Happy Birthday




Yesterday was Dan's birthday. He would be 38 if he were still alive. I don't know what that makes him since hes not. For 5 months hes two years older then me instead of one and I would tease him about how much older he is then me. How he's an old man now.  How I'm so young compared to him. I mean 38 is practically 40 I would have said. We might as well just say your 40 old man.  We didn't do any of that. He's not here to tease about growing old with me, or before me.

Last year for his birthday I was still in a fog. (I might still be now, I really don't know). The entire family went out to dinner at his favorite restaurant Red Lobster. 25 people. The biggest birthday party Dan ever had and he wasn't even there. Then we sent him balloons with messages on them and did fire works.

Dan was never really big on birthdays, A total introvert he hated parties and big crowds. Usually for his birthday we would send baby girl to grandmas and have a date day. See a movie, go treasure hunting, eat lunch somewhere other then McDonalds. Then we would have dinner and cake with his parents. They were good birthdays. They were what Dan wanted, to spend it with us.

Baby girl loved picking out presents for Dan. She would pick out things she thought he would like (because they were things she liked so why wouldn't daddy like them) A teddy bear one year, A baby doll one year. Once she really wanted to get him this ceramic doll dancing in a bright pink dress. It took a lot of convincing that maybe daddy would like something else better. She relented sadly.

I always thought Dan was hard to shop for. Especially since his birthday was in December. I had to find presents twice in one month. He always said "i'm easy to shop for just get me a tattoo" Uh yes babe you would like that but a tattoo is not in our budget. either are the awesome antiques I know you would love. I guess I should say finding him presents in our budget was hard. If we were millionaires there's all kinds of things I would have bought him. If I had known we wouldn't have the rest of our lives together I would have bought him anything he wanted just to make him smile more.

This year for his birthday we were going to do the same thing. The whole family was going to go out to cheesecake factory.  Baby girl woke up with a sore throat and not feeling well. So we decided to be more low key and just have pizza at home. I still ran up to cheesecake Factory to get a cheesecake. That place was crazy busy and loud, I'm glad we stayed home, Dan would have like it better anyway. So we ate pizza, and had cheesecake, we set off fireworks and sent messages to Dan on flying wish paper. We told funny stories about Dan. It was a good birthday party. Dan wasn't there. For the second year we celebrated his birthday without him.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my...
Read more

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h...
Read more

My therapist told me to start a blog

Image
My therapist told me to start a blog. She thinks I have something worth while to say. Something? Yes. Worth while? I guess we will find out. I mean, everyone and their dog has a blog, right? What makes me so special? At the very least, I hope it will be cathartic. Here is the short story, which I will elaborate on in future blogs. Eighteen months ago, I was 34. I had a 7 1/2 year old daughter. I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we were still madly in love with each other. It was like a fairy tale; we liked to compare ourselves to Wesley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride. We were in the process of adopting a baby. And then we weren't. And then it was gone. In a second, literally one second, he was gone. My husband Dan died, extremely suddenly and unexpectedly. All day long he was fine. We went downtown to our favorite bookstore, we ate lunch, we had dinner, we went to bed at 11. At 11:15 I called 911. At 12:01 am on January 12, 2015, Dan was pronounced dead on...
Read more