Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday.  We probably all have baggage around birthdays.  At some point in my childhood, probably my tenth birthday, I made a decision.  After a day of being largely ignored, I went with my parents to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where my visiting uncle (who I barely knew) proceeded to dominate the conversation and eat all the food.  My parents, Depression-era kids, didn’t order more - the very fact of dining in a restaurant felt like an absurd enough expense.  Back home, I was gifted with a brass candle-stick.  I cried myself to sleep, my belly empty.

In the scope of bad birthdays, this is nothing.  I realize that.  But something cemented in me that day.  The idea that birthdays are important.  And that it was up to me to honor my own.  The rest of my birthdays have been a parade of self-thrown parties, self-bought gifts, announcements to near-strangers that “It’s my birthday!”

I kicked off my birthday a week ago with a celebration with one group of friends, my party girls, my playmates.  We ended up at one of the bars in town and young bartenders and bouncers (secretly prompted by my very good people) dutifully sidled up and whispered birthday greetings.  Last night I went out with a different group, which included some of my very oldest pals, people who know my very essence, who have seen me in all my incarnations, who know how far I’ve come.  

In between those two evenings, on Tuesday, my friend died.  She had been sick for a few years with a rare and aggressive form of cancer.  She died on her forty-ninth birthday, leaving behind two small kids.  She was lovely, she was fierce, she lived each day deeply, even before she was fighting for her life.

When my dad was dying, of his own awful cancer, when I was barely an adult, I realized that the death process and the birth process are similar.  Death and birth are the same doorway, from where and to where we can only imagine.  These two events are similarly mysterious, similarly mystical.  I had a feeling my friend was going to die on her birthday.  She was (it’s so hard to use the past tense) connected to those invisible threads above us.  I thought she’d find the same doorway out that she came in through.

This week, like all weeks, has been full, has been beautiful.  I have celebrated myself, I have recognized again how very fortunate I am to live in this place, in this body, with these people.  I am remembering that I better live this life fiercely, freely, deeply.  I better take every ride I can, love with a wide open heart, sit deeply in the gift of the everyday.  We are lucky, so very lucky, to be alive.