Dairy Queen or Bust

How do you celebrate the death of someone?  

My dad died about 5 years ago, and my kids were still pretty young.  When we talked about him, for them it was just revisiting the same selection of a few core memories, and early on in dealing with the process of grieving him, I became concerned of a date in the not too distant future where the only one who really remembered him would be me, and efforts to bring him up would be met with rolled eyes and the frustration of childhood (to be honest, the same way I remembered acting when asked to remember my OWN grandfather, who died when I was quite young. 

At this point, I thought that a great idea would be to create an occasion that would mean we’d be able to do something joyous each year to celebrate his birthday… thus we decided that every March 14th, we would make a special trip to Dairy Queen. 

This was arguably one of my fathers favourite places.  When I was a kid, we would meet for lunch at Dairy Queen. I would walk up from school, and he would come from the mechanics shop where he worked, and we’d spend the hour together enjoying a flame grilled burger and finishing with a hot fudge sundae (him) and a strawberry sundae (me). 

Then I’d go back to school and regale my friends who’d had only their packed lunch in the Scooby Doo lunch pail (Oh, what’s that Todd? Bologna and Ketchup on Wonderbread? Sounds delicious. Me?  Well, I had a Dairy Queen.  Yes!  I DO live a life of privilege!  Pardon me?  Ah, ok, I’ll shut up now.) 

Years later, when he’d come visit me and my wife and children in Vancouver, he would often pull me aside and question, in hushed tones, whether it would be possible to pop to Dairy Queen for a ‘quick snack’ before dinner, because my wife (who is a fantastic cook, but tragically for him, is pescitarian and as such, didn’t subscribe to his world view of ‘if you ain't eating meat, then you ain't really eatin’ ) and so despite making a world class dinner, he’d need a burger to ‘top up’ before he sat down at the table to do his best with what was presented. 

And so, Dairy Queen is a place that became synonymous with my Dad, which made it the perfect place to lock in with my kids.  Now, I get reminders from my kids weekly, months in advance of his birthday.  ‘Is it time to go to Dairy Queen yet?  I want a Blizzard!  When was Papa born again?’ It gives me the perfect occasion to talk about my dad again with a minimum of rolled eyes, and I think that’s pretty much what most of us want.