3 Days in Summer

How often it is that the unexpected triggers a return to memories. My daughter finishes school for the summer holidays in a week, her first year done and dusted. In the end-of term run up, though, she won’t be told to gather with the ‘other summer birthdays’ in front of a whole school assembly for a communal well-wishing. My brother and I, with August birthdays 3 days apart, were always given that dubious honour during our primary years together.

It was never so much the 3-year part of our age gap that bothered me; rather the 3-day element, Martin’s birthday inconveniently (I often perceived) following mine. I do, for instance, recall one occasion when, such was the level of my annoyance at seeing him playing with my birthday presents, coupled with being armed with knowledge of what exactly he was due to receive in 2-days-time, that I was unable to curb the jealousy and revealed the secret to him to get him to just buzz off. It worked – he was ecstatic, and I regained control over my toys. But my mother’s furious glare, prompted by his tattling on what I’d blurted out, was more than a little guilt inducing. Bad sister.

Fast forward to now, and I would be lying if I said that 3 days matters not at all. I’m not going to lie, the gap between our ‘big days’ has played its part in anger-periods post-his-suicide, simply because it is impossible to forget that 3 days after my birthday, we (especially my parents and I) are also called upon to mark another age that he has not reached. How can you fully celebrate your own still-being-here with a looming sense of such a sad-marker-date so close? How just not fair is it that parents are called upon to be happy for one child whilst in the build-up of a loss-reminder for another?

Even the approach to each birthday, as well as the day itself, since Martin’s passing in 2011 has become a little harder. Whilst I’m in no doubt the sands and waters of Cancún, where I intend to be for this year’s anniversary, will be an aid to happier senses of my advancing years, and whilst I also appreciate the continued care of friends and family in showing and sending love, there is still a part of me that finds my acquiring a larger-number-label difficult, just because the day inevitably prompts reflection on and visitation to ‘the past’. Most recently, I have found myself finally realising, as odd as that may sound, that my brother is not aging as I am, that he has already missed a great deal of my life (and I his) to the point of asking, “would we recognise or really know one another at all now?” A chief part of my brother’s ‘hilariously unique’ take on birthday wishes to me included reminders of ‘your body-clock’s ticking, better have a baby’ – I’m way past that point now, so I can’t help but wonder, what would his-age-related-ribbing reference now? I can comment ‘Martin would have said/done this’ or ‘loved/hated that’ all I like, but the truth is, had he lived, his life/experiences may have altered his shape and thought in a way I might not have expected. I don’t and can’t know who he’d be, what he’d think now, at his age. And I don’t really like the idea of putting words in a never-reached-but-still-nearly-34-year-old Martin’s mouth…

Oh, woe is me, etc. etc. As always, it’s remarkably easy to swiftly fall into sadness if there’s no challenge to think about things in a different light. It would be wrong of me to say that frustration at close birthdays was the prevailing emotion as we grew – we did have good ones. I did for instance have a rather excellent party, built on a posh dinner party theme, for which my brother performed the chief waiter role rather (surprisingly…) superbly. In return, I proper engaged myself at one of his, a full-on pirate-themed affair.

Because of our birthdays being so close during the summer holidays, they have left me with some images to remember, like us having a Christmas tree up in August at his request; him decked out as a roman soldier parading up and down Hadrian’s Wall; him not exactly taking the sport seriously whilst playing on the ‘very proper’ Brora Golf Club course and so on.

Martin was the first person to greet me on my 18th, bucks fizz in hand, and some of my favourite photos are of us at my ensuing party, his hair spiked with blue, us dancing and sipping cocktails together. Happy, laughter-filled observances.

Maybe the task now then is simply to learn to accept that whilst Martin and I can no longer have more birthdays closely together, we did share some good ones, and it is the memories of these, rather than the regrets for future anniversaries, that should be remembered, clung to, and cherished as enablers of a sunnier tone for each year more of mine.

“Yet though the ocean with waves unending covers the earth

Yet is there loss after all?

For what e’er drifts from one place  is with the tide to another brought

And there’s naught lost beyond recall which cannot be found if sought.”

(Anne Dudley, taken from How the Tide Rushes In)