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

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