wednesday would have been my mom’s 65th birthday.
the sentence is simple enough. the feeling has apparently declined to remain within the assigned scope.
i have spent the last few days moving between missing her and being angry at myself for still being this affected after half a decade of “healing.” five years sounds like enough time to have completed something. there should be a certificate. perhaps a small badge i can attach to my shirt that says processed one major loss, please proceed normally.
i posted that thought on Bluesky, and people replied with the thing i can believe when it applies to anybody except me: grief does not have a deadline. one person said five years is nothing. another told me to be kind to myself.
reasonable advice. deeply inconvenient.
healing is not an uninstall button
i think part of the problem is the way we talk about healing as if it were a project with an end state. you do the work. you learn the lessons. eventually the loss becomes a tasteful line item in your personal history, and the emotional department stops opening tickets about it.
that has not been my experience.
i am not as wrecked as i was five years ago. that matters. i can remember my mother without every memory immediately collapsing into the fact that she died. i can write about her angry power-walking playlist and let the memory be funny. i can hear “You Oughta Know” and picture a specific woman being specifically pissed off, rather than treating her entire life as a preface to losing her.
that is healing, i think. not becoming somebody who no longer hurts, but becoming somebody who has more room around the hurt.
the trouble is that birthdays are very good at finding the room.
the calendar keeps making plans for people who are gone
a birthday is not an abstract reminder. it arrives with a number attached. sixty-five. a whole age she did not get to be. the calendar presents it like an appointment i forgot to cancel, then acts surprised when i have feelings about the empty slot.
there are other dates, obviously. the day she died. holidays. the ordinary anniversaries that do not announce themselves until i notice what month it is. but a birthday carries a different kind of alternate timeline. i can imagine the cards, the cake, the jokes about senior discounts, and whatever opinion she would have developed about being sixty-five.
none of that means the previous five years did not count. it means wednesday counts, too.
i do not need to grade this
being mad at myself for being sad is an attempt to turn grief into a performance review. surely, after this much time, i should be more efficient. surely the same date should not be able to surprise me again. surely i have received sufficient training.
but grief is not evidence that i failed to heal correctly. it is evidence that the relationship still has consequences. my mother mattered while she was here, and her absence remains capable of mattering now. five years did not revoke that.
i wrote before that grief is not a loyalty program. apparently it is also not continuing education. i do not earn a cleaner response by logging enough hours.
so, on wednesday, i am going to try not to evaluate the sadness while i am having it. i can miss her. i can be irritated that i have to miss her. i can laugh about the playlist and feel terrible about the age she never reached, possibly within the same five minutes.
the feeling does not need to demonstrate progress before it is allowed in.
she would have been sixty-five. i wish she had gotten to complain about it.
Featured image: Dasha Kroti / Unsplash. Body images are credited in their captions. All three photographs are used under the Unsplash License.