The Green-Wood Cemetery ca 2013  s.kalish

November is “my month.” It was actually the family month. We would hang the Happy Birthday sign across the wall-unit and there it would stay from beginning to end, reminding us of another year. The 5th…the 11th…the 30th.

It’s different now.

My birthday, on the 5th marks another year for which I am grateful. But it is a bit scary and daunting as the numbers go up.
As a child, it would fall on election day every few years and that was special. A day off from school. A meat ball and spaghetti birthday party with all the girls in my fourth grade class in 1957. Someone gave me an outfit for my Barbie doll. We played pin the tail on the donkey.

I want to be nine again.

My son, whose birthday falls on 11/11 always has the day off and it falls on another very significant date. He needs his own sign for his own place.

My husband’s birthday was 11/30.

We’d take the sign down on December 1st. We did this for years.

But then 2020 came: The Years of Covid.
My mother passed on November 6th, a day after my birthday. And as she descended into Covid side-effects, old age, dementia and veritable insanity, and as my birthday approached I told her on the phone: “if you die on my birthday I will kill you.” I don’t know if she caught my “joke,” but she waited until the day after my day.

There was a pall over my day and yesterday, November 6th, and it hit me after the fact. It was four years since my mother was gone, having reached age 102. I never really mourned.

Two weeks later, in November 2020, my husband, Robert, who was suffering from neurological disorders, fell during the short time I drifted off to sleep at 7:30 in the morning. He fell backwards and hit his head during my sleepless watch; weeks of exhaustion got the better of me; he fell, trying to walk just a few steps to get to the bathroom. He hit his head.

He went to the hospital. He never came home.

He got caught up in the system of hospital, nursing home, triage, and thirty-eight months later, death. His fall was the day before his seventy-fourth birthday.

I hung up the birthday sign for me this year but it felt hollow. My birthday fell on election day and I won’t get into the results (I can’t out of respect for everyone and their views), but what I observe leaves me me saddened, frightened, bereft: I spent months listening, watching, analysing, reading, fact-checking. There is always one part of the country that is reveling and the other wallowing. There’s never a combo thereof, never a mid-point or the dropping of the ego. I am beginning to think this country needs a “two-state solution.”

I will leave it at that. This is not a page about religious or political beliefs which are virtually one and the same, and should remain as private.

So what is this all about? I think it is all about grief. The grief I never dealt with, the grief for what I have repressed, and the grief that comes from fear of the unknown. I have suffered loss of people close to me, loss of another piece of my body, loss of my youth, loss of the well-being that I probably never really appreciated.

November will never be the same, and I am not sure if I can hang the Happy Birthday sign again.