My mom would have been 83 today.
The first thing I did when I woke up, after stretching, was whisper “Happy Birthday, Mom” into the quiet of my bedroom.
Then, without warning, the absurdity hit me. The words themselves make plain what we all casually accept by singing the same song, saying the same words, year after year with too often forced enthusiasm and a kind of casual indifference : We are marking a birth.
An entrance, followed by sustained momentum; a life built, brick by brick, the person still laying mortar down.
Nothing in the ritual speaks to exit.
The irony of empathy is that you need closeness, you desire intimacy, the recognition from another person that says “Hey, I know you.”
But that kind of familiarity is rare, ethereal, really.
Instantaneous, sometimes, and at other times grounded in uncanny moments where everything aligns and you’re vulnerable enough, know yourself well enough, feel safe enough to risk your heart for the opportunity of sincerely connecting with another person on this planet.
For someone like me, the moments of feeling truly seen are anchors, reminders that in a world where almost nobody knows what they’re doing and it’s messy and complicated, a place we’ve ravaged and brutalized, bent to our will at the cost of almost everything truly good, there is still love with heft and depth, an earnestness that feels molecular.
Kurt was one such person for me. My mom, another.
When they first met, they both caught me tracing the front of my thumb across the top of my ear. Kurt was the first to notice and ask: “Are you tired or stressed?” My mom nodded along.
I’m not even aware of the habit, really. “I’m tried,” I admit. The drive from Ohio, even shared, wore me out for some reason. Both we’re relieved the answer was simple.
That’s true intimacy. The small details, the quiet observations that give you insight into another person and allow you to seamlessly care for them and anticipate need, find and expand joy, bolster honesty, help shoulder burdens and shelter against pain.
People will unfold themselves to you in a million different ways if you are brave enough to pay attention.
In a culture that winds itself up so tightly around bodies and sex and morality, where any closeness, unless religiously sanctioned, is seen as questionable and deviant, we leave little room for what makes being human tolerable—connection.
We scoff at close observation and yoke intimacy to sexual desire instead of giving her air to live in the adjacent space she’s also meant for, where seeing someone completely, wholly, fully isn’t wracked with shame and obsession. There should be nothing extraordinary about noticing things about your fellow humans, even those things that are deeply personal but obvious to an empathetic eye.
But we make it so. We pound our default settings from public to private almost from our beginning—our birth—until our operating system hums with shame and guilt, and curiosity and exploration are shoved into the darkness to fester until, as with so many things humans ruin with worry and austerity, we no longer recognize them as beautiful and fundamental.
There is nothing that compares to being known. No words in the English language can hold the feeling of having someone devoted enough and aware enough to map you for themselves so they can draw you back to your center when you stray too far or need reassurance. Small, inconsequential gestures that are implicitly understood, habits attended to, feelings unmasked and deciphered with tenderness.
Nothing asked and nothing owed.
My mind moves back to the world birthday, and I think of all the ways my mom might have been rebirthed into the universe. I have no religious beliefs. I do not believe in the afterlife or heaven. But as one scientist encouraged in a column devoted to why physicists should be invited to funerals, I do believe in energy.
When I’m feeling particularly raw and exhausted, wrung out by loss, I imagine my mom zipping around the ether, pure, frantic energy, loose from her mortal coil. She’s happy, has dispensed with everything weighty and wearisome. Exists in nothing and as nothing more than … what?
The most essential part of herself? The lightness that allowed her to trust herself when she heard her heart say: “Hey, go ahead. Lean in.”
These are usually the times I’m also begging my mom for some reprieve, to show up and let me know I’m not alone. Kurt, too.
I’m angry or perhaps jealous when I picture them, maybe even together sometimes, free.
I’ve talked before about how surprised I am by how fresh Kurt’s death feels alongside my mom’s. That nagging ache in my center creeps back sometimes, like I’ve been hollowed out with a melon baller. The pain is dull but somehow urgent. I’m aware something is missing. Even worse, I know what’s missing and I desperately, desperately want it back.
My body alone doesn’t know how to fill the gap. I’ve been devouring sappy romances where the characters are hopelessly in love and attuned to one another, but also peppered with moments of intimacy that can and do exist outside romantic love. In some ways, I find I’m just reinforcing the loss, widening the gap. In other ways, I’m renewing my hope in a world I want to believe can exist, where we all pay attention and find moments of real connection, build real community.
Perhaps what I’m really feeling is what, when I’m still, is the seed of grief for me. All the losses I’ve endured, especially of people who, like my mom and Kurt, gently gave me space, made space for me, in their heads and hearts, pushing me back toward the invisible rhythm of the world I want to live in.
To see and be seen.
Here, there, everywhere.
You and me. Me and You.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
(I love you, Kurt.)
Amazing