Birthdays bring up so many emotions, which can be especially challenging when you’re a deeply feeling person. I sometimes wish I could compartmentalize them all. Put them in boxes to pace out opening and experiencing them. In a way, this is what therapy helps us understand—how to balance our feelings and experiences so they don’t overwhelm us, and to also identify triggers before they lead to emotional explosions,
I came across a post on my old site that I wrote on my birthday in 2010, the last one I celebrated with Michael before he died. In that post, I wrote about how my father dying at 49 years old, when I was only 23, and how that old saying “life is short” shaped so many of the decisions I’d made moving forward.
In a way death gave me courage back then to take chances. Perhaps youth also played a big role—in our 20s anything seems possible. Little did I know how drastically my life would change a mere nine months later. Death would arrive at my doorstep again, except this time there was no partner to help carry me when the journey felt too heavy or lonely. Instead, I had to walk it alone as a single mother of two young children.