If it was Your Birthday

My heart broke as I read the Facebook posting, "Happy birthday to my boy, Jimmy who would have been 44-years-old today." It goes on to say some wonderful things about Jimmy, but the subtext is clear... another broken parent whose child left far sooner than he should have.

My friend John's son has been gone for many, many years. He was only twenty-four when an extremely rare genetic disease took him. So you might think his parents would have had time to grieve and John tells me that it's not as bad as it was for the first few years, the first five or ten, or so.

John says that the grief still hits him at unusual times. During football games, hearing an old song on the radio. Seeing two cute little boys playing trucks together or some such on a TV sitcom. You see John and his wife lost both of their sons within a few years to the same disease, both at the same young age. Johnnie died a few years later than his big brother and there was still no treatment and he fared no better.

When I read that posting today, I realized that Jimmy was exactly one week older than my son Rob, who would be 44 this Friday. But he's not here to celebrate his birthday, either. I was luckier than John and his wife because I had Rob for almost all of his forty-three years. But the loss, confusion and pain are very raw for me. Sometimes I can talk about him without crying and other times it's like a faucet's been turned on.

What I've learned from special people like John is that the love you feel for your kids will never end no matter how long they're in your life physically. And whether it's three hours, three years or 43 years you and they are bound together and nothing can break that bond. Not time, not age, not memory. It will always be there.

When We were Brand New

When I was little we used to play dress up with my mother's wedding gown. It hung carelessly in a storage closet in our attic. Unlike brides of today, my Mom, who never really cared much about "things," hadn't heirloomed her dress and put it carefully away dreaming of the day one of her daughters would walk down the aisle in it.
No, her dress, champagne stain and all, hung carelessly in a musty attic closet.

That didn't keep my two sisters and me from LOVING it. We imagined every romantic detail of our parents' wedding... well that's an exaggeration. When we first discovered the dress we were very young and probably didn't know much about love and romance. But as we grew into our sixes, sevens and eights you can only imagine where our dreams took us.
Of course we thought our mother was glamorous and our father was dreamy. We'd grown up seeing pictures of their fancy Columbia wedding hung on our wall and we knew instinctually that it had been special.

My mother had gardenias in her hair and my father was in his dress uniform. You see it took place just after the bombing at Pearl harbor. It was an anxious time for our country but a joyous event for my parents and their families.

My sisters and I never knew anything about that. We just knew how much we loved that dress and what beautiful brides we would be one day when we wore it. And in those days, the early- to mid-fifties, my older sister was always the bride. She was beautiful with blond hair and big blue eyes. And my little sister was always the flower girl strewing what ever she could find as pretend flowers. I can't remember what role I usually played... maybe the groom. I was always the tallest and really didn't plead my case very well. But in spite of that, I remember those times fondly. And I did get to try the dress on when I was all alone up in that attic. Now that's when I really raptured romantic. And my groom? Well of course he was none other than the very handsome groom in those pictures downstairs!