In America, we tend to celebrate birthdays as a triumph over the sneaky, dark forces of mortality. One more year! I survived another year! As the saying goes, “Getting older is better than the alternative.”
When people die and stop getting older, often we keep celebrating their birthdays. Each year ceases to be a tick mark of longevity and becomes a tally of absence. So many years without a loved one. So many years since a celebrity departed. If you’re famous enough and dead long enough, eventually maybe we’ll turn your birthday into a national holiday. Later we’ll rearrange it to suit our schedule.
As you get older, the collection of ghost birthdays in your life grows larger and larger until you risk bumping into one at every turn. In October, I’ll observe my pop’s birthday for the first time without him, and my grandmother’s birthday after more than a decade without her. In November, my granddad’s birthday, two decades gone now, a thing unfathomable to me when that first ghost birthday came.
Today, the 29th of September, I observe the ghost birthday of Rilya Wilson. Today is her 18th birthday, the 14th since she went missing. I never met her, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about her, since I first read about her disappearance from a Florida foster home. At the time, I was working at a domestic violence shelter in Tampa, and my day-to-day interactions with victims of abuse gave me little hope that Rilya was alive. I’d seen how a flash of anger could break a child’s arm, or black her eye, or permanently damage his spine. I could imagine the ease with which an adult could purposefully or negligently kill a child. A kick, a punch, a “punishment” that went to far.
In some ways, it is this ghost birthday that clings to me more fiercely than any other. My grandparents are safely buried after long lives. My pop is still a fresh grief, but I keep part of him in a little jar on my kitchen window sill. Rilya is lost, her life cut short, and I want to be sure someone thinks about her on her birthday. Thanks for reading this and helping me do that.
My mother’s birthday is the day before my son’s birthday, so she always looms large in our memories when we celebrate his arrival into this world. She used to say his birth was the best birthday present, because she finally had her first grandson. (She didn’t consider what her remarks might sound like to her three granddaughters, but that was Mom, traditional Japanese until the day she died.)
You’re probably given Rilya more acknowledgement than what she ever experienced in her short life. I also look at the kids I work with and think how easy it is to injure those fragile little bodies, and I shudder. All kids deserve to be protected and loved. It’s too bad it’s not always by the ones who are charged to protect them.
I wish I knew what the solution was, but it is heartbreaking how many kids are living in fear and uncertainty. They all need to be safe and cared for. I wish I remembered where I read it, but I think often of this: Some kids get love at home and come to school to learn. Some kids come to school to get love. We need to be sure our system is catching these kids.
Beautiful piece. That’s all the words I got right now.