Dearest Rachel –
Happy birthday, honey. I hope you didn’t think I’d forget about you today. I know that you never really liked it when your birthday fell on a Sunday, because it got subsumed into the more general celebrations of Mothers’ Day. And while you didn’t begrudge your mother (or mine, in the years following) ‘her’ day, and were always appreciative of being featured once you were a mother yourself, it always felt like ‘your’ day was being co-opted by something larger than yourself, and therefore got shorter shrift than you might have thought it deserved.
For what it’s worth, at least it’s a moving holiday; imagine what it would be like to be born on a standard holiday, like Halloween (okay, you’d get plenty of candy and all that, but so does everyone else; it’s not like you’re special or anything) or Christmas (compared to everyone else, you often wind up with barely more than half the gifts that anyone else you know throughout the year). Not that it’s something I ever really experienced; my birthday has only fallen on Easter once in my lifetime that I can remember – although now that I’m checking it, it appears to have happened three times in my life, and won’t happen again until I’m long dead – so that doesn’t count for much.
Still, every five years or so, you were stuck playing second fiddle to the larger holiday, and I could tell it rankled you a bit sometimes. I think the only time you really enjoyed the combination was the year that there was a third activity drowning both events out – Anime Central 2000, when it was all but in our back yard at the old Sheraton Hotel, and all the fanfic writers (and there were a lot of them back then) gathered on Sunday at the Chinese buffet place we’d made a habit of going to back in those days after church. But at least you were participating in something you enjoyed (both in terms of the convention and the restaurant itself), and so the fact that your thirtieth was lost in the noise and the shuffle didn’t seem to matter as much to you as all that.
These days, your birthday is overlooked for a completely different reason; the fact that you’re no longer here with us. There’s no point in getting you a gift, or even a card, since you’ll never read or enjoy it. Likewise with any experience, like a restaurant outing; you can’t go with us, and bringing your urn would be both pointless and tasteless – literally, since your ashes wouldn’t be able to appreciate the food, and metaphorically, as other patrons would probably be less than pleased to see something like that in the first place.
There is some small consolation in the fact that I’m sure that every day you’re experiencing up there (assuming you can even distinguish one day from the next, given what I understand about there being no night time up there) is likely to be so much better than even the best days on earth. It’s why, even if I were able to, I wouldn’t have the heart to try to bring you down here to stay by my side until I was allowed to rejoin you, much as I might love to do exactly that with such power. It wouldn’t be right to take that away from you; the best gift you ever received, and it wasn’t even on your birthday.
All I can do is to acknowledge the day, and the rest of us left behind remember that this was your day, once upon a time, and hope that it can be sufficient for the moment. One day, we will be back together, and it will be better than all the birthdays and Christmases we had and missed rolled into one wonderful ongoing moment.
But for now, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 