grief-cardis
and other birthday traditions
Like a lot of grief-y shit, this month is both/and….
I hold October dear for many reasons. It is really when the roots dig into rich fall soil to hunker down. The leaves do their color magic, the pumpkins start to stack up on stoops and farmstands and suddenly, it’s my birthday month. So close to Halloween, my Mom (and Scorpio sister) used to say, “almost a witch.” To know her was to know the clever sarcasm and truthy retort this was in regard to my day of birth.
The year my Mom turned 50, was the year she died. My birthdays since that fateful summer of 1993, turned less all balloons and cake and presents — and came into sharp new focus as the day she ushered me into the world.
My birth day.
It felt far less celebratory and more like a big fat, middle-finger-to-missing-her day. The year between 49 and turning 50 proved an extra-tricky one. “What if this was all you had” was playing on loop like a hit single, over and over again in my head. This was the only song I heard as I neared the last birthday she ever had here on earth. Decades later, sure I have learned to live with loss (and on what I deem borrowed time!). I have even companioned my grief, in many ways. Come along to the movies she might like, or far-flung destination she may never see. It lives with me, beside me, in me and of me - and that is just the way this long arc of motherloss has manifested and wiggled into the crevices of life.
As author Stephanie Sarazin, so generously quoted me this week in Psychology Today, I have come to think of my grief like a cardigan. I see grief as something we wear. Some days it’s itchy and uncomfortable, some days we welcome its warmth and familiarity. Some days it drapes us lightly. We seek its comfort one day and wish we could take it off the next. But we can’t. So we put it on and take it off in all of its twisted iterations and just keep it hanging around. This week I buttoned the top button and hung it over my shoulders like a G-d damned super-hero. Because, while the calendar had not turned to the first of the big O, my body knew the score. I could feel October blues stirring in my bones.
I have ignored the day some years, gathered for a yoga with friends, celebrated a house warming and laid low with family. One tradition I instituted and really dig, is that I buy myself something from her each year. Monumental or mini, it doesn’t really matter, it is just in the remembering how it used to be for me. She made a big deal of your big day. It was often some kind of an experience or outing, like a Broadway show or fancy city lunch. Her birthday is a week to the day after my own. This kind of makes November itch too. She loved Thanksgiving. Come hell or high-water (yes, even the storms of this week!) you came home and hither on T-day.
Let’s make a donation to breast cancer in her honor this month. A fresh reframe. And check your boobies, why don’t you? No time like the present. And make a mammogram appointment too. For Ellen. For your birth day and many more.