Today is Megan’s birthday. She will be 28. It will be her second birthday since Maxx died. When I was 26 I had been married for a year. When she turned 26, her baby brother had been sick with cancer for 2 months. Tonight we will have dinner and hug her, give her a few gifts, try to be together in some form for three or four hours as a family—shattered as we are—without Maxx. The idea of marking anything except the time passed in months, and eventually years, since his absence feels absurd. And for the most part we don’t even try. In fact, we do the opposite. We hide, we ignore, we live through until the next day.

But Megan’s birthday we will not wave aside, nor would we if we could. She is my firstborn. My only daughter. And I remember her baby days, her childhood with great love. Megan taught me how to be a mother. She awakened within me all the love I was meant to express. She turned my life from “me” into a state of “another,” a dynamic, electrified giving response mode—switched on and never turned off--that has determined the course and shape of my life all these many years since she was forcibly pulled from my body. I think she must have known, even then, that this was probably not a space she wanted to enter. This world.

But despite her fierce desire to stay put both within me and, failing that, in a universe where only immutable goodness and justice exists, and my inability to sustain that universe for her, loving Megan taught me how to love Maxx. She is the reason I live now. And it is her birthday.

My beautiful, smooth skinned, peach complected, intelligent, funny girl with the shining hair, hazel eyes, and delicate features. My lovely daughter whose heart is lonely and aching for her brother’s smile, wit, his gruff, but genuine expressions of care.

Her poor broken-hearted birthday.