My phone vibrated on the table next to my laptop. “Mummy's Snowdrops in full bloom. It's so sad because she would have been so happy she'd finally managed to get some to flower.”
The message from my father intruded on my thoughts on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, which also happens to be my brother’s birthday.
It was one of those moments when you kind of forget about grief for a while, when your mind is on other things and you almost don’t quite remember your loved one has died. My job as a writer for a marketing agency keeps grief thoughts at bay quite successfully a lot of the time.
But the message brought an unexpected grief slap to my weekday afternoon. An untimely reminder of the pain and suffering that are never too far out of reach. My stomach fell to the floor and I felt the same panic and devastation as I did the night I received the dreaded phone call.
But I brushed it aside and refocused on my work. I didn’t have time to feel those feelings, nor did I want to.
The next day, I saw a video of a galgo (a hunting dog that’s widely used, mistreated, and abandoned in the south of Spain) being left at a rescue association by her owner. The poor girl waited for him all night to come back for her, but he never did.
It was too much. The flood gates opened, and I started crying uncontrollably. As I tried to pull myself together, I realised why that particular video had hit me so hard in the feels. I was the abandoned galga, waiting for someone to return who never will.
I also realised I wasn’t just crying for the galga. I had built a dam around my feelings over the last few weeks, and it had suddenly burst. One peculiar quirk about my immediate family (including my mum’s older sister/BFF) is that all our birthdays are clustered in the first four months after Christmas. As an early April baby, I’m the outlier. The next important date after that is the deathaversary in October.
So during the week of love, we had my aunt’s 80th, what should have been my mum’s 71st, and my brother’s 38th — on Valentine’s Day. Two weeks later, my dad turns 70, and a month after that, I’ll be 37.
Grief-wise, this is both a blessing and a curse. It means that most of the important dates — Christmas, birthdays, and the dreaded deathaversay — are concentrated in the six months between October and April, meaning the rest of the year brings a slight reprieve.
But it also means those six months contain the intensity of a year’s worth of grief. They also happen to be the winter months, which makes them even sadder. My mum loved the spring, and the emergence of her snowdrops is just another callous reminder of her absence. A season that was once full of joy (birthdays) and hope (spring) has been darkened by the black cloud of grief.
Like anniversaries and other significant days, birthdays bring up a lot of grief feelings. From memories of birthdays past to ruminations about what could have been to wondering just how the hell to mark an occasion like a dead loved one’s birthday. Do you do nothing and try to pretend it’s not happening, or do you look for a way to make it special?
I’m not sure if I have any solid advice to share about surviving birthday season or any other date when you’re grieving, but I can tell you what I did this year. My mum’s birthday was on February 10th, which was a Friday, and I don’t work on Fridays, so I decided to mark it with a ceremony.
I prepared my altar with candles, crystals, incense, and a photo of my mum. I poured her a glass of wine as an offering and prepared myself a cup of ceremonial-grade cacao, infusing it with my intention to connect with her and be open to receiving any messages or guidance she might have for me.
I sat and talked to her as I had done so many times over a cup of tea or glass of wine. I told her about my life, her death, and everything in between, and let the conversation take its natural course, meandering through topics that surprised even me. Once I had drunk the cacao and said all I had to say, I gave her a turn to speak.
I channel best through automatic writing (which is probably not surprising), so I took my journal and channelled a message to myself. Then I pulled some oracle cards to go deeper into the conversation. Finally, I asked her for a sign that she was with me.
When I had finished, I saw I had a message from my partner’s mum, Silvana. She lost her mother when she was 20 and has been a wonderful source of support in my grief process. She said I wouldn’t believe this, but her mother’s birthday was also February 10th. Not only that, but her name was Maria and my mother’s name was Mary. Was that my sign? On my sceptical days, it feels harder to believe, but I like to think it was.
The same day, a friends’ baby was born. To be honest, I wasn’t too happy about this cruel reminder of the relentless onward march of life. I wished she could have been born any other day, because now her birthday will always remind me of my loss. But then again, maybe it won’t.
Perhaps, as the years pass, I won’t feel such an acute need to mark my mum’s birthday. Perhaps I’ll be able to smile and connect with joy again as we celebrate my friends’ daughter’s birthday. Maybe one day February 10th will just be another featureless day.
But I don’t know. As with every aspect of the spiritual journey, how I spend birthdays and anniversaries will probably shift and change as I do. And perhaps one day, the sight of snowdrops will once again bring me joy instead of sadness.