Val was almost exactly a year older than me. 22 days separate our birthdays: March 8 (mine) and March 30 (Val’s). Every year when my birthday would swing around again, I would get this companionable, kid-like goofy happy feeling from being the same age as Val for most of March. I caught up! It was like a game of tag, or maybe a relay race: I’d catch up, she’d pass me the baton of the new age, and then March 30 she’d skip off ahead again.
It felt good celebrating Val’s birthday this year with song in the morning (performing with one of my beloved choirs) and with friends and crow cake in the evening. I missed her poignantly all day, but it was a day of fellowship in missing and remembering Val.
It turned out that the hard day wasn’t Val’s birthday — it was mine. I turned 44 this year, the age Val was when she died last year. She got to be 44 for fifty days. Looks like I’m on track to beat that record.
And most of the time I am gingerly at peace with the randomness of our life spans, and the glorious blaze Val made with hers; but all I could think around my birthday was: It is so unfair. SO UNFAIR. The whole symbolic week buzzed like a bad fluorescent light with the disquieting sensation of catching Val up, for good.
I kept wanting to say: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Val, that I get to go ahead and you don’t. You were so good at life. You should be here too. We need you here. It would be so much better with you here.
And I kept wanting to make promises: that I will live this life as well as I can, I won’t waste it with unkindness to myself or others. I will keep trying to be present and vivid, and I will forgive myself when I fail, and I will play with the dog every day and sometimes throw peas for her. And I will try to see others, and let myself be seen, scary though that can be.
These are some of the ways I carry Val forward. And I do carry her forward. I’m not sure what that does to her age. Her father’s broken heart is soothed with the idea that Val is “forever young.” I am a little bit haunted by it. I want her to keep getting old alongside me. I think maybe in some ways she will. The part of her that I carry has to go at my speed now, though. That feels different.
It’s not the age per se that gets me — although this year I guess it sure did get me. March was such an intensely hard time last year, and birthdays are so hardwired into American culture that our birthday month coming around again tripped my circuits about what age signifies: persisting, living, changing. Does Val get to keep changing? I don’t know. I believe my relationship with her will continue to evolve. I imagine that’s true for others. I want her to get to keep changing. She was always so damn interesting.
