of cake out of the pan. I dropped spoonfulls of icing onto the mosaic of the bottom half, hoping they would serve as spackle to keep the thing together. Then I lifted each half-circle of the top half in place and began to apply the icing.
The cake peeled off in layers when I tried to put icing on it. Along the sides, gravity combined with the weight of the icing to pull the vertical surface of the cake away. The insides then spilled out, like a sand castle whose innards have dried out.
I finally gave up trying to put icing on the sides and just piled it on top. I spread it as carefully as I could and as slowly as I could, trying first a spatula and then a table knife. Even then, I managed to create divots in the surface of the cake, craters that I’d then have to dump more icing onto in order to achieve a thickness that would stand spreading without grabbing the underlying cake surface and ripping it away.
When I tucked what I concluded to be the ugliest birthday cake in the world under a cake dome, I felt relieved, a weight off my shoulders, a stress I hadn’t anticipated. I thought about throwing the whole thing away, but I knew Andrew would like it anyway. Heck, if it had sugar and chocolate in it, it couldn’t be bad. Whenever I got ready to cut him a slice, he would shout out, in as deep a voice as he could mister, “Cake! Cake!”
I figured at worst he would laugh and say, gently, “Dad, you are such a dork.”
Sitting on the bench, eating my share of cake, I look around the campus. I take a last bite, a classic Andrew forkful so huge my cheeks puff out like a chipmunk’s. As I slowly chew, I stick the fork in the top of the cake and sit there. When I swallow the last of my Andrew forkful, the taste of deep dark chocolate icing and the gritty feel of rice flour cake, I feel speechless, awkward. I force myself to say things out loud but they sound dorky and stupid to me. I stop talking and just hold an image of Andrew in my mind. His Dallas Cowboys ball cap. His loose, lanky, athletic body. His wise smile. The freckles across the bridge of his nose.
When it’s time to leave, I know I have to leave, yet there’s something that makes me want to stay. And maybe it’s just to stay connected to Andrew, which is odd, because I feel connected to him no matter where I go. But this is a special place. I know this campus was a special place for him. It was special because his friends were here.
A few minutes later, I’m driving off to an appointment in downtown Seattle. That half-eaten slice of cake is back there on the bench. As I record the draft of this essay on my smartphone, my voice shakes. I don’t feel any tears coming. They came last night, as I thought about today, and after I’d baked this disastrous cake. Today I just feel sad and kind of lonely, wanting my son with me.
Now here come the tears.
I think about Andrew’s friends, whether they are thinking about him today. I know of one who came here for several years after his death. She may still be doing it, I don’t know. We haven’t been in contact for several years, though we’re friends on Facebook. She would come to visit this bench on this day. Most of those times, she saw a piece of yellow cake with dark chocolate icing and knew it was from me.
I learned that she’d been visiting when, a couple of years ago, I arrived at the bench in late October, a few days after the anniversary of his death. Even from a distance I saw something under the bench. A bouquet. As I approached, I saw something underneath the bouquet. An envelope, sealed into a clear plastic bag. Addressed to me.
She wrote some very sweet things about how much she cared for Andrew and how he had affected her life. I called her a few days later to thank her.
Last year, I missed Andrew’s birthday. I’d taken my mother back East for a family reunion. When I got back, I took Andrew a piece of cake.
As I drive, I think about him again, and where he might be. I had a waking vision about 6 months after he died, that he’d been reborn, to a couple in Kansas. Father named Andrew, possibly suffering with cancer himself. And Andrew, in this rebirth, was given the name Daniel. I think about Daniel and sometimes wonder what it might be like to bump into him. Would I recognize him? Would I see some vestige of Andrew in him? Would he laugh? Would he call me a dork? I wonder what kind of kid he’d be like. He’d be 9 right now. A second grader? Third grader? What kind of man will he grow up to be?
And will he ever laugh at his father, and call him a dork? Would his mother ever attempt a birthday cake made with brown rice flour?
I come back to Andrew. I wonder what he would be like at 26. 10 years later. What kind of a man would he be? What kind of a life would he be leading? Where would he be living? How close would we be?
I want him very close. I want him next to me, I want him riding in the car with me. I want him going on hikes with me. I want him going to a ski hill somewhere, him on his swoopy snowboard, carving elegant turns and jumping, me on my pointy old K2 Merlin 4s, running the groomers or watching Andrew in the half-pipe.
I want to hear him laughing at me. Laughing with me might be better but I’ll take laughing at me, for being such a dork with this cake, trying to make it better with rice flour, how ridiculous. I just want to hear his laugh.
I just want to hear his laugh.
