What we gave my dad for his eightieth
He didn’t want a party, he didn’t want a fuss, and he had specifically said, out loud, in front of witnesses, that he didn’t want anything. So we gave him something that required him to talk about himself for six months, which on paper was a catastrophic misreading.
He said no to the party four separate times.
The fourth time he said it in the specific voice he uses about once a decade, and my sister and I finally stopped ringing each other to check whether he really meant it. Which he had. Repeatedly. In English.
I want to record that as its own small failure, because “are you sure you don’t want a party” is not a question, it is a form of pressure, and we applied it to a man in his seventy-ninth year on three separate occasions.
The things we rejected
A watch. He has a watch. He has worn the same watch since 1994 and it is essentially part of his arm, and buying him a better one is a suggestion that the arm is wrong.
A weekend away, which he would have gone on, and which would have been for us. A better version of a thing he owns, which is the trap we had been falling into for a decade.
An “80 memories” jar. I want to be honest about this one because I made it. Eighty slips of paper, eighty memories, hours of work, and about halfway through the writing I noticed that the memories were all mine — things I remembered about him, which is a different object entirely from things he remembers. It is in a cupboard. He read maybe six.
The thing that had actually been bothering me
About a year before, I’d asked him something at a family lunch — I can’t remember what, something about his twenties — and he answered it in a sentence and a half and then asked about the football.
And I sat there thinking: I don’t know how my parents met. Not really. I know the version, the anecdote, the two-line thing that gets said at anniversaries. I don’t know what he was doing that week or what he was worried about or what the job was.
He is not secretive. Nobody had ever asked him properly. There is no forum in an ordinary family life in which anybody asks an eighty-year-old man a follow-up question.
What we gave him
LifePages, which does memoirs — the questions come to him, he talks, and it turns into a written book. He doesn’t have to write anything, which mattered, because he is not a man who writes things.
I was fairly sure he would hate it for a fortnight and then get into it. It was about ten days.
The unlock, for him, was that the questions are small. Nobody asked him to tell us about his life — that question had already failed at the family lunch. They asked what the road was called. What it paid. Who he sat next to. And a man who has nothing to say about his life turns out to have a great deal to say about a specific Tuesday in 1971.
The story
There is a boat.
I’m not going to write it out, because it is his and it is going in his book and because I’ve read it back three times and it does not survive being summarised by me. But my father, at twenty-two, did something I would have described as completely out of character for him, and did it for a reason he has never mentioned in fifty-eight years, and my mother did not know either.
That was a complicated evening, actually. Better than complicated, in the end. But there was a phone call with my sister at about eleven at night that neither of us had expected to be having.
That’s the part nobody tells you about this kind of present. It is not only a nice book. You are asking someone to go and look at things, and some of what comes back is new to everybody, including the people who were there.
Nell’s questions
She was allowed to submit some. She was six.
Hers were: what was your dog called, did you like school, and were you ever really scared. The third one got a proper answer. Mine, in forty-one years, never had.
The bit I’d tell anyone
Do it while everybody is well.
We did this because he turned eighty, and eighty is a number, and I now think the number was a poor reason that happened to produce a good decision at roughly the right time. There is no better later. There is only a later where somebody is ill and the whole thing changes shape and becomes about something else.
The three of us split the cost, which I also managed to handle badly, but that is a separate note.
He is halfway through. He rings me about it, which he did not used to do — my dad has never been a ringer — and last week he asked whether he could add something he’d left out.
Things people email to ask
- What do you get someone for their 80th birthday?
- Something scaled to the person rather than to the number. A round birthday creates pressure to do something big, and for a lot of eighty-year-olds big is precisely the wrong direction — my dad wanted no party, no speeches and no attention. A present that unfolds privately over months suited him far better than any single afternoon would have.
- Is a memoir a good present for an elderly parent?
- It has been the best one we have given, with the caveat that it takes months rather than minutes and the recipient has to be willing. My dad was reluctant for about the first fortnight and then became the most enthusiastic person involved. It also produced two stories none of his three children had ever heard, which is not something a watch does.
- How do you get an older relative to talk about their past?
- Do not ask them to tell you about their life. It is far too large a question and ours answered it in ninety seconds and then asked about the football. Small, specific, dated questions work — what was the road called, who did you sit next to, what did that job pay — which is exactly what a structured memoir service provides, and what a good list of your own questions can do for nothing.
- What if they say they don’t want a fuss?
- Believe them about the fuss, and separate that from whether they want to be asked about. Ours meant it absolutely about the party and did not mean it at all about the attention — he wanted to be interesting to his grandchildren, he just did not want to stand up in a room. Those two things get bundled together and they are not the same refusal.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Presents for people who say they don’t want presents
My mum has said “don’t get me anything” every year since about 2011. For a decade I treated that as a politeness to be worked around, and bought her nice versions of things she already owned, and she thanked me properly every time.
Presents for people who live two hours away
We see my parents perhaps eight times a year, and for a long time our presents were an attempt to make up the difference — bigger, posted, apologetic. The thing that helped was giving something that produced phone calls instead of parcels.
The year we all put in, and how badly I handled it
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
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