Most people always were on holiday at my father's birthday. So in late August, we took him to a restaurant in Amsterdam, de Kas (the Greenhouse), seemingly for a small family dinner. Although he began to suspect something was up when my dear old grandmother called and asked him what she should wear, he never suspected that my mother had taken care to invite friends, colleagues and family, over 100 people in total. Some had come from overseas, some across the country. The smile slowly grew on his face as he recognised one table after another filled with friends and relatives, his eyes sparkled with mirth. Always a man of few words, he spoke his surprise characteristically soft, a gentle "Hey!"

On 30 July 2002, my father turned 61 and I had pitched my tent in Yellowstone National Park. I was on holiday, trekking through the USA with my first serious relationship. The day was as resplendent as it was in the Netherlands. At home, it had been very hot the previous days. When I called to send my congratulations my father was the most concerned about the garden, one of his great loves, and how the beds needed a lot of watering.

On 30 July 2003, my father turned 62 and the Netherlands were sweltering - in the middle of the heat wave that lay across most of Europe that year. My father knew in his heart it would be his last birthday. I didn't want to know it. I came back that evening from my geological excursion through Romania. Bald from the chemo therapy, he was sitting in his favourite chair, stripping beans, watching the television to catch the latest update from his other great love, the PC. There was family everywhere: my grandmother, my uncles, aunts, cousins, my sisters and their boyfriends. My father lived his birthday exactly as he wanted to: surrounded by his family, his love for his garden unblemished, doing the simple things he always had enjoyed and infinitely excited about them.

On 30 July 2004, my father would've turned 63. My mother, my sisters and I were together, in Limburg, the most southern province of the country, visiting Maastricht, going through the motions. Only the relationship of my oldest sister was still intact, but already deteriorating, to implode later that year. I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts - the day was sunny and warm. We visited the massive St. Servaas church.

Beslan unfolded, Belgium was rocked by a catastrophic gas explosion. People were blown up in Baghdad. It remained, for all the empathy I could muster, tragedy far removed. With the family's centre ripped out, the family had collapsed quietly toward each other. We were halfway our year of great mourning.

On 30 July 2005, my father would've turned 64. We celebrated it the only way possible: harvesting the potatoes we had planted that spring. Even while I wanted to extend the life of the vegetable garden, make it as vigorous and resplendent as it was under my father's care, this had become virtually impossible in combination with my MSc. graduation project. But at minimum we had planted potatoes in the spring, albeit a little too late. Our harvest consisted mostly of small potatoes - but it was done by the entire family and we'd have our first batch of potatoes that evening, as tradition demanded.

It would be our last harvest there. The sun was shining down from a blue sky.

On 30 July 2006, my father would've turned 65. He would've taken up his pension, perhaps half unwilling, and would've continued to work onwards as emeritus professor. He might have taken up his goal to write his sailing novel and might have begun breeding a new potatoes species, in the footsteps of his own father. Possibly, he had started to clean out his study - although I don't think it would've been likely. Throwing stuff away was never his strong suit. This is why I now own the leather jacket he wore when he was my age, which he wore when driving a motorcycle without a helmet, or a license, to his parents - and scaring the hell out of his mother. My father the rebel, an image I only learned during the final days, the month he spent in the hospital, wasting away.

I was experiencing the summer in Sweden, reminiscing on the edge of a lake gone flat and silent under a clear sky, sending my thoughts out on text messages. Snippets of song and laughter would drift my way from the campfire some hundreds meters behind me, from the third group of people I was guiding across the Vasaloppet.  

On 30 July 2007, I was driving back to Johannesburg, returning from a weekend spent in Durban. Spring was in the air. The sun in a flawlessly blue sky was warming up the country. The province of Free State is numbingly dull to the mind - it absorbs thoughts in the expanding nothingness, similarly how Iceland could. My girlfriend, still with me then, noted my brooding silence while the sun was setting. There were no more phone calls to make.

My father would've turned 66. My mother has moved to a new job, a new village, a new house; all her children have graduated and made the final step into modern adulthood: financial independence.

The horizon of futures is closing on me. It has become impossible to write what my father would've done by now. Lives have branched away into new directions. I think my parents still would've lived at their old place - the communal village under the smoke of Amsterdam where my father felt at peace, where he had forged so many lasting friendships in less than a decade. Perhaps he would've finally learned how to type on a computer for his novel, though I doubt it. Yet this I know: on his birthday, he'd have sailed the boat across the nearby lake to a quiet cove, he'd have plucked at some of the grey hairs on his chest while reading the paper in the sun and he'd eat an apple whole. We'd listen to the birds screeching in the reeds, and he'd tell me about them and how he, when he was 13 or about, would look for ducks' nests to pilfer eggs for cake. And then, because of the wind lulling with the evening coming on, we'd sail the boat back, cycle home, buy shoarma with lots of garlic sauce at the local snackbar and eat it with relish, together with a giant salad from his garden.

Perhaps that would've happened, perhaps a thousand other things. I'm just damn sure it would be sunny that day.