MY FIRST BIRTHDAY WITHOUT MY MOM

My mom had a tradition the night before my birthday. She would stay until midnight in New York—which wasn’t difficult given her aversion to going to bed—and call me at 9 p.m. Pacific time to wish me a happy East Coast birthday. I always made sure I was available for the call and would often wait with the phone in my hand to hear her welcome me, three hours early, into my new year. This Thursday night, my mom won’t be able to keep up our lovely tradition because she is dead.

Saying my mom is dead has become a kind of mantra that grounds me to my current reality. It’s not so much pouring salt in a wound as it is smelling those salts they give to people who have passed out. It awakens me to the fact that my world has been flipped upside down and the constant unmoored feeling in the pit of my stomach has a clear cause. I won’t receive a call not because I am less loved than I was last year but because the person who wants to call me physically can’t (due to our current understanding of physics and mortality). I like to imagine that she is somewhere I can’t see repeatedly trying to punch in my number similar to how I can never seem to get a cell phone to work correctly in a dream. The intention is there but we can’t quite get the buttons to work properly.