A Birthday Wish to Honor Life and Death--and Everything in Between

I had a birthday recently, the last one before one of those really big “zero year” events. “Next year’s a milestone,” my brother Ron said, teasing me, which is his prerogative as a younger brother. “A half century,” he added, rubbing it in.

For years now, I have grown more and more quiet about my birthday, hoping that people would forget and the day just slip by. It seems like a fairly effective strategy, particularly this year, when everyone is so distracted by a September we will never get over and the uncertainties and fears that trail us. We all have that same look in our eyes--a remove, a shadow, so many questions and no answers. We’re all thinking more about time, and most of us are treating it differently; we are all so much older since that Tuesday morning. But in truth, my 49th birthday didn’t slip by. I thought more about birth and life and death than ever before.

It seemed fitting that my birthday this year fell on a Sunday, an inherently quiet day. The weather cooperated, remaining soft and misty, the sky like pale wool. I like days when the sun stays hidden and the passing of hours isn’t announced by its movement across the sky. I had only one thing planned, lunch at my parents’ house. Before that, in the chill of early morning, I took a long walk on the beach. I looked more intently at everything--a flock of sea gulls lifting in unison from the sand as I approached, a pelican diving headfirst for a fish into the gray sea, surfers as graceful as ballet dancers riding waves in to the shore.

I thought about those greeting cards that declare “birthday wishes” but don’t usually say what those wishes are. I had a wish that I would never take another moment for granted. I wanted to drink in every image, memorize everything I was looking at. For myself, and also for my sister, Maureen, who spent so many months before her death in hospital beds, far away from the ocean, from sea glass and tiny shells, and pelicans swooping down. And for my father, whose eyes seem to stare into forever.

It seems somber to say I thought about death on my birthday, but it didn’t feel somber. I looked at my footprints in the sand, and I remembered seeing my father’s footprints along a California shore so long ago, when I was small and he was tan and strong, and summers seemed endless--before politics, before the governorship and the presidency. The thing about death is, it teaches us to live. I think we honor our birth by honoring the end, whenever it comes. It slows us down, makes our lungs breathe more deeply.

My mother asked me at lunch if I still had my bronzed baby shoe that she had given me many years ago. I’ve moved so many times over the years that I’ve lost countless things, and I knew as soon as she asked that the bronzed shoe had to be one of those lost items. I haven’t seen it in at least six years. I told her I’d look for it, but I know it’s gone. And then I thought how careless I had been throughout the years, treating some things as just that--things--rather than mementos, memories, pieces of a life lived.

It was my birthday, and 49 years earlier my feet were so tiny that my mother could hold both of them in the palm of one hand. I think I was about 3 when she had my baby shoe bronzed, sealed in shiny metal to preserve a year, a moment, that would never come again. I added to my birthday wish list a promise to be less careless with my memories, my slivers of shared histories.

I looked for a long time into my father’s eyes, and thought how long the years can seem, but how short life really is. I didn’t used to think like this on birthdays, but I’m glad that I’ve come to this. At the close of my 40s, I have a gratitude for life that I didn’t have before. I have a reverence for the fact that I was born, put on this earth to grow, and learn, to stretch my heart and leave some footprints, to pause and memorize the moments as they fly by.

I suppose next year I should do something a bit more festive. It will be, after all, a big “zero-year” milestone. But I want to remember my birthday wishes this year; I want them to trail me through time, for however long time lasts.

When I went home, I lit a candle at the end of the day--not on a cake. Just a candle, which flickered in the breeze coming through the window as sunset colored the sky outside. I lit it for the child I used to be and the woman I’ve grown into. I lit it for my parents, who held a tiny baby in their arms 49 years ago, and for all the memories that have held us together even when the rumblings of life have pulled us apart. I lit it for my sister, who held on so tightly to life but on a summer morning left with death. I lit it for the promises I made on this birthday before my 50th, to be less careless, more attentive, to appreciate every moment and to never lose another bronzed baby shoe.

You might think I’m making this up, but I’m not: A gust of wind came through the window and blew out the tiny flame. And in that moment, I recalled my father’s face, the way he used to wink. And I heard him say, “OK.” And I knew that, somehow, it would be.