Pens and Ponderings, Birth and Death: Thirty-Seven Years

THOSE Anniversaries

Anniversaries are bittersweet. No not the ones recognizing marriages, or engagements or even all the firsts; first time you met, first time you did something, or even celebrating milestones like a job or even a blog. No, I am talking about the anniversaries of those of our loved ones who are no longer here. Most people think about the day they died and the day they were born. Some, especially for significant others, remember other special dates. But Birthdays and Death are the two that stay with us when we remember our loved ones.

Birth and Death. The day they take their first breath, and the day they take their last one. In so many ways it seems like contradictory dualities. Of belongings and endings. But then it is also a reflection, of what truly is the circle of life. Birth and Death are the dates we use to honor their memory and share stories, to reminisce and to reflect, to remember and honor. Always. Because that hole in our heart might have scabbed over, it might be nothing but a deep scar, but it is forever changed, forever altered.

Thirty-Seven

Somehow it seems fitting for my sister’s birthday to usually fall around Easter, especially with her passing. Heck, we even celebrated her twenty-first birthday on Good Friday, (that irony was not lost on us even a decade plus later) and the memories of that night still live on. In many ways her birthday feels like a celebration, but also a bittersweet reminder that she stopped celebrating her birthday here on earth at twenty-five. In many ways that irony was and is purely her. A timeless ageless angel, forever young, which she would have loved, but in many ways she also was just budding into adulthood.

Her birthday is reminder of all the what could have beens. The sister I knew at twenty-five, would most certainly have been a different person at thirty-seven, because we ALL become different as we age. We grow, we mature, we shift with our passions, and desires and goals and dreams. Life is forever changing and us with it, and THAT is alright. But as is normal, we are left wondering about the what might have beens, and the where would they be’s. On what would have been her thirty-seventh birthday, the possibilities are endless, and yet they are nothing but grief stricken musings on what forever could have been in another life. Time is cruel like that, but is also further proof that the promises that comes with a birth, does forever solidified in time with their passing.

Happy thirty-seventh birthday Sugar. <3