So in January, I decided to have three months off the booze. I had my last alcoholic beverage on Friday the 29th of January this year. I didn’t realise until many weeks into my teetotaling stretch that my three-month stint winds up on your birthday. There is no better day of the year to have a glass of bubbles than the 29th of April.
As my circle of friends and I all pass their likely halfway point in life, the ageing is apparent, the tangible features on individual faces “mature.” (That’s a nice way of saying, we are all looking bloody old.) As everyone’s youthfulness is fading rapidly, you’re the only person that doesn’t look a day over 40. 😉
Your face, your memory, your zest, is young forever.
As time moves forward and we age without you, I think about grief every day and what it means for different people. Until you lose someone you don’t have any idea what grief is. For me, before my loss, I would have explained it as a period of sadness that you have to endure when you lose someone. Which is way off the mark.
I believed this period of time is something you have to fight through until you reach the sunshine on the other side. I now know that you never reach the other side and there isn’t a destination or a journey that has an endpoint.
Grief is a massive adjustment to your life. It’s an alteration and new definition of what your life is, what your responsibilities are and what your purpose is. Grief ends only when we do too.
In the simplest of terms, grief is love. Grief is love with no place to go.
On massive milestones like your birthday, grief feels like all the gas between the cork and the liquid in a champagne bottle that will never be opened. It’s stuck, it can’t be uncorked and shared. It’s shelved.
Bereavement on your birthday won’t stop us from uncorking our own champagne bottles though and encouraging all that dissolved carbon dioxide to bubble over. To toast you. To remember you. To appreciate the time that we had with you. To love you.
Happy Birthday Crae Crae xx