No matter what day it is, it’s someone’s birthday.  And that’s a great thing — I love birthdays!  Not just my own, which in our household has evolved from a single day to more of what my husband calls my “Birthday Season.”  He says this usually while rolling his eyes and lamenting my enthusiasm for baubles and cake.

My birthday season is about a two month period before and after my special day where my friends and family insist on squiring me about town, treating me to dinners, events and presents.  I really do have the best people in my life — I’m very lucky!  And I know I must sound spoiled, but it isn’t one sided — it is my immense pleasure to reciprocate this indulgence with all of these wonderful people who enrich my life so.  Little gives me more good feelings than helping others to celebrate their birthdays.  I think that, in this world, everyone deserves a day (or more!) where they feel special and can celebrate being here.  It’s sad that this isn’t more widely embraced by the world.

Most people these days don’t share this appreciation for this annual milestone because it reminds them of things they’d rather not dwell on:  that they’re getting older…that they aren’t as fit/capable/thin/happy as they used to be….that, someday, they’re going to die.  But I say, “Isn’t that the point?”  Commemorating the day you were born is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  Someday we will run out of them and I’m happy that today isn’t that someday.  For me or for you.

I never knew my maternal grandparents.  My grandfather died before I was born.  My grandmother died when I was a baby.  And my mother died at the age of 42, when I was 12.  My family history isn’t Methuselaic.  They all had cancer, which is, as everyone knows, a bitch of a disease, to fight through or to die from.  And you know, if you’ve read past musings here, that, as of February 13, I will be an 8 year survivor of cancer, myself.  Luckily, I had a highly treatable form of cancer.  Really it’s one of the least awful kinds.  But as anyone who’s fought the disease knows, you always wonder when it’s coming back.  I do.  In the back of my mind, I always suspect that that’s how I’ll go, no matter how healthy I am, how many years pass….someday it’ll be back and I’ll have that moment thinking, “There you are again, old nemesis.”  Because that’s what cancer does.  It wins.  That’s the lesson I learned at 12.  No matter how much medicine, how many doctors, how many get well cards you crayon, cancer eventually….always…wins.

Now I know intellectually that this fear isn’t reality.  Plenty of people beat it and meet their end in other, unrelated, ways.  But that didn’t stop me from commemorating October 16, 2011.  Was that my birthday…?  No. It was the day I officially lived longer than my mother.  I celebrated.  And I cried.  For the fact that she, and so many others, had no more birthdays to celebrate.

The American Cancer Society’s motto is “The Official Sponsor of Birthdays.”  I love this…this is important.  Because they’re worth celebrating.  For you.  For me.  For her.

She would have been 76 today.