The years pile up

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What if we didn’t celebrate her birthday this year?

This is the treacherous, traitorous thought that runs through my head this early January, as the rain falls ceaselessly and the gleam and glitter of Christmas fade into the background. The last two years, especially, her birthday has been dismal. We’ve had cake but each year the mood was wrong –  sour, tense, and everyone ended up in separate rooms, the cake abandoned on the counter, uneaten, before I even got the candles on it. The first year I was enraged and devastated and vowed to never again set myself up for that disappointment. Last year, I was softer, realizing belatedly – and feeling stupid for the belatedness – that I’m not the only one with big, complicated emotions around this day and this sudden familial antagonism was a symptom, not a plot against me.

This year, I’m not sure I want to face it again. And not sure how much it matters. She would be twelve. I have to do the math to make sure, because the last few years have seemed to run together, the years piling up quicker than I can keep track. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. A big girl. An almost teenager. She would go with her sister to Sephora, they might wear each other’s clothes. She’d play on the junior volleyball team and I’d drive all over town between their games. Or maybe she’d be more like her little brother, in jammies at home with a book. I think about the two bedrooms at the end of the hall, his and hers, tiny spaces in this ridiculously expensive city, and wonder where she’d fit in. Even the floorplan conspires against imagining her here.

I’m not sure I can face another disappointing birthday. And sometimes, to be really honest, I’m not sure what it accomplishes to celebrate it. Her siblings are ten and fifteen. Her sister was three when she died, her brother not yet born, and for years we talked about her and remembered things together and imagined what it would be like if she were here, but now we don’t. And that’s ok. I think. I mention her sometimes, mostly wistfully, I suppose: ‘what would Anja be like this year?’ ‘What would she have wanted for Christmas?’ ‘Who would she be like?’ That’s where conversations generally start and stop. And that’s ok. I think.

What if we didn’t celebrate this year? What if I just mark this time quietly in my own way? I feel compelled, as the days rush on toward hers, to notice beautiful things, to make parts of our life more beautiful, to be together, enjoying each other. Maybe this is enough. Maybe this is all there is now. To burn quietly at my centre and to move quietly through the days, seeking beauty, love, joy, catching it where I can, holding it briefly, letting it go.

There’s a lot of pressure on the babylost to find the “right” way to celebrate birthdays and other anniversaries. Sometimes it’s all a bit much. Are there any non-celebrators out there?