Happy Birthday

On life, my mom, and October

Today would have been my mom’s sixty-sixth birthday.

I don’t usually make a post for her birthday, only on the anniversary of her death. I’m sure it’s to the annoyance of those who follow me online and maybe even to some of my friends. I’m sure some people see it as morbid, that others are probably wondering why I’m still going on about it as if I’ll ever stop grieving my mom. But not too long ago someone I follow who also has a dead mom made a post for her mom on her birthday and remembered her then, instead of on the day that she died.

So I wanted to try doing that, or rather I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot recently and thought I might as well write about her, write something for her birthday. There’s a lot to October, or there used to be when she was here. Her birthday was always around or on Thanksgiving which meant we’d sometimes have to postpone her birthday dinner to before or after Thanksgiving depending on where her birthday landed that year, but it also meant that we had two cakes. My dad would buy her one and then she got a free one from her work, so we’d have cake for days, and later in the month was my parent’s anniversary. There used to be a lot for us to celebrate in October.

But October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It feels like a cosmic joke sometimes for my mom to have been born in October only to have breast cancer three times, to end up dying of inflammatory breast cancer in the end. She was first diagnosed when I was nine or ten and after the first time she went into remission we were a family that proudly wore pink ribbons. Sometimes I still find them around the house. My mom was very proud to be a survivor. When the second and third diagnosis came she was determined she would beat it even when it was clear there wasn’t any hope. As my dad described her when writing her obituary, my mom made optimists look like a cynics.

And I think about how it’s only motivational to call something a battle when it’s something you’ve won, not something you’ve lost. Sometimes I see TikToks of cancer patients ringing the bell to let everyone on the floor know that their battle is over, that they’ve won. I saw a TikTok once of a small child being allowed to ring the bell and their mother looking away because the kid hadn’t won but couldn’t understand that. I wonder if my mom rang the bell, if the bell even existed then because if it existed she would have wanted that, more than anything. And she would do it smiling.

I think about how I should start getting mammograms, how I am overdue for one. How I am scared.

I keep going back to her death. I don’t know how to talk about her life. I keep those thoughts, these memories of her bottled up inside my heart. They are too precious to let out and more importantly, they are mine. And I am selfish.

Sometimes I will be at work and discover that the customer I’m helping was born the same year she was. I will look at their hair, their face, their posture and try to find the parts of them that my mom might have, will try to create an image of who she would be now. I’ll tell myself that it isn’t possible she could look this way, that my mom was always mistaken for younger so maybe she would look this way instead of that. But it’s all a waste of thought anyway. I will never know what my mom will look like at sixty-six or seventy or eighty-two. She was never given the chance to grow old. I will never know how our relationship would have changed and developed. I will never know.

It still makes me angry.

I’m still going back to death, but it’s impossible not to. If we are alive and that is a certainty, then the next certainty is that we are going to die. Not if or maybe, a when, an inevitability. A certainty. Memento mori, remember you will die. But also memento vivere, remember you will live. We will live, we are living, and we will die. Both without getting ahead of ourselves, which I think I already am.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses.

This was supposed to be about life, about my mom, about her birthday, and I guess it’s all those things but also about death which isn’t what it was supposed to be. But maybe I’m only good at writing sad things, and maybe that’s a consequence of keeping all the happy things close. Then again, remembering the happy times is also sad through memory, when the person you were happy with is no longer here.

So Happy Birthday Mom. I miss you. I love you. I wish you saw fifty-seven, I wish you saw a hundred. But most of all, I just wish you were here.