It would have been my mum’s 90th birthday today and it is a funny sort of a day. Everything is fine, but there is no balance here; I can’t really weigh up any pros and cons to it, such as “life would not be what it is now if she was still alive”, and “it might not have been a fun day if she was a very poorly 90 years old” and “she lives on in me and my brothers, my sister and my nieces and nephew” etc.
Those are the thoughts that balance out the rest of the year where I find myself zooming along through my own life perfectly fine, despite living in that reality of hang-on-my-parents-are-dead-
But there are a few days, like birthdays and anniversaries of the day they died which are not so easy to zoom through. Where the bike doesn’t defy gravity and is a heavy, complicated thing. They don’t have to be the worst days ever, but they are just not the same. Days like these remind you more that they really are gone, and however it was that they died it’s not really as neat and tidy as you can make the rest of your life on days other than these.
Something really is missing on days like today… 11 years of it not being the same sort of day as it used to be? Something like that.