I don’t know why we place more emphasis on some birthdays than others. Why is 16 more significant than 17? Why are multiples of 5 more significant than multiples of 4 or 6? I don’t know who decides these things or on what basis, but I suppose 25 is significant because it marks a quarter of a century. Though it is an uneven number it somehow feels like a round number—a particularly meaningful one.
Today is Nick’s 25th birthday. Or is it better to say that it would be his 25th birthday? I’m not sure. Either way, though a quarter of a century has passed and so many memories have been lost to time, there is still so much I remember about March 5, 2000—the excitement of knowing the day had come at last, the helplessness of watching Aileen in labor, the awe of witnessing childbirth, the joy of meeting my firstborn. It is a day that remains set apart in my mind and memory, set apart in our family lore.
For 20 years we celebrated March 5 and for five years we have mourned it. For 20 years it was a day that evoked gratitude for a wonderful gift and for 5 years it has been a day that evokes grief for a tremendous loss. Of course, gratitude and grief are not opposite to one another and do not cancel each other out. It is possible to be grateful and grieved. And that is how I feel today—still grateful for Nick’s life even as I grieve his death.
It’s rare for me to read my books after they’ve been published, but I do find myself picking up Seasons of Sorrow from time to time. Seasons was written as blog articles and journal entries long before I imagined it being collected, collated, and bound into a book. In that way, it is an urgent and in-the-moment series of reflections on loss. I find myself increasingly glad that I wrote it as I did, for so much is different now. I have become a seasoned sufferer instead of an unseasoned one. I have learned to live with sorrow instead of being crushed by it. I could never go back and capture the poignancy, urgency, bewilderment, and brokenheartedness of those early days. I would necessarily make it seem easier than it was, to transpose my five-years-later settledness onto those days when I was so severely tested. The book captures moments in time that I’d never be able to re-capture today.
Aileen and I often consider that bound to missing Nick is missing our old lives. The loss of our son and the loss of our innocence are inseparably bound together. Our old lives were good. We had many pleasures and few griefs, many joys and few sorrows. But now grief is always close at hand, always just beneath the surface, always able and willing to swell up at the smallest provocation. Yet joys and pleasures are also always close at hand and we are determined that we will not neglect these joys nor allow sorrow to overwhelm them. If we are responsible to steward our griefs surely also our joys, and to entrust them all to the Lord. We are grateful that each March 5 without Nick is just a bit easier than the one before.
The reality I struggle to admit to myself these days is that Nick is beginning to fade into the past. Photos of the two of us look a little less familiar than they once did, almost like they are snapshots of someone else’s life rather than mine. It’s not that he has become a stranger but just that he’s so much less familiar than he once was. I don’t think I could prove it, but I’m pretty sure a day has now gone by when I didn’t think of him even once. I still miss him dreadfully. I still long to see him. But he exists in my past, not in my present.
Yet my confidence has not wavered that he exists in my future as well, that after a few more birthdays have passed, or perhaps many more birthdays have passed, we will be reunited. And nothing has dimmed my anticipation of that day. Nothing has diminished my longing for the joy he and I will experience when we can finally throw our arms around one another and rejoice in God’s salvation. Nothing has dimmed my confidence that Christ has risen and, therefore, Nick and I will rise as well—rise to be with Christ and rise to enjoy him together.
Finally, here are a few glimpses of March 5 in years past:
