A Birthday Card

a hurrah

Dear mama,

Happy birthday. It’s April 15, 2024. Tax Day and your 62^nd birthday. You’d be mortified to know how we celebrated, me, mommy, and Caroline, which was by getting un-matching tattoos.

On this day last year, we stood in the sun and whacked a paper mâché piñata with the words “Fuck Cancer and Trump Too” written across it in white block letters. Your hair was short and silver. Your smile was wide. Life was happening right up against the edge of something, which somehow made lines cleaner, colors brighter, everything saturated and loud. The piñata cracked open, and candy flooded our back deck. Milky ways and Twix bars, shining in the sun.

On this day last year, each moment was the last of its kind. The last time we’d sing you happy birthday, watch you blow out your candles, see you turn a new age. Finality has a preciousness to it that will sharpen your senses if you let it. Mama, you taught me how to let it. You taught me how to take something hard and make it beautiful. How to think of the last of something as a reason to make it a hurrah. 

This year, each moment is the first of its kind. The first month without you, the first holiday, the first time attempting to set up my 401k or file my taxes or hang a painting without your help. My first time watching an amaryllis bloom without sending you a photo or hearing a raunchy joke that’s not followed by your laugh. There are all these firsts that catch me by surprise, the first time I wonder if I should remove your phone number from my favorites, the first time I wear the blue cashmere sweater that I took from your closet the week after you died.

I visited mommy in Florida a few months ago and everywhere I looked all I could see was your absence. It was like a blurry spot in my vision where you were supposed to be. On the right side of the bed, in the lounge chair beside her, pointing out orchids budding by the lake. I kept rubbing my eyes. Like if I rubbed them hard enough, maybe you’d appear. It was my first time in Florida without you, without your brightly patterned button downs, your size 11 Birkenstocks, your hand in mine as we walked the dogs.

Mama, I miss you with a kind of missing I didn’t know existed before this. A missing so big that I have to hold it at arm’s length in order to move through my days. Sometimes, it feels like I have to physically turn my head away from this missing in order to survive. This missing makes it hard to write, hard to feel, hard to be. It feels like something is caught in my throat, like lethal indigestion.

Today, on your birthday, I am sitting in the sun at my favorite cafe. I’m crying while I type, and it feels right.  Like my internal and external experiences are aligning in a way that they haven’t been recently. The indigestion eases slightly. I’m crying the kind of public tears that New Yorkers would never dare to interrupt, which is one of the things I love most about New York.

A few weeks ago, I cried so hard on the subway that I lost my breath, and no one even flinched. Big, loud, public subway tears on one of those new C trains heading up town. No one even looked my way. It made me love every stranger on that train so hard that I stopped crying and started thinking, I love you man in the red jacket reading an Emily Henry novel, I love you woman with a designer stroller that is going to be nearly impossible to carry out of this non-wheelchair accessible station, I love you teenagers loudly cramming for your first period physics quiz.

I could tell you about all of the days that I ride the subway to work and don’t cry, which is nearly all of them. There was a period of time, a few months ago now, where I was enraptured by the subway, engrossed in the kind of love affair that soaks your brain in oxytocin, sweet like cherry juice. The anonymity, the normalcy, the utter humanness of it all. I still feel that way sometimes, but it’s not as strong as it used to be. Normalcy feels sad to me right now. Normalcy exists without you. I can’t think of anything sadder than that.

Today you won’t turn sixty two and to mark how entirely un-normal that is, we get tattoos. An amaryllis for mommy, a string of lights for Caroline, a candy heart for me. Mommy lies on her back and squeezes my hands while a man she just met pokes a potted plant into her ankle with a 3R needle. She scrunches her brows and groans with pain. I lean close to her ear and tell her that she can do anything. I think about the night you died, how I slept on your side of the bed beside my mommy and placed my hands on her back. How I could feel her body heaving, the kind of heavy sobs that only happen a few times in a life. I think about the two of us sitting in the breakfast nook in our kitchen the next morning, making lists, calling the deli that would cater the shiva, the lawyers for estate planning, the funeral home, the florist.

Mommy talks to strangers all the time now. She made a friend by complimenting their greyhound on the street. She knits hats and plays pickleball and does jigsaw puzzles on the dining room table. She cooks large pots of vegetable soups, waters the house plants, cries some days but not most. In the three months that she was in Florida, I think she had friends visiting her for two and a half. What I’m saying is, she really can do anything.

I smile when I think about you watching us. Me, your needle-phobic daughter, coaxing mommy, your vehemently anti-tattoo wife, through her ankle tattoo. If I had told you a year ago that mommy was going to get a tattoo you would have laughed your big toothed laugh, sure that I was joking. But she got one. And while she nearly broke my fingers in the process, her amaryllis is dainty, and lovely, and so very her. Another first in a series of firsts we didn’t think we’d be able to do until we did.

For your birthday, we gather in Maplewood. On the back porch, the same spot where on this day last year, we whacked the Fuck Cancer and Trump Too piñata. Where candy bars glittered like gems. The same spot where we came together for three days of shiva, blistering heat and the brightest of colors, soaked in the kind of saturation that occurs when you’ve just crossed from one edge of something to the other.

This time, on the back porch, it is sunny. We cook all morning and pile food atop the dining room table, herby salads with dill, cilantro, and mint, chopped and fragrant in layered shades of green. We barbecue chicken and roast beets, salt and pepper, and sprinkle in cheese. We eat that flourless chocolate cake that you always loved so much. We watch the flowers in your garden begin to bloom.

Life isn’t happening quite as close to the edge as it was this time last year. The food is good and the flowers are pretty, but they’re ultimately just food and plants. Candy wrappers don’t sparkle from their post-pinata fall. The missing part of loss is less scarce, less precious, a series of firsts that will become seconds and then thirds, that will start sad and stay sad. There’s a part of me that misses the intensity of the edge, which I think is just another way of saying that I miss you.

But mama, all last year you showed me how to take something hard and make it beautiful. And on your sixty second birthday, we took this latest version of hard and we tried to do just that. We did what you would have done, which is bring all of our people together. I watch my friends hug mommy’s friends hug Caroline’s friends, I watch them greet each other by name, share an inside joke, laugh. Generations of women huddle in groups and radiate color. These women are magic, they somehow make all this missing precious too.

Caroline sets up drinking games in the backyard and moms and moms and daughters and daughters toss dice into the sky, sipping cold beers and Pampelmousse La Croix. We lay in piles on lounge chairs and share a slice of cake, four forks full of sugar and cream. We stay up late, legs spread across each other under the awning of the front porch and when it starts to thunder, we laugh in wonder. We hold hands and get tattoos that remind us of you. What I’m saying is, we celebrate. We do our best to give you a hurrah.

Happy birthday, mama. I love you and miss you more than ever,

Jessie