Today is my birthday and I’ve shifted from “entry level” to “firm footing” in my thirties.
I am 31.
Each word in that phrase lands like a weight that I’m simultaneously glad and terrified for. It’s an age I haven’t necessarily been “dreading,” at least not in the normal I’m-getting-older-and-freaking-out-about-wrinkly-skin-and-gray-hair kind of way. No. This age has been magnified on my radar in anticipation of the heightened reflection I knew it would bring. Pain I’m good at avoiding most of the time would fight to the surface. I knew it would happen this way, and the knowing helps.
I opened my eyes in bed this morning and felt the “1” fall into place behind the “3.” 31. A strange mixture of happiness and remorse mingled in my bed with me as I lay soaking in the fact of a number. I tugged on the powder blue blanket I’d inherited from my big sis; I clung to it like Linus from Peanuts, year-round and without a care for seasonal appropriateness. Dark blue snowflakes decorated the length of it and showed a hint of winter in our home at all times. My cheek brushed on its soft fibers reassuringly. I gathered up the fabric and gave it the kind of bear-hug I’ve been missing from Amy and in the past two years have only tasted sparingly in wonderfully bitter-sweet dreams. This all might sounds like I’m getting over a hurdle of “the first birthday without her,” but that’s not it. This is the second, actually, and it’s much more significant for me than the first.
Today I am the same age as my “older” sister. That two year span that had always put her ahead of me, laying down a road-map to trust and follow, has disappeared with each day that narrowed the gap I’d always looked to for guidance. Knowing this is how old she was when she died, this is how far she made it in life and I’m there right now, fits only one word in my world: unnatural.
5-year-old me and 7-year-old Amy
Bundled in a warm birthday cocoon against a gray fall morning, the 5-year-old part of me thought of balloons, cake, friends, presents, special dinner made to match my favorite tastes, and happy cards that came in the mail just for me. But the 31-year-old part of me thought of the sister who wouldn’t be sitting next to me as I opened those presents, laughed over intentional bad wrapping, or reminisced over the night of my birth 31 years earlier that had been filed away in her mind as a very first memory. I couldn’t recount to her how this day always makes me think of the first present I’d ever stumblingly learned to wrap with mom’s guidance, an abundance of tape, and her excited little body bouncing in the next room. We wouldn’t giggle together over the silly games we used to make up, like mixing birthday cake in a bowl with ice cream, stirring until they became a thick pile of gloppy mush as we yelled out all the new ingredients we were adding to make it taste even more magical. “Trees!” she would yell, pulling them out of the air and imaginary throwing them into the mix. “Houses!” I would echo back, mimicking her motions with one hand and clinking a whirling metal spoon against my ceramic bowl with the other. “People!” she would call out, and we wouldn’t hesitate for one second on how disgustingly morbid it is to imagine mixing human bodies into our Franken-cake. If we had, we still wouldn’t have cared because it’s just what we did, these ritual practices we’d performed since before we could remember the worlds of how or why they ever began.
These memories are mine to recount to others without her now and it seems even more important that I do, because today it feels like the ultimate line is being crossed. My identity is splitting farther from the mash-up of her and me together as I’m laying my own route minus my leader. I’ve finally hit the last big “firsts” I knew I would come to after her passing. Technically I won’t hit the exact date, stepping beyond her number of earth days, until spring (I hadn’t been able to keep myself from fully defining the moment with a scribbled note in my planner two years ago), but the number is still there in front of me right now. 31.
Eventually, I shifted out of bed and made my way to a yoga class I’d been thirsting for all week. I walked into the YMCA with bed-kept hair and black pants thoroughly highlighted with my dog’s white fur. I handed my membership card over to the attendant for scanning, my mind focused on getting set up in time; this Saturday morning class always filled fast. Kids and adults alike scurried around the packed entrance. There was a basketball event going on to the left and swim lessons were in full swing through the glassed walls to the right. It wasn’t normally this crazy and for a moment I was lost in the scatter of bodies, splashing water, and slamming balls. “Here you go,” the man said handing my card back. He had a smile that was enhanced by his snowy-white hair. “Happy birthday,” he offered cheerfully. I skipped a beat, caught by surprise in all my distraction. “Thanks,” I offered in return, averting my suddenly stinging eyes. Clutching my yoga mat I hustled through the crowd in search of cover in a dimly lit room and the alter of my mat.
As I lay down to settle myself I remembered that Amy had taught yoga at the Y. I don’t know why I repeatedly forget and remember this fact, but I do for some reason. I felt her draw near, like I do so often when I come to yoga. Today there was the familiarly packed room, but an unfamiliar substitute instructor and a new playlist that hit me hard. I found myself listening more to the lyrics than the instructor’s prompts. Soon I was in Downward Dog and the world was up-side-down. The music and Amy told me I was strong. I was in Rag-doll and my heart and chest melted down to the floor. I flowed through pain, heat, and tears as I heard “I’m sorry,” “don’t worry,” “please celebrate,” “I love you,” “you’ll be OK,” “I’m waiting for you”… I rose up to Mountain and stood firm while the music punched through the cage of my heart. I breathed, I gulped life, and finally I came to rest in Corpse Pose.
I saw Amy and she moved to my head. I’d learned to trust these intuitive moments of connection without judging them. She played with my hair like we’d always said we felt spirits do. She would braid my hair and leave a crown of flowers there if she could. She moved as if to wipe a tear from my cheek and smiled. I chided her for trapping me in a room with twenty other people, hyper vigilant of a soundtrack she knew would cut through to me. She was glad I was letting myself feel. “Just doing my big sister duty,” she said. We ended on Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” a reflection of my morning, previous two years, and the span of cherished moments we’d shared as 80s girls…girls I still carried with me all the way into yet another year.
***
I recently met with a friend at a coffee shop. Surrounded by middle and high school students pouring over laptops and coffee, we settled into a high table above it all and on the edge of a rush of young learning. She’d turned 30 the month before and as I welcomed her smiling face to this new decade with gusto and tea, we reveled in a new decade that placed us beyond the chaos and self-defining fights we all face in earlier years. “I just felt so tortured in my twenties,” she’d confided to me. I knew what she meant. I’m sure so many people do. Those years had all been full of a quarrel with life to hand me what I desired. Now I’m ready to simply “be” and move beyond the struggle on my sister’s behalf. I’m hoping wherever she is she can revel in this transitional age as well, setting the battle aside.
One of the last times I’d seen Amy I was sitting behind her in the car. Our mom was driving and Amy had claimed the passenger seat. It was our typical arrangement now that I think about it. All those errands we’d been carted around on as kids she’d always taken that seat, never letting me have a turn. It was defining of her position as the eldest, always a bit ahead of me. I’d stared at the back of her head then like I’d done so many times before, but now her once light and curly hair had been limp and brittle with declining health. There was still the same bleached ends she’d sported since high school, though. As I stared I noticed a fugitive among the brown and blond strands. I’d been plucking gray hair from my head for years and felt a pang of the old familiar sibling connection and life-path reassurance I’d always felt, before she’d started distancing and spiraled away from me.
Hooray! We were both going gray! It was silly but felt so affirming. Without thinking I reached my hand out, pinched the white strand, and laughed. “Ouch!” She’d yelled angrily, spinning around in her seat. She was the distant version of my sister, mad and unbonding. “I pulled a gray hair for you,” I said in a forced cheery voice, holding it up for her to see. Her eyes accused and lacked the humor I’d hoped for. She turned around, hand on her head. I stared at the wiry hair in my fingers wondering if there would be more or if I’d grow the rest of mine without her to match.
I thought of this again as I sat with my friend and we noted how often complaints of age come up with each passing year, each passing decade. “I don’t really worry that way about aging anymore,” I said. “Since Amy died I think of each new birthday as a success, a year she didn’t get that I did.” From now on that will be more true than ever. It was time for me to finally stop stealing from my sister’s closet, to stand on my own, sit at the front, and be OK in leading myself. My friend nodded in contemplation. Then she smiled and lifted her cardboard cup of steaming tea. “To another successful birthday,” she said. I lifted my cup and tapped it against hers, matching her smile. Simultaneously we brought our cups to our lips and drank in the thought of another gifted year to come.
*excerpt from a maybe memoir...or ponderings from a very full journal.
