Family Memory(XIX) – 12:01am, June 14

I tend to be a night owl. It’s quiet after ten here (usually) and that offers me time to work and contemplate things…sometimes, perhaps, too much.

One of those evenings is always like tonight, late on June 13 as 12:01am, June 14 comes around. This will be the tenth time I wait for a phone call that will not come. That’s how many birthdays have come since Mom has been gone.

Back when I was in high school, Mom made the brave decision to return to school after 20+ years away (and not having been a good student when she was a teen anyways…). She graduated at the end of my sophomore year of college and started her career as a nurse. Eventually, she settled in to working second shift–because she was a night owl at heart, too. I think it was the summer of ’88 the first time. I was in Ames in the Preeti-Seema apartment I was sharing with Tony F. and Jason E. for summer. At 12:01, one minute into my birthday, the phone rang and a woman’s voice on the other end (Mom) started singing a bad version of ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. From that point on through 2010, every year, I’d get that call. If I was in Davenport, then she’d get home from work and the first words out of her mouth walking in the door–happybirthdaytoyou! In bed–too bad, so sad…friends visiting, they can wait. Nothing could interfere with the birthday call.

No more midnight phone calls, no more goofy singing. I’ve never been a fan of birthdays for a number of reasons…as a child, they were made miserable by others. As an adult, only milestones matter–and even then, Dad died less than a month before my 21st birthday. And then you get to the birthday one past your dad’s age when he died, the 10th that your mom’s been gone. It generally sucks.

That’s not meant to generate sympathy, a pity-party, or even happy birthday requests. The sentiment here simply “is”. It will not get better, nor does it get worse. It is an absence which can never be replaced. It is something you learn to accept, a scab that tears off from time to time to remind you of what can no longer be. This isn’t just me–this is an inevitability for everyone who reads this.

Most of the family memories I remember and consider writing down are happy ones, even the one about my grandfather’s funeral is important for the story told at it. This one though? It’s rough, real rough. And yet here I am, writing this up an hour before midnight. I’ll stay up until midnight, think of the phone call I haven’t heard in years, the voice that I haven’t heard. And then–it will pass, I will get over it, enjoy the rest of the day and let the wound heal until the next June 13-14 comes along again.