B –
Today is your birthday. The last one in your 30’s and it’s such a strange thing to type out knowing that you haven’t been here to even finish celebrating the ones you had left in your 20’s. Leaving at 23 wasn’t ever in the cards for our life, even though we both knew the immense cost of what could happen when you left on that bus for your second deployment. However, absolutely no one ever believes it could happen to them. Until it does. For 16 years, I’ve mourned this day. Most years are easier than previous ones, but this one is extremely impactful. I want to think it’s because of going to your hometown to honor you for the memorial ceremony surfaced years of grief that I had buried – not because I didn’t want to feel it, but that I didn’t know how to do it in a way that would mean something. I had taken my grief and put it in a box and buried it in the deepest trenches of my soul. The deeper I suppressed it, the less it hurt. I still missed you, of course. That ache isn’t anything that burying my grief could ever rid my soul of. It is an ache that echoes through my bone marrow with no end in sight. The chasm of losing you, I’ve learned cannot be filled with anything but you. You’re no longer here to fill that space and so the shadow space that once held you stays empty. By now, I’m long acquainted with the shadow of you more than I ever seemed to be with the person who I loved for such a short time on this earth. Going to your hometown caused my grief to surface, brand new and raw. 16 years is a long time to ignore such a monumental loss. At 18, I grieved you the way I knew best. At 34, I’m grieving you all over again for the first time but at a higher cost. I know how long 16 years is. How much we could’ve accomplished as a married couple together – how drastically different my life would be if it hadn’t been you.

Every year, I wake up on November 3rd and think about this day so long ago. The last voicemail I ever received not realizing it would be the last time I’d ever hear your voice. It would be the last time I’d ever go to make a care package for you with all the things you loved, requested. I never realized the immense guilt that would settle into my heart of not answering the phone at dinner but knowing I wouldn’t have seen the call come through until I left with no way to call you back. My heart shatters when I think of you, my birthday boy, leaving out for the field not knowing that you’d never come back. I cry over you, over myself. I shatter, rebuild and shatter all over again. I stumble through your birthday knowing that November 4th is coming, and with that the news that you went missing. For 25 days, you stayed missing until you weren’t anymore. I’m reminded of the promise you made me that early August morning before you boarded the bus to Afghanistan that you’d come back to me. You kept your promise, just not the way we would’ve thought.

I’ve always thought about how I could do something so impactful with your birthday, the day after and the rest of November, but remembering you is all I’ve ever been capable of. I truly hope that it’s enough for you. You never were my big fanfare boy. You didn’t care for surprises, big events or grand gestures. You just wanted to be loved quietly, unconditionally, deeply and I will always do that. This will be the last year that we would both be in our 30’s together and that’s such a tough pill to swallow. To be honest with you B, I never imagined being older than you ever were. Yet, I’ve now lived almost 12 years more than you. Being older than you isn’t something I’m ready to admit, and I never want to stop imagining you on the other side aging with me.

39 would’ve been such a big year for you down here. The last of your 30’s and we’d have made it something to remember. Instead, this will be the year that I come face to face with 16 years of grief and trying to unravel myself from the choking knot that I’ve made of my feelings. Finding courage after all this time has exhausted me. I just want to make you proud. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I hope that I do. I miss you so much it hurts to breathe sometimes. I look for signs everywhere from you, every day in the hope that I’ll see something to remind me that you’re still here and you’re still watching. You always were the protective type, and I just can’t ever imagine you giving that part of yourself up on the other side. You were always the selfless one between the both of us.

I hope you’re having the best birthday up there in the clouds, my boy.

Until we meet again, I love you forever.

Happy birthday, B.