June 21st

June 21: My birthday and, this year, Father’s Day. It should be a happy time. In a way, it is. I have my dad and my puppies living with me. Both my brothers texted me “Happy Birthday” this morning, and I sent one of them back a “Happy Father’s Day” (only one of them is a father). My dad got me a birthday card with a Kohl’s gift certificate (I’m in desperate need of some new clothes), and tonight, we might have some pizza and chocolate cake to finish off the day. It’s not a big bash like we would have when we would go down to Disneyland or even when we would just go to the movies, but in its own simple way, it’s nice. It’s us. As long as I have someone to be with on my birthday, I’m content…for the most part.

The problem is, I don’t have the person I want to be with the most this year. It’s something that I’m still getting used to, even almost a year after losing her, and this is my first birthday without her. As most of you on here probably already know, I’m talking about my mom.

For those of you who don’t know, I lost my mom last July to nonalcoholic cirrhosis. It happened very suddenly, and I am still having a hard time getting past it. She was my best friend—honestly, she was my whole world—and I struggle to handle even the day-to-day activities without her. My dad is having an even harder time without her, and this is his first Father’s Day without her. We’re working through it together.

This time last year, we were having Popeye’s chicken with her in their bedroom. She struggled to eat any of it, but bless her heart, she tried. She tried even harder to eat some of the chocolate cake that we had gotten from Walmart for my birthday (the same kind of cake that I got this year—I was feeling nostalgic). The whole time that she was sick up to that point—a couple of months—she kept worrying about missing my birthday.

“I missed your birthday, I missed your birthday,” she kept saying, even though she had not.

It broke my heart. It still brings tears to my eyes to write about it now.

This poor woman was in incredible pain, pain that I could not even imagine, and all she was worried about was missing my birthday. That’s how much love she had in her, how much love she had for me. She wasn’t thinking about herself or her condition. She was thinking about how it was affecting me and what she could still do for me.

She died a little over two weeks later, on July 6th. Sometimes I wonder if she only held out as long as she did because she was making certain that she had made it to my birthday. I don’t know; it’s hard to tell with how the toxins muddled up her brain by that point.

My mom had always made my birthdays special. She always went out of her way to buy me whatever she thought that I would want (gifts were her love language), she would take me to Disneyland or arrange great parties for me, and she would just make me feel like the most special person in the world. It’s what she tried to do for everyone she cared about, whether they wanted her to or not (just ask my dad, who hates getting gifts and all that). She made my birthday worthwhile.

Now, I don’t know if I’m ever going to look forward to my birthday as I once did. It feels a bit empty, like the Earth just went around the sun once more and that is all. It might just be a temporary state of mind. Hopefully, it won’t feel this empty forever. Hopefully, as long as I have someone to spend it with, I will actually have a good birthday, as I said in the beginning. But grief has a funny way of changing things.