Blame it on Steve Day
A holiday for indulgence and introspection
Here’s an embarrassing fact about me: I can never remember the date my dad died.
I know you’re thinking, “how is that even possible?” But I promise this will make sense when you know the context of what was happening in my life back then.
It was early May 2018, and I was studying in Germany when I got the news that dad was in the hospital. He was admitted for a heart aneurysm and needed emergency surgery. My dad was in Las Vegas — Pacific Time — and the rest of my family was in Detroit, in Eastern Time.
I was visiting Hamburg that weekend with my classmates and was eight hours ahead of my family in Michigan. So it was well into the evening when mom called me to tell me what was happening. At that point, dad had just gone into surgery, and my mom and sisters were catching the first flight to Vegas to be with him.
What followed on my end was a surprisingly peaceful night sleep and then a full day of anticipation and increasingly doomed text message updates from my family as they waited for my dad to come out of surgery. Finally, almost 24 hours later, I learned that he passed away during the operation.
I remember it was evening again when I got the news, because I’d gotten back from the Hamburg trip and spent almost the entire afternoon pacing around the neighborhood near my dorm. The sun had just been setting over the trees when I went back inside. It was nighttime again in my world, and the edge of afternoon in my family’s.
The time zone difference made the news of my dad’s death feel even more unbelievable that it already was. Being so far away thrust me into a liminal zone of grief and confusion where time didn’t seem to exist. If I looked around me, nothing had happened at all. But I could feel, deeply, how much things were changing for my family on the other side of the world.
I wasn’t looking at the calendar on the day he died. The only thing that mattered was surviving my first night alone in a grief spiral and then getting home as soon as possible. My family helped me book the quickest flight home, and before I knew it, I was leaping through time zones until I landed in Michigan to the scene of the chaos.
And then the next few days were a blur of seeing relatives, going to the funeral, sorting through his things … you know, the typical stuff that happens when someone dies.
After it all, I decided I wanted to go back to Germany to finish up my semester, since I felt there was no reason to sit around at home and wallow in grief. My mom bought me a ticket back, knowing I would be home again in just about a month.
So I waved goodbye to her at the airport, got on the plane for the eight-hour, red-eye flight to Frankfurt, and prepared to go through the process of pushing through my jet lag for the third time that year.
It was through all this that the days seemed to flip by like a desk calendar in a movie montage. I know everything happened in May 2018, but when I look back, it’s hard to solidly recollect the timeline of events. I blame the time differences, mostly. But I also know grief just makes it hard to remember the finer details.
So every year, when May rolls around, I know my dad’s death anniversary is coming soon. It’s usually the first week of the month, but sometimes the second. And usually, my sisters and my mom will be the first ones to text or call about it (rather than myself, because I never remember which day he passed).
This year, I was feeling more confident than most years that I’d remember the date. It’s May 4th, I told myself, because it happened around a minor holiday, and May 4th is Star Wars day. But May 4th came and went, and no one in my family texted me.
Then, it was May 5th — Cinco de Mayo. Oh yeah, it definitely happened on Cinco de Mayo, I told myself. Forget Star Wars day. Cinco de Mayo was the minor holiday I was actually thinking of.
But the same thing happened on May 5th, and I didn’t hear a peep from my family. Then I got that sinking feeling that maybe it was May 6th, and I was remembering it wrong again. Was it the day after Cinco de Mayo?
When I woke up that day, I felt a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. I had a sneaky feeling I was right this time, but I didn’t want to be too sure. My suspicion was confirmed that night, when I got a text from my youngest sister: “How was everyone’s Blame it on Steve day?”
Blame it on Steve day is the nickname we give to our dad’s (Steve’s) death anniversary. I don’t remember exactly how we came up with it, but the spirit of this holiday has a lot to do with how we coped with things in the earlier years.
When you’re young and have no blueprint for dealing with loss, sometimes you do dumb stuff. Sometimes it’s not anything that dumb, but rather impulsive, indulgent, excessive, or unnecessary.
For example, I got four ear piercings at once on the first anniversary of dad’s death. Did I really need to get four piercings at once? No, but it was a rough day, so I blamed it on Steve.
The name also riffs off the fact that our dad had a knack for indulging in the finer things when he was still around.
He often treated himself to nice dinners at fancy restaurants during special occasions and when he was travelling for work. And we saw him buy maaaany expensive gadgets just for fun. So when my sisters and I buy ourselves something silly on Blame it on Steve day, we just consider it a necessary indulgence, because he probably would do the same.
Anyway, how was this year’s Blame it on Steve day, you ask? The only thing I bought on May 6th was an ice cream cone, and that was before I even realized it was what day it was. (Oh yeah, and we renewed our car insurance. Super exciting.)
But this year, I kept coming back to this thought: wow, I can’t believe it’s already been six years. It feels like another lifetime when I learned he was dying. The black hole of grief makes it difficult for me to conjure up memories of the funeral, the burial, the despair.
When I think back to that time, it feels like I’m watching a stop-motion film of someone’s seemingly endless nightmare. None of it feels real, and none of it feels like it happened to me, even though I know it did.
At the same time, it feels like yesterday when I last spoke to my dad. I don’t know if it’s because we were on different continents when he died, but my brain never fully registered that he was gone, even though I literally saw his body at the funeral.
If I let the past drift out of focus, I can still convince myself that he’s just out of town, on a business trip somewhere. That he’ll come back one day and everything will be normal again. Call me delusional, spiritual, whatever — it just never completely feels like someone you love is really, truly, ever gone.
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