A Solitary Birthday
So today, I’m 67. My husband and I will go out to dinner at, ironically enough, the place we went to exactly two years ago — the day before the advent of Coronavirus Rex, or as we say in our house, “The Years of Murder Hornet Bingo and Hold My Beer.”
It certainly doesn’t look the way I thought 67 would, decades ago.
I don’t have my-mother-at-67 to go by; she died at age 59 from a heart attack, brought about by a life of drink, drugs, smoking and misery.
And since 2001, I haven’t had my Birthday Buddy, either. And I miss him terribly.
You see, Dad was my best friend, my cheerleader, the one who always understood who I was, even when it was difficult. Why? Perhaps because he and I shared the same birthday. I was his 34th birthday present, he said, and for years I thought I came in a box with ribbons…
And the story begins like this…Long ago in the mists of time, a little boy was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He would gain a younger brother, go through the Great Depression, graduate from Lehigh University in three years, graduate from Johns Hopkins Medical School at age 23 in two years and 11 months, and travel across the ocean to Vienna, Austria, with the 110th Station Hospital attached to the American Occupation Army (getting married in 1946 shortly before he left for Europe).
In 1948 a son came along, and in 1950 his family moved into a bright new home-with-an-office in Camden, New Jersey. A daughter arrived in 1955. He lived there until the late 1960s, working at Cooper Hospital and maintaining a private practice. In 1968, he moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey and the home he would live in until his death in 2001. His first wife died in 1984, and he remarried in 1985. He retired in 1989.
Those are the cold facts. The man was so much more. Complex and paradoxical, beset by a genius mentality and curiosity that forever clashed with depression and anxiety, he fought relentlessly to matter in the world — to his wives, to his children, to his patients. He found poetry in his soul in later life, and his passionate dancing with words he left to his daughter, as he left his incisive medical understanding and deep compassion to his son.
He is gone more than twenty years now, yet still remembered with fondness and respect by people whose lives he touched — retirees who were young nursing students when he was at Cooper; the newer generations at the Camden pharmacy he used, where stories are still told about Dr. Dorkin’s clear instructions and heinous handwriting.
He lives on in my brother and in me; we both pass on his trademark healing and care in different and distinctive ways. And while Jerry Dorkin was never as famous as people expected him to be when he was young, the world is far, far better for his having lived; and through us, his love and teachings have changed lives worldwide.
So that was my Dad. And up until last year, which was his centennial, he was always in the forefront of my memories. I felt like we were still sharing a birthday together.
But at what would have been 101, I finally feel him completely released from the planet. 101 doesn’t have the same ring as 100, you know?
So this is my first birthday really on my own, in a strange, metaphysical way.
I don’t have children, so once I’m gone, the birthday energy dissipates completely. No one will remember what March 8 used to mean. And perhaps I’m fine with that. Because at that point, my Birthday Buddy and I can celebrate wherever (and whenever) we choose.
I’m going to talk him into doing the same-date thing again next lifetime, though. You can bet your candles on it.
