The Birthday You Do Not Know How to Spend

The calendar is the free one from the garage, and it is hanging on the same nail it has hung on for nine years, and it is open at the wrong month because nobody has turned it over.

She turns it over while the kettle is going. And there it is. The fourteenth, in blue biro, circled, because she circled it in January the way she circles it every January, sitting at this table with the new calendar flat in front of her and a cup going cold, doing the birthdays the way her mother taught her to do the birthdays.

She circled it in January. Her mother died in March.

Eleven days from now.

She stands there with her hand still on the page. Behind her the fridge does the thing it does. Outside somebody's car alarm goes off and stops. And what she is actually looking at is not a date, it is the garden center café, the table by the window with the wonky leg, the terrible carrot cake her mother ordered every single year and never finished, and the twenty minutes afterwards in the plant section where nothing was ever bought and everything was picked up and put back down.

The family group has been quiet for a fortnight. She knows exactly why it is quiet. Everyone in it has looked at the same date and nobody is going to be the one to type first, because whatever you type is wrong. Shall we do something? is wrong. Are we doing anything? is wrong. And saying nothing is also wrong, and everyone knows it, and so the message sits there unwritten in four different phones.

That is where she is. And now I have to stop, because you are standing somewhere just like it.

Yours might be in March. Yours might be the day after tomorrow. Yours might be your husband's, or your son's, or the birthday of a person you were not officially allowed to grieve in public, so nobody has even thought to check on you about it.

And here is what nobody tells you. The dread starts weeks out. It is not the day that has been eating you, not yet. It is the eleven days in front of the day, the slow approach of it, the way it sits in the corner of every hour like something in the room breathing.

And you have no plan. You cannot think of a single thing to do on that morning that does not feel like either a performance or an abandonment. Do something and it is forced. Do nothing and it is as if the day did not matter, and it matters more than almost any day in the year.

You cannot skip it. That is the thing about a date. It is coming whether or not you are ready, it does not care that you have not decided, and it will arrive at midnight like every other day in the calendar.

You do not have to spend that day well

Before anything else, let me clear some things out of this room, because people have been putting them in here and they do not belong.

Your mother did not die so that something could be learned. This did not happen for a reason. There is no door that closed and no window opened somewhere down a corridor, and nobody up there needed her more than the people at that table with the wonky leg. If somebody has said any of that to you, they were frightened and they were reaching, and you may set it down. Scripture calls death an enemy. It never once calls it a lesson.

And I am not going to hurry you toward a hallelujah. Not today, not eleven days out, not with a date coming at you like that.

So let me say the actual weight of it out loud instead.

The second year is often harder than the first, and almost nobody warns you. In the first year everyone is around you and the world is still stunned with you. By the second, the casseroles have long stopped, people have stopped saying the name, and your grief has started to feel slightly inconvenient, so it gets done privately, on schedule, in the car.

And there is the arithmetic nobody admits to. You know exactly how old she would have been on the fourteenth. You worked it out without meaning to, the way you work out the change from a note.

And there is the fear underneath all of it, the one that makes the day so frightening. That if you get it wrong, if you spend it badly, if you go to work and it passes almost normally, then some thread will have been let go of. As if remembering were a job with a standard, and you the only one left to keep it.

Now hear how God describes what He does with a grieving person, and read it slowly, because it is one of the strangest and tenderest sentences in the whole book.

You have kept count of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your record?Psalm 56:8

He is counting the wanderings. Not the achievements. The wanderings, the back and forth, the pacing, the nights you got up and moved around the house because lying down was unbearable. That line has stood in Scripture for three thousand years, and His Spirit puts it in your hallway at four in the morning rather than in somebody else's.

And the tears are in a bottle.

Do you understand what that means? It is not a poetic way of saying He notices. A bottle is a container and it is for keeping. You keep what you value. Your tears, the ones you cried in the shower where nobody would hear, the ones on the fourteenth of last year, the ones that will come at some ordinary moment on this fourteenth when a woman in a queue laughs the same way she did, are not spillage. They are not a mess to be cleaned up before you are fit to pray. They are being collected, deliberately, by God.

And there is a record. It is written down, and the Holy Spirit reads it over you in the present tense while the kettle goes.

David wrote that in the middle of being hunted, not afterwards from safety. Four lines earlier he says, on the day I am afraid, I put my trust in You. He is not describing a feeling he has recovered. He is doing something in the middle of the fear, in the middle of the running, on the day itself.

So hear me, because this is the whole of what I have to give you today and it is enough.

You do not have to spend that day well.

There is no correct way to observe the fourteenth. There is no version of it that God is standing over with a clipboard. You may go to the garden center and sit at the table with the wonky leg and order the terrible carrot cake, or you may drive straight past it and go to work and say nothing to anybody all day. You may lie down at two in the afternoon. You may laugh at something and then feel awful for laughing, and the laughing is allowed too.

Whatever the day turns out to be, every tear in it is already accounted for by a God who keeps them.