your birthday

Instead of happy birthday, everyone is saying rest in peace. Everyone who should be texting you in celebration is texting me with sympathy. I prefer the “thinking of you!”s over the “how are you?”s. One of those asks a question that is impossible for me to answer.

For your birthday last year, I was a couple months pregnant, couch-bound with nausea. I couldn’t make you a cake or cook you dinner. Axl and I made you a card. When you got home from work, we did the round of birthday calls, all of whom asked you what special dinner or treat was planned for you. When we were finished, I burst into tears and you held me while I told you I felt like shit for not being able to do anything special for your birthday. You chuckled at me like you always did when I had a tearful outburst like that, amused and perplexed about the things I would manage to hold guilt about. You kissed me and told me, for the 97th time that day, “I really don’t care. I don’t need anything special. You work hard and you have a baby in you!” But I didn’t know it would be my last chance to celebrate you.

I tried to make you a lego cake I saw on Pinterest once. Amber came over to help me, and we drank too much white wine in your tiny little studio apartment on South Huntington that we could barely finish it. I tore up the cake while frosting it, I couldn’t get the frosting to stick to the marshmallows, which were supposed to be the top little lego nubs. It looked nothing like two lego blocks, but you loved it anyway. Another year, I made a giant Little Debbie Zebra cake. It took me hours and looked just like the real thing, but it was so sweet it was inedible. You loved it and choked it down anyway.

When Axl gets home from school, we’ll make a pitcher of Kool-Aid. I got measuring cups finally, so I don’t have to eyeball the sugar anymore. I’ve been terrible at it. When I told Axl last night that it would be your birthday today, he asked what we would do to celebrate. We each weren’t sure, so we decided to think about it. If the baby will cooperate and the temperature doesn’t drop, I’m hoping we can get outside despite the ice and feed the goats. You always loved that when you were here. Axl is good at it and really brave. I’ve been saving our fruit and veggie scraps for them and I have a nice bag of goodies for them in the fridge. In our Old Life, I’d be saving them so you could put them in our compost bin, preparing rich soil for your spring garden. You’d have ordered all your seeds by now. I’m hoping we can find a way to garden this spring and summer; it’s what you loved the most. For now, we just feed the goats. 

Anytime we are outside, it feels like you’re with us, so none of us seem to mind the cold. You never minded the cold; loved it, in fact. Axl is the very same way. He begs each morning to go out on the porch and check out the weather, running out in his socks and pajamas, sometimes into ice and snow, coming back in to proclaim that it’s “not bad!” despite the thermometer showing a frigid 10 degrees. He never wants to come inside once he’s out in the snow, never once whines about being too wet or sweaty or cold. He explores his surroundings like I can only guess you did as a child, finding a stick and imagining it as a fishing pole or a light saber or a magic wand, poking it into mud or snow or flicking rocks with it, happily entertained. He “built a museum” when we first got here, which consisted of collections of ice shards that had fallen from the roof, stuck into the snow in neat little lines of a snowbank. I hope you can see him when he’s playing outside; he’d make you so proud. So I’ll try and make sure we get out there today just to feel like we’re visiting you. We’ll see what else Axl has come up with, too.

It’s 11:11, and I’m going to pretend my noticing is a sign. I was seeing 11:11 all over, constantly, back in 2020 when I was doing intense emotional work to heal myself. I felt I was being told that I was on the right track, that this work and this pain was what I was supposed to be doing, this was the path I was meant to be on. I hadn’t really seen many 11:11s since. But now, since we’ve been here, I’m again noticing them constantly. So to see it now, while writing about you (to you) on your birthday, I can see it as a stupid coincidence – just a time I happened to glance at a clock – or I can see it as a sign that I need to keep going. A sign you’re okay.

And wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great birthday.