Burning the bed on the way to the pyre

My dad is dead.

If you’re already squeamish, you’re reading the wrong column. Or maybe you’re reading the right one and need to toughen up.

As the old man liked to say, “Put some hair on your chest, Nancy.”

While the glorious month of my birth seeps away and March tumbles in, we approach the anniversary of when he bit the big one.

What blows my mind is that as long as I don’t see my untimely demise in the next decade and a half, I’ll be older than he ever was.

Mr. Christopher 2.0, now with more teeth!

A man of conviction and frivolous vices, he picked up smoking and drinking at the ripe age of 8. Yeah, you read that right. 8.

What a square!

You could have lit my breath with a lighter when I still rocked Pampers and pacifiers, thanks to what was in my sippy cup. He was so proud.

From childhood, I sounded like a crotchety doctor who knows he’s getting nowhere. “You’re gonna get cancer. You’re gonna get cancer. You’re gonna get cancer.”

A tumor eventually sprouted in his chest, and I briefly considered a career in fortune telling.

To be honest, when he got it, I couldn’t even revel in the “Told ya so.” The poor guy only found out after having a stroke and slipping in oil and catching his face and hands on fire.

The oil and the stroke were separate events that singed the medium-well mummy in unforgiving succession.

He must’ve crossed too many black cats or walked under too many ladders or maybe God just didn’t like him.

He had the first tumor cut out. About a year later, it returned in force.

Not to be labeled a quitter, he never stopped smoking.

He’d lay there, defeated and deteriorating away in his bed, sucking at oxygen tubes like he’d found the bottom of a milkshake.

Even then, a smoldering cigarette perched between his fingers, little more than a column of ash.

Just like his mom, who spent several of her last months damn near lighting one with the last in a never-ending string of Marlboro Reds.

I know for a fact he caught the bed on fire more than once, too. Just a little conditional training for his eternal resting place, if you know what I mean.

He breathed his last in his sleep, sans cigarette.

I arrived a few minutes before the mortician and watched as the husk of what once taught me to be a man got carried out on a stretcher.

Contrary to popular belief, they don’t always close the eyes when they take them. That’s a moment that still sits with me.

After mistakenly having him embalmed before realizing that my 25-year-old wallet could not support a funeral, I began selling everything short of my daughter to pay for his cremation and the works.

At the funeral, yours truly delivered a killer speech that had the sad-saps’ sides splitting. He’d always asked that I come to the funeral in a grim reaper outfit. Unfortunately, my cloak and scythe were at the dry cleaners that week.

The service ended. Mourners shuffled past. I rocked impatiently on my feet, ready to be done with the whole ordeal.

“We really should see each other outside of funerals,” they’d say.

“I could never be funny if my dad died,” they’d sniffle. Takes a special type, you know?

My grandpa’s second wife stopped on her way out and leaned in real close, “Your father was so upset when we cremated your grandpa.”

I’d forgotten about that when I opted for cremation. Whoops.

“I brought this for you to mix in with his ashes.” She slipped me an orange pill bottle full of what looked like an emptied cigarette bin.

My grandfather. Not exactly pound cake or flowers, but I guess it worked.

I took my box of dad and my bottle of grandpa to my sister’s, where they sit today. I’ve never been the sentimental type, so I felt that human remains were best stored where I’m not.

Now we tell my mom that her house is haunted by his restless soul, because the air sometimes reeks of smoke, although the family is full of vape-suckers.

I’m pretty sure it’s just my 6-year-old nephew sneaking cigarettes between beers. What a square.

Dad would have been so proud.