I’ve been thinking a lot about the day I was born, trying to imagine what it was like for you.
It was brutally hot — that’s the one detail you always remembered most clearly. Deep July heat with heavy, humid air, so different from the rainy cool heaviness we’ve had most of this month.
I picture Dad driving you into the hospital that morning to get there at the scheduled time, for the c-section that it had been decided would be the safest way for me to enter the world. I imagine the two of you would have driven from Roslindale up the windy curves of the Jamaicaway toward Longwood, the route all of us have taken so very many times since.
That route makes me think of childhood trips to the dentist near Fenway, of warnings from you that I might feel carsick in the backseat, to be careful and let you know if I wasn’t feeling good. It’s the route of occasional rushed morning car trips into high school when we had missed the 39 and might be late; the route of late-night trips home from school concerts and plays, past the streetlights twinkling along the Pond.
It’s the route that Dad and I took that awful morning, too. We drove up those curves when we were following your ambulance to the hospital as early as we could, knowing your stroke had changed everything but not knowing yet how very much.
How very strange that the hospital you were in that morning, hooked up to machines in the neuro ICU after emergency surgery, is just a few blocks away from where you brought all of us into the world. These entry and exit points from life, overlaid on each other in a single square mile.
It makes these places heavy now, yes — I feel that heaviness in my body whenever I’m even remotely close to them — but also sacred. Always sacred.
So much of this city we’ve called home for so long really does feel sacred now. It’s one of the biggest gifts you’ve given me: a rooting in place so strong that these simple, everyday places carry layers of memories (precious memories, memories of you) to slip into whenever I move through them.
I walk around our city now and think that this place must surely be holding the love of you with me. You loved and gave so much of yourself to the complicated little part of the earth we call home — surely it loved you back, surely it misses you as dearly as everyone else you loved does now.
The sense of you is strong and soft and warm in the home you brought me back to a day or so after I was born, the home you raised me in and gave so very much to. I’ve spent most of my birthdays there, thank goodness, so the memories of so many sweet years are there to catch me as I free-fall into this one.
Kiddie pools and ice cream cakes in our backyard are the sweetest memories from early years. Some birthday parties with friends here and there, but mostly just simple meals with the six of us, a homemade birthday cake and a few small gifts at the kitchen table. In recent years you always picked flowers from the backyard early in the morning before I got up, setting them out on the kitchen table with my birthday card and a fresh pot of tea to welcome me lovingly into a new year. I hope I told you at some point, in feeling if not in words, how very much I loved that little tradition.
I rarely enjoy most of my birthday day that much, if I’m honest. Too much pressure to have it be something, too strange to have it be just my day when half of my family shares theirs (with respect to how complicated triplet birthdays are in their own way, of course). If it’s too hot I feel sick, if it’s rainy, it feels not enough like summer. I’m almost always impatient to get to the next age, constantly trying to catch up with my sisters (if only, one day).
Now, I know, it’ll become a marking point, maybe just as hard of a day as your birthday will always be. Another year older, another year without you. How impossible that to be lucky in life now is also to have so many years stretching out in front of me without you here. I want to live a full life, and a long one if that’s in store for me — but god, it just seems like too many years to do all of this without you. I’m not sure I can possibly keep on moving for a lifetime without you.
But time isn’t linear, right? It can’t be, it really can’t, and that truth might just save me. Time, I think, builds up as layers. How else could the beloved places that have held so much of our lives together be so thick with it, so deep and full of you that each memory, each moment of our time there feels so completely present, still.
Recently it’s felt like I’ve been cut loose from my own timeline. The years that had you in them were my real life, the life that had rules of time that I could make sense of, and the time since and in front of me is simply extra, bonus time for me to float around in. And the bonus time doesn’t follow the rules of linearity at all: it’s made me feel ancient, like these months have aged me well beyond my years, and yet the loss of you in April feels like it surely must have happened yesterday. I bounce around in my own timeline constantly, spending lots of time in the sweet years of childhood when I had so much of you, yes, but also so very much time in my future, in myself when I’m the mother I know I need to be, in the stage of life I’m more impatient to get to than ever. (There could be no greater connection, after all, than to share motherhood with you.)
I’m not sure where all of that leaves me now, honestly, other than wanting to be almost anywhere in my timeline except for here, at this strange linear point, about to celebrate my 27th birthday.
And here, anyway, of course, because this is the reality of the time I’m now moving through.
May I hold this day well, as well as I possibly can. May I forgive myself for my last birthday, which I spent with you but not fully present, in a self-focused grumpy mood about all the pandemic year had already taken away (if only I had let myself imagine what might be to come, if only I’d known more).
May I let myself sink into the beautiful pool of memories past that year, into a lifetime of birthdays held in your quiet, steady love and care.
May I hold on to my sense of what that first day must have been, may I fall into the complete love you gave me from the moment I was first in your arms. May I trust that I gave that complete love back to you in your final moments, as I held you in my arms.
May I trust that there is enough love in the infinite between to hold both of us, on both sides of this strange veil, on every day that is yet to come.