Brain cancer.  Sixteen.

I come here several times a year.  Today’s occasion is what would be his 26^th birthday.  To me, it IS his 26^th 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.

Fellow writers, upon reading an early version of my book, challenged me with a question:  “You’ve written about your own experience and your experience with your children, but you’ve hardly mentioned your father.  You didn’t show up to the challenges fatherhood a blank slate.  How did he shape you?”

My initial response was “He had nothing to do with it.”  A lot of eyebrows went up.  “There’s a lot of charge in that statement,” someone said.  And I knew what that meant.  I would have to look.  I would have to look at my history with my father.

And to understand his history, I had to learn a few things about Trieste.

My father was born in Trieste in 1925. Trieste is a provincial capital in the northeast corner of Italy, on the border with Slovenia, about an hour and a half by car east of Venice.  It sits on the Adriatic Sea, just below the southern edge of a massive karst formation that rises 1,500 feet from the sea and extends north into Slovenia.

When my father was 13, in 1938, he served in a youth honor guard for Benito Mussolini when he came to Trieste to make a speech.  In that speech, he told the city with the largest Jewish population in Italy about the new racial policies he was imposing, policies similar to those in Germany that had already prompted a steady flow of Jewish refugees through Trieste’s port.  My father doesn’t remember a word, but we both wonder what thoughts ran through the minds of many of the men sharing the dais with Mussolini that day:  The mayor, who was Jewish.  Many prominent business leaders, who were Jewish.  Many business owners and professionals and government officials in the audience, who were Jewish.

Trieste was a cosmopolitan city with a long history of international commerce, multi-culturalism and religious tolerance. Long the primary port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — and before World War I, the largest port by tonnage in Europe — it had declined somewhat when the Empire collapsed and Trieste was ceded to Italy, which focused its resources on developing other ports like Genoa and Naples.

Now, with Jews banned from owning businesses — along with many other restrictions, including having their names removed from the telephone directories — Trieste’s economy suffered another blow.  Soon after Mussolini’s talk, the cost of his international adventures in Spain and Ethiopia became a drag on the economy, and Italy’s entry into World War II imposed even greater restrictions.  My father and his family were relatively well off, but a piece of fresh meat, coffee, even milk were often hard to come by during the worst times.

And then it got even worse.  Shortly after Italy surrendered in September, 1943, German troops took control of Trieste because of the strategic importance of the port, an essential lifeline for Hitler’s war effort.  When Slovenian partisans seeking to disrupt this flow set off a bomb in downtown Trieste, killing five German soliders, the Nazi’s seized and hung 50 civilians as a reprisal.  These men, women, and teenage boys and girls were strung up from the eaves of a building in downtown Trieste.  That building was on my father’s regular walk to school.

Unbeknownst to Trieste, the Nazis also established the only extermination facility in Italy in a converted rice processing plant near the port. Over the next two years, they proceeded to wipe out what was left of Trieste’s Jewish community, along with thousands of Gypsies, political prisoners, resistance fighters and other suspicious persons thrown in.

As the war drew to an end, my father, a college student exempted from military service due to an ulcer but otherwise okay, faced increasing danger of being conscripted by the Germans as they prepared to leave Trieste.  My grandfather’s relationship with a German banker in town helped my father escape, sitting on a box in the back of a truck driven by two German couriers from Trieste to Milan.  Because all the bridges across the rivers were out, a trip that today would take five hours took two days.  Lucky for my father, the weather was cloudy, so Allied war planes, which were strafing anything that moved, couldn’t operate.  Lucky for my father, the truck wasn’t stopped by Partisans, or he would have been executed as a suspected Nazi.

When the war ended, my father saw Mussolini’s body hanging from a  gas station awning  in Piazzale Loretto.  In another piazza nearby, he saw dozens of bodies, killed in battles between two political factions vying for control of the city.

When he returned to Trieste, he found it occupied by British and New Zealand soldiers, considered saviors compared to the alternative: the Yugoslavian Army and associated Partisans who had justifiable enmity for all things Italian.  The city was divided and became the southern terminus of the Iron Curtain.  The economy nearly collapsed, the city cut off from its historical trading areas.  And while the city’s status was debated at the highest levels of global politics, it took nine years to get a final settlement that left the city partitioned.

That was 1954.  My father was 29.  He escaped thanks to winning an American scholarship to business school, earning his MBA at Syracuse, soon joining Sperry Univac, one of the pioneers of the early computer industry.  While attending a training program in Philadelphia, he met my mother.

Those 29 years shaped my father in a way that would lead him to shape me in turn.  It took a while to dig all those influences out, but the process resulted in a reconciliation of sorts.  My father left us in California when I was 15 and moved back to Europe, where he lives to this day (in Switzerland now, after long stays in Vienna and Trieste).  Until I began this investigation, I hardly knew him.

I didn’t always like what I learned, but I came to understand him, forgive him and even appreciate some of his good points.

During the three years I did this research, I spent four months in Trieste.  One outcome was that two women, longtime friends of my father’s, appointed themselves my second and third mothers, respectively.  My father was an only child and had only one cousin, so it these women provided a surrogate extended family and helped me feel at home.

One footnote:  Trieste’s status as a border city  created an interesting  experience for my grandfather Umberto: He had lived his entire life in Trieste yet had been a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy, the Germany Reich, Yugoslavia (for 45 days), the Allied Protectorate of Trieste (under a military government run by Americans and Brits) and finally the Republic of Italy.

Wrong.  Their responses said they got something from the words I sent them, something they variously described as moving, powerful, emotional or spiritual.  They gave me the sense that if I could put down on paper what I’d lived, and a little bit about what I’d learned, that I could help them.

At first I was skeptical.  My first drafts of this story were attempts to create a biography of Andrew, describing him, his struggle, and the impact he had on his friends and family.  The more I shared this idea, especially with professionals in the publishing industry, the more I heard, “Okay, but how did this affect you?  Tell us how this affected you.”

What ultimately convinced me was a brief exchange with Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards.  I met her at a book signing for her memoir, Saving Graces.  She writes about her own battle with cancer and the loss of her son in a car accident.  Her son was 16.  Andrew was 16.  I told her what I was doing.  “A male perspective is so needed in this area,” she said. “We need to hear from men.”

That’s my external motivation, and it was essential to getting me through those times when writing about my experiences felt like ripping open an old wound, pounding in the salt and then attacking it with a wire brush.  But even if this memoir never gets published, it has had incredible value for me.  As tough as it sometimes has been to re-read and re-write passages about the most difficult and painful events or the most embarrassing and shameful things I did, I knew it was good for me.  Getting at the sorrow, feeling the sorrow, has been crucial to my grieving process and my spiritual growth.  While I’m neither a Boddhisatva nor a saint, I’ve learned a few things.  One lesson is this:  Unacknowledged or unfelt sorrow leads to anger.

Another unanticipated benefit of writing this memoir has been the joy of learning a craft.  I was a newspaper reporter for three years, but that was right out of college, and the ability to write a newspaper article has very little to do with writing a book.  While I can’t say I’m an expert now, I’ve done it.

I welcome your comments or stories about the links between sorrow and anger.  What you’ll see in the memoir is just my own experience and my own personal interpretations and conclusions.  It will help me to know the stories of others.

Thank you.