28: The Birthday I Stopped Believing I Was Going To Die Young

I can tell you when the seed of “young” and “dying” being synonymous was planted. I can tell you when I finally (recently) ripped the roots out of the ground and turned it to mulch. I can’t tell you though how the tree got so tall in the first place or more consequently how I managed to live to 28 years old without noticing its existence.

I think it has a lot to do with grief, some to do with denial, and nothing to do with birthdays in and of themselves.

To me every birthday, anyone’s birthday but especially mine, has always been a moment and a celebration. It’s a day worth honoring and inviting in more joy than displeasure, more cake and less thought of calories or the particles that make it up. And so in some ways, actually, maybe that’s exactly how I missed noticing that I thought I would die young. I looked at the big picture and I rarely noticed the fragments and anxieties my years were built on.

My normal was bated breath and an expectation of the other shoe dropping being a matter of when and not if. My normal was a fractured relationship with life and age because of my mom. She died at the age of 44 years old. To my 10-year-old self her identity as a mom made her not only ancient but also the “right” age for death because “older” was “old” and “old” was “death.” Except it wasn’t and I learned this because I got “older” and the wires got crossed. I didn’t just think “old” and “death” went hand in hand, I thought “older” and “death” went hand in hand.

I had no one in my life to explain that death and age are less related than we assume them to be. No one to debate me or steer me in the opposite direction of believing that getting older wasn’t going to reach its cap at a young age, like I believed.

So life under this school of thought looked a lot like this:

1. Believing I only had one shot at something
2. Not dreaming too far into the future because time stopped for me at a certain age
3. Wondering constantly if the obit line would read, “There she was at the pinnacle of her happy when splat, she died.”

The itch in my throat and the tears in the back of my eyes grow more present as I think of life up until this point and…