The Birthday We Don’t Celebrate Together Anymore

Yesterday was Mom’s birthday.

Every year, it catches me a little by surprise. Not the date. I know the date. I know it’s coming. But somehow I’m still surprised by the fact that we aren’t celebrating her birthday in person anymore.

It has been 21 years since we last had cake and coffee together.

Twenty-one years.

There’s something almost impossible about that number because so much life has happened since then. There have been countless school programs and birthdays. Anniversaries. High school graduations and college graduations. We added another grandchild to the family, and then four great-grandchildren she never got to meet.

There are entire people in our family who know Mom only through us.

And maybe that’s the part I’ve been thinking about most.

Because she is still here in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve lost someone who helped build the family you’re still living inside.

Mom planted some things deep.

She planted faith. Not perfect faith. Not faith that meant nothing bad would happen to us. God knows we have disproved that theory a few times. But faith that gave us somewhere to go when life got hard. Faith that became part of the language of our family.

She planted love, too. The kind that keeps people connected.

Twenty-one years later, we still talk. We check on one another. We laugh a lot. We know what’s happening in each other’s lives, sometimes probably more than anyone requested. We show up.

And we take care of Dad.

That mattered enormously to her.

I think she would be relieved to know that he is loved and cared for. That we listen to him. That he still gives us advice and guides us through our lives, at least as much as any of us let him, which I’m sure would make her laugh because she knew exactly who she raised.

Grief is strange this far out.

It isn’t the raw grief of the beginning. Twenty-one years changes it. Life grows around the absence. New people arrive. Children become adults. Families get bigger. The calendar fills with things she should have been here for, and somehow we learn to celebrate them anyway.

But then her birthday comes around, and for just a moment, I can almost picture something very ordinary.

Cake.

Coffee.

Mom sitting there.

And I miss her.

I don’t think the fact that we kept living means we left her behind. I think maybe the opposite is true.

She planted roots deep enough to keep growing after she was gone.

And yesterday, on her birthday, I realized we are still living inside some of what she planted.

I think she would have liked that.

And I really wish we could have had one more cup of coffee.