Birthday Without

In the past several days several of my friends, good friends have celebrated birthdays.  Mine is coming shortly but I am not looking at it with any kind of favor.  I am not unhappy but in my heart I know this one is different.  I have lost my birthday brother and I am at loose ends about it. 

Each year John and I would talk on set days, Christmas, our birthday and the like.  Each year we would exchange a card.  Some years there were gifts, some not.  I know I was the poorer correspondent, the negligent younger brother.  Hey you all know I am always the poorer correspondent and the most insensitive bloke in the house.  But John was always and will always be my big brother and our shared birthday mean something to us.  

Trying to fix the empty spot I am feeling regarding the upcoming day I went searching for poetry at poemhunter.com to see if there was something from a poet laureate or such ilk to capture my feelings.  I did not find it.  

Dylan Thomas as he often does caught my mind and pulled it in some directions that I wasn’t planning to go to.  His “Poem on his Birthday” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-on-his-birthday/ brought a variety of feelings up; mixed dark feelings. While Mr. Thomas and his poem capture some of my feelings about life and aging it did not capture the sense of loss and melancholy within my heart.

The closest thing I found was a poem written to ostensibly be given to a wife on her birthday after the passing of her husband.  But in some ways Jonathan Goldman’s poem captures it for me.

Celebrate or not
they come each year to stay
To count your years for all
To know you and your ways.

Your Birthday is here again
Alas, I cannot be
with you to celebrate
and make your day great.

To celebrate this year
is not what you can do
For memories of the past
will forever break through.

My wish for you today
Is for comfort, solace and more
To get through these times of woe
And have happiness evermore.

I am sorry that I cannot find that snarky card to send.  I grieve that he cannot send me as equally a snide aside.  (He sent me probably the most profane birthday card about 25 years ago, think Gilbert Gottfried with no filter).  I still laugh every time I think about it.  Memories will always be present when “our” birthday comes.

I guess I would tweak the above poem a little bit and in doing so it would make sense to me, this year, this month.

Celebrate or not
They come each year to stay
To count our years for all
To know us and our ways.

Our Birthday is here again
Alas, I cannot be
with you to celebrate
And make your day great.

To celebrate this year
is not what we can do
Memories of the past
Will forever break through.

My wish for all today
is for comfort, solace and more
to get through these times of woe
And have happiness evermore.

To my brother John, it is hard to imagine the cycling of the sun without you here among the living. Travel well. I will keep you in my heart. 

Post Script:

After I wrote this piece and posted it I began to mull on something. Something bothered me and I tugged at it with my mind. Rereading my post something about the tenor left me disquieted.

What I wrote was from the perspective of a much younger brother with somewhat distant sibling ties. John and I were two people tied together by parentage and a calendar date. We had times together over the years and many shared experiences but he wasn’t part of my day to day life. Some of that distance was of my own making. When I was young I ran as far and fast as I could away from my family. My choice carried with it both loss and gain, but this is not time for regret.

By creating such an egocentric piece, my feelings, my thoughts and the like I missed something huge. My feelings constitute but a small part of the loss that my brother John’s passing made in the lives of a number of people.

John’s beloved wife Gayla, his sons, his daughters and the friends that populated his world they will feel a loss when his birthday passes. While I may ache with melancholy they most likely will have a more deep pain. Their pain is the kind that each holiday, each anniversary and each recurring event they would normally share with John in the calendar’s cycle is now marked with a huge absence. My love goes out to them on this what would have been John’s 73 birthday. With time only the moments of remembered joy will remain. It is one of the good things of how our human hearts work.