Happy Fucking Birthday

A good name is better than a good ointment, And the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth. - Ecclesiastes 7:1

I'm thirty four years old today. I want to scream. This birthday is exposing unhealed, fractured grief; I can't even write the words I want to say. Not right, anyway. Everything aches. There is something unnatural about being as old as your big sister. It's simply eerie and wrong. I feel monstrous. Too many years lived. Too many years to go. I don't want to breathe another minute. Using up better people's air.

All weekend long, I felt it coming. I've been like an animal sensing the earthquake, precognitive, ears twitching, the tastes of catastrophe on the wind and on my tongue. I felt like there were all these gaping holes inside me. I couldn't get enough to eat; I behaved like a starving person. It's unusual for me to binge but I didn't know what else to do. Eat. Eat. Vomit. I'm so gross. I'm 34 years old and this is what I am. I can't even look in the mirror without feeling like I need to be sick. I don't want to eat another bite of food. Using up better people's food. Taking up better people's space with this...pathetic, waste of a body.

God got it all wrong. I shouldn't be alive. I keep thinking someone is going to realize there was a mistake; tap, tap, tap at my door. "Excuse me, ma'am, but you're going to have to come with us now. We're terribly sorry to have to tell you this but you're dead. Amy is alive."

I'd tell whoever it was not to be terribly sorry. I'd say, "Finally. I don't have to go on living this lie." I'd gladly give up my spot in this world, that space I so pathetically and pointlessly occupy, so that Amy could have one more minute, one more day dispensing her precious gifts, her bright and numerous smiles, her sweet "hello theres" to passersby, her homemade whipped cream, her corny jokes that made me roll my eyes.

God, she was so fucking beautiful. Look at her.

The pretty sister. I knew that. It was a hard, bitter pill to swallow but I had finally gotten it down. She was beautiful and I was not and I was finally okay with the knowledge of that. And then she got cancer. And then she lost her hair, her long, thick auburn hair. Slowly, ever slowly, her beauty started to fade. And deep down inside me, in those dark and wicked places inside myself, I felt glad to be prettier. See what I am? Terrible.

Some things have a lovely way of dying. Roses come to mind. I have three dying roses hanging from the blinds in my kitchen. As they die, their colors deepen and their skins soften first and then turn crisp. Those roses look better when they're dying than when they were alive. Not people. I hate to think of Amy in those last days on hospice. Completely bald, a pallor of yellow. It felt like everything went yellow about her. Skin, eyes, teeth. And I thought of the way she loved yellow roses and it made me sad beyond what I can name with words. I tried to think of her like that, though: A yellow rose. My memories of her like dried rose petals in a ceramic dish on the coffee table.

A month before she died, Amy had picked out photos of herself for her funeral collage. The pictures were the way she wanted to be remembered. That last week, I must have looked through those pictures a thousand times. I must have showed them to every person who came through the door to say their goodbyes. I was really trying to tell them how to remember her: not as the bald, yellow shell of a person mumbling in the bed but as the vibrant, beautiful woman she was just a few years before. I even made the hospice nurse look at the pictures. I know she was rolling her eyes internally but I didn't care. I wanted her to know what Amy had been. I wanted her to know that she had been beautiful. I don't know why that mattered so much to me. After years of envying her beauty, of hating her for it, it was the suddenly the only thing I wanted people to know about her.

How must it have felt to pick out photos for your own funeral collage? How must it have felt to know that 34 years was all you were going to get? I know my sister wouldn't be looking at her life the way I do mine, with contempt and utter despair. I can read your mind. You are thinking I need to suck it up and get over my shit. I need to appreciate what I've been given and stop being a whiny little bitch about the things I've lost. I wish I could do that.

Since I was raised a Jehovah's Witness, we didn't celebrate birthdays when I was growing up. Your birthday came and it was just like any other day. We didn't have parties or presents or singing or blowing out candles on a cake. When other children celebrated their birthdays at school with cupcakes, I had to sit outside in the hallway until the festivities were over. I remember sitting out in the empty, lonely hallway listening to the sounds of all the kids laughing and eating their treats and enjoying being a part of something. They were a part of somebody's special day. And they knew that one day soon, it would be their turn to be special too. It was so painful for me to be excluded. I always felt like I was being punished for...being alive. I knew my special day would never come. I knew that there would only be more days of sitting alone in an empty hallway, my butt going numb on the hard floor, eavesdropping on other people's joy.

And that's still true for me, for my life. I can never really get in it, feel happy, feel special. It doesn't belong to me. It never has. Happy 34th Birthday to me. It feels hollow and weird. I'm afraid that it always will. I wish I knew how Amy managed to find joy in the life that was handed to her. If she was here, right now, I would ask her to tell me those secrets. I would ask her to give me those instructions on how to smile from ear to ear and actually mean it. I would ask her to tell me how to laugh with abandon from the deepest core of my soul. I would ask her how I will survive being 34 when she didn't. I would ask her if 34 years was enough.