Here’s a birthday wish: Continuing to celebrate those we’ve lost

Why do people diminish birthdays after someone dies? 

“Today would have been her birthday, had she lived,” I often hear. It’s as though the day of your death obliterates the day you were born.

I will ask my mother what she thinks about this when I visit her on her 106th birthday, today, August 19. It will always be the date she was born, even though she has been gone six years. She will probably agree with me but ask me why it bothers me.

“It’s the beginning of our history,” I will tell her, “and it shouldn’t be taken away just because we do something as natural as dying.”

“Thanks for keeping my history intact,” I can imagine her saying with a little laugh that conceals whether it’s sarcasm or how she really feels. 

Then I will segue to a subject that might better catch her fancy.

“Do you want to know where today’s stone is from?” I will ask as I follow Jewish tradition by placing a stone on her grave to show that I visited. 

On my first visit after she died, I brought a piece of the white gravel from under the deck that my late husband built. Mom was a big George fan and enjoyed relaxing on his deck. After he passed away a year after Mom, I began gathering stones for each of them from places that had meaning in their lives.

Mom’s birthday stone is from the Huntington Gardens rose garden, a place she loved. We had taken her there on her last Mother’s Day and George pushed her wheelchair close enough to the bushes for her to lean over and smell the roses. She got such a kick out of the fact that the roses were named for well-known people – such as the “Henry Fonda” rose hybridized by the late Jack Christensen, former gardening columnist for this newspaper chain – and had fun searching for presidents and movie stars.

About 40 years ago, on one of Mom’s first trips to visit me, she bought a rose print from the Huntington Gardens gift shop. It hung in her condo in Virginia and in each of the rooms of the retirement and nursing homes where she lived in California. 

And now it lives in my home. 

Happy birthday, Mom.

Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net. Follow her on Twitter @patriciabunin and patriciabunin.com