Prebirthday Blues?/Happy Birthday to Me

I don't really know why, but for some reason this year, my birthday has been an unexpected grief trigger. Definitely a first for me, for these last four years.

Most years (or clarification: most years since Charley died) I'm indifferent about my birthday. It's fine, it's no big deal...just another day. Some years I made special plans--like last year when I had a fabulous girls' night out with almost a dozen of my different friends, the best birthday I'd had in probably 10 years or more--but generally it's just that I have lunch with a friend or two, maybe get a massage (and a facial if I'm feeling extra splurgy for myself). I'll have a small "party" with my family--usually my parents and one or two of my sisters and their assorted kidlets--somewhere in there, but overall, my birthday isn't really anything big. Nothing amazingly, excitingly fantastic...but more importantly, nothing that sets off a bad grief spell either.

But I found myself in a weird funk this week. I couldn't even put my finger on what it was, exactly, but several times this week when I was driving in the evening--always when I was alone--a wave of something washed over me. As I drove on the wide circular interchange to get from one freeway to the next on Wednesday night, on my way home after support group (and a wonderful dinner with a few of us afterward), the first wave swelled over me. I didn't really want to go do anything after dinner--didn't feel like shopping, or a movie, or anything really--so I figured I might as well go home, but then it suddenly hit me that I'd be returning, same as always, to an empty house. And I really really wanted someone to be there to talk to, to share about the day, my wonderful dinner...all the normal "reporting out" stuff, just chitchat, at the end of the day. These moments don't really hit all that often--sure, the underlying wish is always there, but I'm not usually consciously aware of it--so it hurt my heart a bit to realize it was still there, same as always. But I cranked up the music in my car, and I guess it helped for a bit; I can't remember.

But then as I stopped and waited at a stoplight a few blocks from my house a few minutes later, another wave washed over me, this time as I gazed blankly at the arms to the railroad crossing next to me. I hadn't been thinking about Charley, but I suddenly almost choked on an unexpected sob--again out of nowhere. An overwhelming press of missing flooded me. As the light turned green and I drove on, I finished the thought, felt inside myself how much I missed him at that moment, missed that he wasn't here. But something felt off a little--and then I realized that I couldn't form the second half of the image, that I couldn't really remember feeling him in the missing. It was just that I felt the sensation of missing, of yearning, of loss...but it was the feeling I was aware of, not Charley.

It was an odd, uncomfortable moment, like when your memories of something have been replaced by the memory of a photograph, rather than the actual experience captured in the image.

I didn't like the feeling much, or the idea that maybe I've gotten so used to the grief itself and feelings of loss that my reactions are less about Charley personally and the absence of him and more just a feeling feeding off itself.

I can't really explain it.

But then I got home a block or two later, and after the first unsettled minute or two about coming home to an empty house, I distracted myself. Watched several recorded episodes on my Tivo from CSI, NCIS, So You Think You Can Dance. And largely the brainless distraction worked. The funk passed.

But then I had another one last night. I'd been invited to attend a private screening of a new widower movie, The Boys Are Back with Clive Owen (I guess writing about a dead husband for the entire WWW to read has its bonuses: a free pass to a movie screening...a post on the flick to come soon). I invited one of my widowed friends to come with me, and after I dropped her back at her car and made my own way home, another wave hit me again. Almost at the same intersection as the previous night too. There aren't really fully formed thoughts, or emotions behind the wave--just a single image or word, one that hits me and I'm unable to move past it or breathe for a moment.

Last night it was sadness. Not precisely that I was sad or feeling sad; like the night before, it wasn't that I was missing Charley. I was just Sadness. Missing.

And last night, as soon as the word for what I was feeling popped in front of me like a preschooler's flashcard, I connected it to the why: my birthday.

Today is my 32nd birthday.

Why 32 has bothered me or why my birthday is a trigger this year, I really don't know. I was first aware of the dissonance about my upcoming birthday a month ago, right before Anna's birthday. We'd just gotten home from vacation on Monday (Aug. 31) and Anna's birthday was coming a few days later, on Friday. I was scheduled to go into work on that Wednesday, and I realized during the day I was in a foul, foul mood...which isn't unusual for me the week preceding Anna's birthday. Fortunately for me we had support group later that same afternoon, but I was surprised to find myself in tears throughout much of it. I chalked part of it up to Anna's birthday; that we'd just returned from a long family vacation, a vacation that could never be a full family vacation for me, no matter how nice of a time we actually had, when my chosen family--Charley--was dead and gone; that I was crying was simply because I'd finally hit a supposed end mark of a long, difficult summer. But I was shocked to hear the words coming out of my mouth as I cried at support group, to realize that it wasn't really vacation or Anna's birthday setting me off. What I realized suddenly, as I talked without filters and cried, was that if it was Anna's birthday already, then it meant that my birthday was only a month away. And I thought of my wonderful birthday party last year, and somehow it made my physically ill to realize that it was already a year ago, that a year could have passed by that quickly. It's been a long, tough, exhausting year since last October--my fifth wedding anniversary and everything else last December, going back to work, selling the house and moving, buying a new house and settling in, the stress from work in May and June, a summer with too much death and loss. It's been one thing after another for the last nine to ten months, and while I told myself that much of it was "easier" because it was all generally "normal" stuff--i.e., not related to grief or death, per se--it still didn't make it easy. Grief and widowhood annihilated so much--everything?--of what I had for so long that it was a relief last fall when things finally started to feel better, when I started feeling noticeably better. But then the so-called "normal" life stresses of the last year have depleted what stores I might have saved up starting last fall.

And now here I am, a year later. It was upsetting to realize at support group a month ago how fast it went. It feels more like six months, maybe. But to realize it's been a full year? A year is supposed to be a long time, time to adjust, make progress, have wonderful things happen. And even though life has supposedly gotten easier as a well-practiced, experienced widow, it doesn't mean it was an easy year. It's been a really, really tough year. And much of it has been quite awful, only I didn't want to call it that at the time because it was still such an improvement over the previous three years of acute grief and early widowhood.

But it's been a long, awful year since last December. And as I sat at support group last month, I was sickened, horrified, to realize that I'd be 32 this year--a number that sounds far too large when much of me still feels like I'm 27, maybe 28...barely past where I was when my life ended four years ago, when Charley died. Thirty-two is a hell of a long way from twenty-seven. Five whole years.

Five years is supposed to be a long time. But it's passed in a blink of an eye. And here I am, still sad, still widowed, still with grieving left to do. Still a single mother, with no more children, no boyfriend, no new husband. Life is better, yes, but it's not at all what I thought it would be three, four years ago, when I was a fresh widow. Back then, I could never see more than a few days, a few weeks ahead of me, maybe a few months. In rare moments I could briefly project to the one-year anniversary of Charley's death, but then a thick, stifling, impenetrable darkness fell like a curtain beyond July 13, 2006. I had no idea what could be beyond that, but somehow I still had an image of happiness, of light, a happy ending by four years out, by five years; I pictured myself remarried, another child or two, happy.

I had no idea. I had no idea then that there was more to come after the first year, that it could get worse, that things might not radically change by four years out, by five.

As I cried at support group a month ago, I wasn't lamenting for my lost youth, that at 32 I was no longer in my twenties or young. I really couldn't care less about my "youth." But what I was grieving for--horribly--was that my life was gone. The life I worked so hard for in college, at my job, with previous boyfriends, with Charley, the life I'd always dreamed of and worked toward, the illusion I'd assumed I could attain even as a brand-new widow: it was all gone.

And here I am, four years later. As of 4:54 AM this morning, I'm now 32. I'm still mostly that girl who looked out at the mirror at me on the morning of July 12, 2005, who had no idea that her happy life would shatter a mere 14 hours later. I'm still mostly that 27-year-old girl. Except I'm being told I'm now 32. And I wonder where the hell the last four years went.

Happy freakin' birthday.