You would have been 60 today. I’m sure you would have smacked me upside the head for having said that out loud where someone may have overheard me. I have no idea how this is your 7th birthday away from me. The amount of times I have counted on my fingers today to make sure that number was right was a little embarrassing. Or the fact that I still count on my fingers at all. But 7 seemed wrong. Well, any number seems wrong. Everything seems wrong without you. You left me with the best I can aim for is everything feels right-ish. Because on my best days I still find myself looking around for you to share it with. I may have trained myself to not reach for my phone to call you. Or to send you a picture. But sharing my life with you is so engrained in every cell of my existence and I know I won’t out train that.
I thought I had been preparing to lose you before I was ready for a long time. I didn’t know to prepare to lose pieces of myself too. The pieces that only you could bring out. The parts of me that I can’t share with anyone else. The ugly, broken pieces I hate. Because you were one of the only people in this universe that would take those pieces and somehow give it back to me as a sparkling mosaic artwork; and make me believe that was who I really was when I couldn’t see the good in myself. I know some of those pieces were broken by you, but I know it was never on purpose. We stumbled and fell down together most of the time. But we’d be the one to pick each other up. But now I feel like I stumble and fall down and pick myself up only to look for a mirror that isn’t there when I pick up my pieces.
I’m realizing I have lost a lot of memories. I get this overwhelming fear that I don’t actually know who I am and how I got here. On my worst days I don’t believe any of the good things about myself that you would say as if there were proven natural laws: “Gravity exists. We rotate around the sun. My daughter is the best person I have ever known, and she is so special, and she’ll do whatever she puts her mind to.” I don’t see a future where I am ever done being angry at the universe for taking you away from me when it did. It felt like my entire life had been leading up to a point where it felt like I got my shit together. I now know I will never actually have my shit together, but at least to the point where I was able to take care of you the way I wished I could when I was a kid. Only to feel like that was some fever dream, bootcamp hell to prepare me to take care of dad until we lost him too.
My life has become a segmented timeline marked by death. My brain tries to place when things happened if it was before you died or after you died. Before dad. After dad. Before Gram. After Gram. I still think we were right in thinking the funeral home should have given us a goddamn punch card. Buy 9, 10th one free. I still couldn’t tell you which way sucked more. Losing you so suddenly or having time to try to say goodbye. I think you had to go when I wasn’t there, or you never would have let go. Because how do you say goodbye to your best friend? I’ll let you know if I ever figure that out. Something tells me that answer doesn’t exist. But I’m usually wrong so who knows.
I guess if the last time we celebrated your sweet sixteen, this could have been your 21st. I would’ve made us white Russians and we could have watched all the movies we loved. I would have begrudgingly brought over the karaoke machine. I picture us sitting on the couch laughing, and for a moment I can pretend that I’m not sitting at my desk crying. I probably would have gotten you a tiara and a dumb sash. Maybe a shot glass with the words ‘best dog grandma’ on it. We could pretend we had all the time in the world together. Because hey, you’re only 21 right? And what’s 21 without thinking you’re invincible, and the worst thing that can happen today is your mom singing the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang theme song followed by Ants Marching complete with an air violin solo because you both know how terrible her voice is and you look down and your drink is empty.