How do you celebrate when grief is here?
Birthdays, death days, and accessing joy amidst sorrow.
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How do you celebrate when grief is present?
I wish for all of our sakes that question didn’t have so many applications: both for the witnessing of our collective griefs and trying not look away, and for our own smaller, but just as present, griefs.
For the most part, the grief I’m about to talk about is extremely small on the world scale and large on my own. But I don’t know that we can get any closer to understanding how to metabolize our world griefs at all without trying to do it with our small life ones too.
Today is my 34th birthday, and tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the death of my dad.
I would love to tell you that this morning I sprang out of bed in anticipatory birthday delight (because I am in fact the friend that will tell every single barista and anyone who will listen when it is their friend’s birthday).
This morning, I woke up with a heaviness I couldn’t name, until sleep cleared and I realized it was the tents getting bombed outside of Rafah. It was family after family losing what I lost, but to an absolutely indeterminate degree, as in, our brains cannot even determine what that must be like.
My birthday wish, my always wish, is a permanent ceasefire and a free Palestine, and while none of us can make that executive order, there is still a bridge between our felt helplessness and what can be done. Here’s a quick snapshot of actions you can take, here is the the official Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions list of organizations to boycott to target collective efforts, and if you have the financial means, consider donating to a cause like Ele Elna Elak, which provides fresh water and food, or to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Anything is better than nothing, but truly see if you can do more. You are not too late to start. You are not too late to start again.
I can only talk for myself about what grief is in a context outside of violence, but maybe as I talk about this, we also can think about what the reality of a “small grief” like mine must be when it is magnifed to such an unholy, incomprehensibly inhuman degree.
Six days before my 30th birthday, and seven before my dad’s death, my friend Andrew penned my first tattoo on my skin. Lying down on the coffee table while he hunched over me, my arm outstretched, I thought of the tattoo as a preemptive celebration, a send-off from my twenties, and a years-late teenage rebellion. “This is what my thirties will be like,” I thought confidently: a little messy, done in friendship, boldly, unapologetically, and imperfectly.
I was not quite prepared to find out just how messy or imperfectly my thirties would so far prove to be, but I was about to.
A few days later, when my mom called to tell me about my dad’s critical condition in the hospital, I remember thinking about that tattoo still healing on my inner bicep. The tattoo is a stippled outline of Mount Sopris, a snow-capped beacon in the Roaring Fork valley where I grew up in Colorado, and where my family still lives. I remember thinking, “Well, good thing I have this tattoo now. Maybe I was supposed to have this to feel closer to my dad in a way I haven’t for such a long time.” He was already gone to me in all respects that mattered, but I thought maybe I could finally feel close again with him gone gone. He was unconscious, and his prognosis was days, if not hours.
I did not get the tattoo of Mount Sopris for my dad, but I’ve never looked at it since and not thought of him. At the time, it simply wouldn’t have occurred to me, because we didn’t have that kind of closeness in his final years.
When I’d been a teenager, literally half my lifetime earlier, my dad and I made plans to summit that same mountain, along with one of his visiting friends.
Despite his Oklahoma/Texas country upbringing, my dad was not exactly an outdoorsman in the recreational sense, so the memory is singular. We woke before dawn and for hours we wound through grassy fields and across talus rock, almost getting as far as the false summit before aging bodies were ready to turn around. I turned around with them. Part of me wanted to keep going, but I only wanted to keep hiking if they were coming with me.
Having a birthday right before a death day feels kind of like deciding whether to turn around on a mountain. If you keep going to the top, you can celebrate once you get there, but that celebration comes with the reminder of what you left behind to do it, and you may not have the people you wanted to celebrate with in the first place. If you turn around before the summit, you can celebrate the extent you did go, but the price is the knowledge that you could have done more. Either way is a choice, and each choice comes with a sacrifice.
In birthday terms, if you choose to celebrate your birthday fully, you edge out grief to make it happen. To do that, you have to willfully ignore the memory of someone you love, at least to some extent, and that comes with the guilt of prioritizing your own joy. But if you don’t celebrate your birthday fully and instead honor the grief full stop, it can feel like you’re appropriately giving a person you love what they deserve, at the cost of feeling like you’ve short-changed yourself and your joy.
Most of the time, I think I have a choice in the matter at all, and then grief arrives and sweeps away any agency I have along with it anyway.
I always think I will be fine, if not good, and then a torrent of grief rips through me. It’s a special kind of credulity that leads me to believe each year will be different. The year after my dad’s death, I had to cancel a birthday party hours before it was planned when friends were driving in from out of state, because I was sobbing too hard to hold myself together. I had to bail on gifted tickets minutes before a much-anticipated show to see Alok Vaid-Menon because I started hyperventilating and couldn't stop. I’ve gotten pre-birthday haircuts and cried in the chair — twice.
More recently, I’ve opted for small-scale get-togethers with a friend or two, but those plans also leave a lot of room to remember and feel. I’m fortunate to have a bevy of amazing connections, but many of my closest are long-distance, and executive dysfunction can make certain coordination for event planning difficult on top of the spontaneous cry thing.
The more I age, the more it seems that we live in dichotomies all the time. I want few things more than to be celebrated wholly and uncomplicatedly at this time of year, but the reality generally ends up being more tender, self-protective, and tinged with grief. I am exasperated by this reality, resentful of it, and quite frankly exasperated by myself that I think it will be any different every year.
My family is fortunate (if you can call it that, and I do think you actually can) because, in theory, we had time to come to terms with an end.
My dad had at least a decade of cognitive decline, and maybe three of those years came with a namable diagnosis we could map onto past memories and associations.
As long as I can remember, my dad kept post-its on nearly every surface in the room that was his office, jotting down thoughts and passwords and who knows what else in a scratching mechanical pencil scrawl. When talking, he’d always been somewhat of a rambler, almost universally known for telling jokes so long you sometimes forgot there was going to be a punchline to laugh at by the time it came. There were many things like that about him: slow, like a cowboy drawl, unhurried. My dad was in fact a cowboy in the early years of my life and before, just as likely tending cattle in Texas as he was listening to NPR in the kitchen, which he analyzed through the lens of his political science PhD. He was in some ways so casual and country, and in others so measured, so buttoned up. When the two mixed, there was a delightful kind of irreverence, with surprising humor that was just as smart as it often was foul-mouthed.
My dad, who I called Papa, was generally a quiet man: considered, thoughtful, and without a doubt an overthinker. He had an undercurrent of wit, with a quiet kind of intensity. So much about this man was understated, but sometimes a glint of mischief surfaced. I could never quite fathom that the superlative in his senior high school yearbook (circa 1960, or thereabouts) stated “Most School Spirited,” but I think there must have been a rabble-rouser in there I just never fully glimpsed.
Beyond that, he was kind. He was, as they say, one of the good ones. He had such patience and was largely good-humored when it came to most things, politics and accidentally slamming his finger in a drawer excepted.
My dad generally operated on the slow side, but I’d also found him to be reliably present in anyone’s company, and certainly with me. I didn’t know what to make of those two things being at odds when they suddenly were. Dozens of memories point to that disconnect, reaching back at least a decade before the pandemic and before that day my mom phoned me with his news in the hospital. It’s just that for a long time, we all interpreted signs of his deterioration as simple facts of his personality.
I’ll spare you the details of what that deterioration looked like, partly because I did write it all out and decided none of us actually needs the reality of a dementia-like condition spelled out today, and also simply because the fact of his decline is central to what happened to him, but none of it is central to who he was. Suffice it to say, watching a person you love slip away from their personality and personhood is heart-wrenching, whatever the details. My mom, my sister, and I spent years trying to reconcile this disconnect with our understanding of the man we’d loved, and meanwhile, he was still walking on the planet for all of that time.
By the time my mom called to tell me my dad had a stroke, I thought those years of reckoning meant I’d gotten so much of the grief out of the way already. Maybe I had, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t still more.
Two days later, my birthday arrived and my dad’s heart was still beating, though he was still several states away from me, unconscious, and not in any better condition. I didn’t know how to feel. It was May 2020, and I wanted to have a birthday as if a global pandemic wasn’t the predominant reality. I wanted to have a birthday as if dying was not already happening. And I wanted to feel like if my dad was dying, at least I was living. But I also didn’t want to feel guilty about living for myself when he couldn’t and others couldn’t. In short, I wanted the reality to be different.
I had told my mom that if my dad had to die that week, then maybe I wanted him to die on my birthday. I thought it could be something shared between us for me to treasure. Once it happened, I didn’t have that wish anymore. He didn’t die on my birthday, but as it turns out, having your dad die the day after your birthday is still close enough to irrevocably alter your relationship with the day you were born from then on.
At the time, I happened to be living in a trailer on some acres of land in Washington owned by friends, and because the trailer was only equipped for sleeping, my dog and I effectively lived in our friends’ house.
Those five weeks were a rag-tag time, and despite the difficulty then, there was something beautiful about it — not being roommates, but more so getting to be briefly subsumed into a family unit that was different than my own. It’s not often as adults that we get to glimpse the lives of our friends to that extent, outside of dating or sharing a lease, and it can feel like a special kind of intimacy and shared knowledge when we do (this is, in part, why I love long-distance hiking with friends).
That birthday, while my dad lay dying 1300 miles away, we piled adults, kids, and dogs into the Suburban and drove fifteen minutes up the road to a pebbled beach. We didn’t bring swimsuits, but the sun was searing, and I let it burn the edges of my shoulders around my bra straps and chest. I don’t know if I was asking for the sun as a blessing or the sunburn as a punishment, but I think I got both. Paired with my bra was a denim hat that did nothing to shield the rays coming in from every angle. Gay Power was embroidered on the front, which I had bought to feel cool, but I’m not a hat person and I’m certainly not a hat with sayings person, so the hat was doing nothing to add to practicality or style. While I rotisseried in the sun, I watched my dog Fenton gingerly make his way through the shallows, blinking at the brightness glinting on the surface. I think for a bit I forgot about my dad, the sun baked it out of me. Or maybe I didn’t fully, but I let myself pretend. Back at the house, I opened mailed presents and we shared rhubarb crumble and homemade coconut ice cream.
That was four years ago, and it’s weird to think that’s the last birthday where I felt fully celebrated, given the circumstances. I don’t really know how to have a birthday anymore. I just know that I want one, and I want the feeling of family to be part of it, chosen family or otherwise.
I don’t think that’s an experience singular to me or my grief. I think even for adults who don’t have a significantly hard time near a day that’s “supposed” to be celebrated, a lot of people feel something like this too.
Regardless of grief status, I am fairly certain many of us want a day (or more) where we’re each tended to, and where it feels like a weight of responsibility is lifted. We want to feel like we’re not alone, but also that we are completely individually seen. It’s not really about birthdays at all, especially because I know many people have complicated associations with that day. More so, I think we want dedicated time and acknowledgment, completely unadulterated for ourselves, and that’s hard to claim when we’re faced with the crushing realities around us.
How dare we find joy, how dare we rest, how dare we want and desire, when all of those are impossibilities for other people, and when some of those people are ones we know and love?
We have to remind ourselves that denying our joy and our wants isn’t going to improve the lives of anyone who doesn’t have access to their own. But neither is complete erasure of the circumstances in our minds. We can retrace our steps down the mountain or keep heading toward the summit, decide to do it big for a birthday or do it small for the grief, but there really is no right answer, and it’s just a matter of what we feel like we can live with.
As far as I can tell, you make the plans for the birthday, and if you have to cancel last minute because you’re catching your breath from crying, you cancel. Maybe having to cancel makes you cry angry tears because you don’t want to have to do it at all. Dude, been there. You just have to try to act based on your emotional baseline, and then live with the disappointment if it goes differently than expected. Sometimes you set aside the day to cry and end up feeling fine, good even, so you take yourself out for a treat.
You lean toward the wants, and then you live with the realities, even though you really wish the realities were absolutely anything else.
Living your life and honoring your desires is how you honor the ones you love. We can’t do that uncomplicatedly, no matter how much we want to, because love and grief are one and the same. We can’t stop living our lives entirely, but we do have to alter our lives to accommodate what is here.
This year, I’m in a cabin alone in the woods for the entire month, which in some ways is entirely right for grieving and is in other ways entirely antithetical to the birthday I want — the stereotypical kid kind where some adult (not me) invites my friends and coordinates the activities and food, where I am surrounded by my people, they get me, they love me, and I feel it. As much as I want to lean into that want, that’s also not a reality I could coordinate this time.
Grief is a lot like that, or entirely like that: deep wants that are at odds with actual truth.
I have to reconcile my desires with what’s actually true, so my own reclamation was the quieter kind for this birthday. This weekend, I drove 1.5 hours from the cabin along the Columbia River Gorge back to Portland. I took the bus across the river and slowly wandered streets past the Victorian and ornate Italianate residences in Nob Hill, no headphones. I listened to the gentle shush of leaves on tree-lined streets, only stopping to pay for a ticket to a solo matinee at the local movie theater. Afterward, I sat at a sidewalk cafe and sipped on rose hibiscus iced tea. I tangled my limbs with another’s, sweaty and breathless and panting. I brought Mikiko mochi donuts to eat in the car with a friend as we headed out for a morning hike, hands sticky with yuzu curd and lavender. I napped and woke up bleary-eyed and head heavy. I felt quiet satisfaction. I felt resentment. I felt deep world-weariness. I felt joy.
Nothing about this birthday is revelatory. It’s not a big bash or surprise party. It’s a do-the-best-that-you-can party.
I’d love for our collective realities to be fuller than do-the-best-that-you-can, but I don’t know what other option we have, and I think doing the best we can is how we’re going to get anywhere different if we want to.
Maybe we should make a birthday network where we all plan each other’s birthdays. Where we say, Here, let me do that for you. That seems heavy, let me take a turn holding it for a while. Only, whoever plans mine will have to account for this tiny detail of existential grief. My friend Maggie says when she visits in September we’ll have a birthday do-over for both of us, and while it’s no blowout birthday, it is an opportunity for that grief to have a place to rest for a while, and to have a place for wants to go to be seen, experienced, and honored.
May we all have the community to witness our grief, and may that community help us celebrate anyway.
May we hold our griefs together, and may we all do the best that we can.
Love,
Iris
Recs and Thoughts
Recommendations are my love language! I love to give them very much!
I cannot wait for the How Much Money is Enough? workshop my dear friend
is hosting this coming weekend, so much so that I literally changed the date of my move into my summer tiny house sublet to be able to attend live. One might say I’m biased by friendship, but in this case, it is purely that I have never not once engaged with her work and left feeling anything but more wholly connected to myself and community.
In the spirit of being adults who might wish we could access more play more often, and with other adults, Evan Chelsee is also hosting Rec Room during the month of June as their answer: coworking, but for fun times. Very literal parallel play for whatever crafts/hobbies/leisure activities that don’t get enough of their own space and time, in company with other sweet, chill humans? Yes, please.
This episode What If We Shifted to a Not-for-Profit Economy? from the From What If to What Next podcast has me absolutely buzzing, and I’ve saved at least 30 more episodes to make my way through. I will definitely be talking about this in future.
I am absolutely obsessed with the Common Queertesy column by Burton. It’s like Emily Post etiquette plus queer gossip and a healthy dose of side-eye.
The book To the Gorge: Running, Grief, and Resilience & 460 Miles on the Pacific Crest Trail by Emily Halnon eviscerated me, in the best way way possible. The combination of raw grief and determination, with the visceral sense of endurance in nature, is one I’ll be thinking about for a long time. I cried so much, more than I can remember in recent times while reading (which says a lot because I am a crier), and it was a cathartic cry I didn’t know I needed.
In the queer rom-com vein, Alison Cochrun is always a favorite for me, and her new book Here We Go Again hits many of the right notes of cross-country road trip sing-alongs and irreverent end-of-life camaraderie and love. It doesn’t top Kiss Her Once for Me, but it makes a sweet read and reminder that second chances can be worth the risk.