Dreading the Miracle
I never expected to grow old.
In 1991 I was diagnosed HIV-positive. That diagnosis was spelled “AIDS” which at that time was also spelled “dead.” I was in my early 40s, fighting the odds, hoping for more birthdays, wondering if I might make it as far as 50.
Then a miracle happened. Anti-retroviral drugs arrived about five years after my diagnosis and AIDS became, in the U.S., mostly a treatable disease. No cure, but stay-alive treatments if you can make them work. About fifteen years later I fought off a tough case of cancer, again stretching my life farther than I’d imagined.
Despite the AIDS and the cancer, and although I once longed for more birthdays, somewhere in the past thirty years I found myself resenting that day every year. Birthdays were markers of age. I didn’t need them: My body and my life were testimonies to age. I began to identify with Mary Quant (“I don’t have birthdays”) and Zane Grey (“I hate birthdays”). If birthdays were a miracle, I dreaded the miracle.
So what do I say about this year when I had not one birthday but two, and enjoyed both?
My first celebration was an accident. Long-story-short, I posted a note on Facebook that sounded like the announcement of my 70th birthday. That wasn’t my intent. But by the time the digital dust had settled, I’d received scores of 70th birthday greetings. The confusion was lovely. It prompted some of the nicest, most thoughtful greetings from people I’ve not seen for years.
For the record, I was born April 6, 1948, in Louisville, Kentucky. This year’s birthday was my 73rd. Age 70, for which I was so warmly congratulated this past weekend, is a distant memory.
I’m grateful for this year’s kerfuffle about my birthday. It reminded me that, after living nearly three-quarters of a century, the actual day of one’s birth doesn’t much matter. What matters is that we’re here. Despite the odds, you’re alive and so am I.
Actually, I’m more than alive. I’m blessed. I have children to love, and to love me. I have a new grandchild who has my eyes (don’t tell the other mother-in-law). I’ve lived the life of an artist, an activist, a friend and daughter, a mother and (now) a grandmother, and I’m considering what the next chapter might bring. I’m not done yet. If I sometimes complain about my age, forgive me. I should never again whine about the years that have accumulated way beyond any horizon I dared to imagine thirty years ago. I’ve been given an extraordinary life. Let me humbly accept it as the birthday gift of God and the scientists.
Then there’s the numbers, not of my birthdays but of people’s kind greetings. They came in by the hundreds. I’m still shocked and very, very grateful. I may not be able to answer every message (apologies!), but each one brought back the recognition that these are people who have been, and still are, important in my life. Their kindness reconnected us. Some said I’d made a difference in their lives. Some said “I love you.”
We came into this Year of COVID with relationships built around habits and patterns. We called. We lunched. We dropped by. We had dinners and weddings and funerals. We gathered. Hung out. Laughed. Whispered. Wept. Each moment in our relationships became a memory woven into the pattern of connections that wrap us together. We learned that Zoom is no replacement for a hug. What I’ve missed most is people. I’ve missed you.
Birthdays measure years. But life isn’t lived in years. We live moment by moment and, if we know grace, in those moments we’re given amazing memories. Every name on the generous birthday greetings I read brought back the memory of our times together, our connections. I recalled moments of hilarious joy and hours of terrible despair. I thought of those we’ve lost and I clung more tightly to the memory of those still here.
A year ago, I was alone on my birthday, isolated under the first wave of COVID. This year my injudicious Facebook posting gave me a half-dozen days of birthday celebrations with hundreds of people whose memories have filled my life with meaning and even with love. What a lovely accident it was, calling me into my 74th year.
