Today I turn the big 5-0, and as thoughts of prideful achievement mix with existential dread, my heart will feel something never felt during the previous forty-nine celebrations of my birth. This year my mother will not be calling, and from the moment my eyes opened, I realized my birthday has lost some lustre through the absence of ceremony.
In place of the typical “hi Vin” that characterized her everyday calls, mom opened my birthday call in song. Although eroded lungs weakened her voice as years passed, my mother was resolute to belt “The Birthday Song, and even in its raspiness, her voice remained unique and beautiful. As the oldest of her three sons, I am the brother who tests the waters of each age. This year, instead of reporting new body aches, I will describe to them the sadness of not having our mom celebrate Fifty with me; an ache for which there is no ointment, and that flares with no discernable pattern.
One of the nasty byproducts of aging is the growing pile of regrets that sits over my shoulder. Because I believed my mom immortal, I sent some of her past birthday calls to voicemail. Although most of me loved those calls, being serenaded triggered my shyness, and I behaved as if she licked her finger and wiped dirt off my face in a crowded room. Rather than confront my boyish embarrassment, I sometimes deprived my mother the fulfillment of singing to her oldest child. This year life gets to teach me the lesson it always wanted to teach. Mothers are not immortal, and voicemail is for spammers. Since denial convinced me next year would always come, I erased those voicemails because I have a thing about digital clutter. Thanks to compulsion, I’m the fool who tossed a winning lottery ticket when he carelessly emptied his pockets, and I am reminded of some subtle ways anxiety pervades life.
My favorite part of my mother’s rendition was that she replaced “Vincent” with “dear number one son.” Although I snarkily referred to her as Charlie Chan, I cherished the distinction and wore it with pride even while not always loving its accompanying expectations. In my mother’s family, oldest children were responsible for aging parents, and I was often rankled by her calls for assistance with what I insisted were tasks she could complete on her own. Now there will be no calls to fix her internet, deposit her checks. In retrospect, her sole motivation was to get me ot visit, and alleviate dome of her isolation of life with COPD. Moms should never feel lonely, and now that mine is gone, I have extra time to confront my role in her angst while mourning the part of me who died along with her.
One year too late, I recognize I am now without the person with whom I shared the experience of my birth. I always viewed my birthday through the egocentric lense of being my day, but it was our day, and should always have been a celebration of us. Death has a brutal way of putting these things in perspective, and although my eyes are now open to birthday partnership, I can’t stop staring at what I missed when my eyes were closed.
In my mom’s absence, I will cherish the remaining loved ones who give me purpose. I will celebrate with my wife, my kids, my dad and brothers, but I will still suffer relentless regret, and the silence of my phone. Part of me will deny my mom’s passing, and will insist she had a momentary lapse of reason, simply forgot to call, and will remember next year. The thought reminds me “next year” is when I will be stung by death’s permanence.
In my desperation to hear Happy Birthday sung to me, I will scour Google for ways to recover deleted voicemails, and I will empty junk drawers in search of old phones in which my mom’s voice might remain captured. I will crave something more concrete than memories of her voice because when memory fades, old voices are silenced. Given we are in the age of upgrades, my desperate search will come up empty, and I will again turn my attention to the phone I now own, or that owns me. Through its refusal to ring, it will scold me for impulses to delete, and will rebuke me for those times I let it ring because I believed moms live to call another day.
