birthday

I'm a perpetually five-minutes-late kind of person. It's because I'm not good with transitions. Also, I have a compulsion to squeeze in one more thing before it's time to leave. I don't start putting Beatrice's shoes on until the minute we're supposed to be walking out the door. Ask my kids; it drives them crazy. We're almost on time guys, I say. Give me a break.

Twenty years ago today though, I arrived at Mike's family home seriously late - like two hours late - having gotten turned around on the way there after finishing my last final of my senior year of college. My car held neither GPS nor cell phone, nor yellowing misfolded map showing the details of the Wilmington suburbs, and when I discovered that 95 South was closed due to some emergent terrible accident I had absolutely no idea how to get to the Brogan's house. I pulled over at a gas station to ask for directions, got confused, pulled over again and asked for more directions, then eventually called from a pay phone. I was meeting Mike's family for the first time, and celebrating his birthday for the first time, too. Arriving hours late, flustered and hot with all my worldly limitations on display, felt terribly inauspicious.

What was it like? Well. It was 1998. For some reason I rememer that I was wearing a very baggy pair of cargo pants and a strappy red tank top. Is it possible I wore no bra? No bra at all? I was twenty and clueless and apparently did not think the as-yet-unknown sisters and mother of my new boyfriend would judge me or my weird floppy boobs. Maybe the world was a kinder place then.

The guest list indeed included Mike's parents and sisters, and I'm pretty sure his grandmother was there too. Ryan and Trevor, friends from Swarthmore, were also in town, hanging out in the backyard when I arrived. I didn't know Ryan well then (he gave one of Mike's eulogies) but I did know Trevor, and I remember him giving me a bemused, questioning look in greeting, eyebrows arched just so, that seemed to say: however is it that you find yourself here in Mike Brogan's suburban backyard surrounded by this lush green lawn and his many lovely family members, in the midst of an intimate birthday celebration? Meagan Howell, are you sure Mike Brogan is your boyfriend?

Because I still felt somewhat amazed that someone as handsome and brilliant and outrageously fucking cool as Mike Brogan was in love with me. An interloper. Maybe Trevor's look really just meant: fashionably late, are we? I've been waiting to play awkward frisbee with you for hours. But at the time I figured he was probably skeptical about the whole arrangement.

Mike greeted me with so much concern and understanding (I hadn't yet grasped how shockingly poor his own sense of direction was) and I desperately wanted to escape into an upstairs room with him. I had gotten into my dad's old Nissan Altima that morning feeling confident, elated to be finished with college and heading off on a sunny spring day to see Mike and meet his parents, who would surely love me too, but by the time I arrived I was sweaty, red-cheeked, and unexpectedly shy.

I didn't know how to act with Mike's family. Was I too weird? Uncouth? In those days Mike used to tease me by saying I was raised in a barn. (Because who wears a bra in a barn?) Would my patent barny-ness betray me? The whole birthday scene made me uneasy. I was (and still am) afraid of what Mike always called "lawn sports" and his backyard seemed to be the kind of setting in which one would be expected to play them. Casually. For fun. (Maybe everyone calls activities such as frisbee and softball and badminton that typically unfold at picnics lawn sports. Maybe I have assiduously avoided lawn sports my whole life and Mike, being my husband, was the only person intimate enough to facilitate the very few moments I was forced to participate in them and thus name them for me.) I'm miserable with flying objects.

But he loved them. He loved having a catch on a manicured lawn (despite later becoming a passionate grower of native plants and vegetables and wildflowers, and frequently bemoaning the monocultural evils of suburban lawns, he still loved them). He loved eating orange goldfish crackers by the handful, alongside a peanut butter sandwich. He loved talking Philly sports teams with his dad. He loved chocolate cake. He loved his birthday.

I saw these qualities for the first time, windows into Mike's childhood, on full, comfortable display that May 23rd in Delaware. My urban sophisticated philosopher was also a boyish suburban sports fan. I was fascinated. Also a little scared. I didn't know this world that he was from. I did just fine in his Brooklyn apartment, but could I fit into this place too?

That uneasiness I felt, alongside so many other emotions, is why I particularly remember Mike's mom Barbara drawing me aside at one point during the afternoon. She must of picked up on my self-consciousness. (An aside: I am SO GLAD to be done with the lingering insecurities of my twenties. Aren't you?) She told me that she'd been watching us talk together on the grass from her bedroom window, and she felt that anyone who elicited such tenderness and gentleness in her son was someone she knew she would love too. She said she'd never seen him behave quite that way with anyone, that it was a joy for her to see us together.

That was a gift. Exhale, Meagan. It's going to be okay.

Today Mike should be forty-three. He should be here with us, sharing the strawberry cake and whipped cream we made for him and took to the cemetery after school. We baked for him every year, even when he was sick, even when we knew it would be hard for him to swallow.

Because for Mike, birthday cake mattered. Celebrations mattered.

How could we not make him a cake today? I've been crying all day. My friends and family keep bringing me flowers and sending messages and offering hugs and I just keep crying.

I was hugging Frances in bed the other night, both of us so sad. I was looking out across the shadowy room, hearing the other children sleep, thinking this is so hard, so bleak, harder than anything in the world. And then I immediately thought how Mike can't have this pain with me. He can't hold our children in the night.

I was overwhelmed with anguish for him, my husband who had to contend with the loss of them, who knew he wouldn't be able to comfort them in their grief, or watch them grow. Our experiences throughout his illness were necessarily and frustratingly different; I was working harder than I can now imagine taking care of him and the children and everything else, while he was often suffering in body and spirit in a quiet room, reading the lives of the saints, wrestling with questions of faith and love and death, mourning the future he did not have. I couldn't contain all that then. I was already saturated. Now part of my sorrow is looking back and recognizing the pain of his grief. I can barely stand it.

I pray every morning and every night that God indeed had something extraordinary in store for Mike that none of us can possibly understand from where we are now. I pray God's grace that descended upon Mike in the moments leading to his death will touch me in some small way, and strengthen my own faith. Because that was how Mike could stand the pain of loss; he trusted God.

He often said he hoped in heaven he could sing. Brilliantly, purely, one voice in a beautiful heavenly choir. Mike, on your birthday, I hope you and all the angels and saints are making holy music together. I hope being with God is more than just a consolation for not being here with us on earth. I hope it is the fulfillment of a lifetime of yearning.

Even so. Even if it is. I miss you with an ache that never stops.