My name is Tim Siebles.

The poem I'm going to read is called "Poem at 64." It's a poem really wrestling with mortality. It was written after my father died.

He was my first parent to die. And I'm just trying to come at  the subject as honestly as I can because so often I think it's... tempting to avoid the subject of death, particularly when it's the death of  someone with whom we feel intimate. Always surprised to be the age I am, though I guess everything since puberty, I remember— that first wet dream, leaving home for college, Shaft In Africa, scooping ice cream at Swenson’s— and I am by now, by all appearances, someone who has succeeded somehow, while a few good friends and early loves have left this life, passed away, “gone on,” like my dad would quip and shrug.

What to do about so much vanishing: the lazy grin you won’t see jump to a laugh, that voicemail you cannot answer— and finding your own jolly self in line for departure, not wanting to go but traipsing to the exit anyway— like drifting toward the door near the end of a party: chatting with her and him, hugging some, squeezing hands, and then, you’re completely outside: streetlights and shadowy trees walking you to the car. It just doesn’t matter maybe, maybe it just doesn’t matter— what we think about death— that grief is harder than anything anyone can do. My father, with his love for Count Basie and lumpy buttermilk, is now ashes.

He has gone on, joined The Chapter Invisible as his Kappa brothers would say. I remember him at 64: forking sardines from those flat cans, some nights pretending to be Redd Foxx, then trudging up the stairs like any other unfamous man. This was twenty-five years before he found himself staring down The Rifleman on TV, almost nonchalantly waiting for his diaper change.

No one ever imagines— I can’t imagine ever struggling with a fork, hoping someone will come to feed me. My mother, slow-strolling the Alzheimer’s Road, still doesn’t know she’s a widow. One time she asked about “that man who used to be here” the way you’d inquire about a friend not seen since high school or an ice cream shop closed long ago.

I’m not mad at anybody. Got nobody to blame though a bad feeling keeps pushing me around like Big Sid used to back in seventh grade. Today I’m 64: born sixty-four years ago, today.

And I might be here again next year, but right now— if I could make the time and make myself less afraid— I would cry like a baby for everyone.