Happy Birthday

Speaking of birthdays, my mother would have been 74 today had she lived. Before J. Caesar got wacked, March 15 (the Ides of March) in Rome was a day of martial festivals dedicated to the God Mars (is that redundant?). I’m not sure what festivals were held in Warwick, Georgia in 1936 to celebrate the birth of a baby girl to a store owner and his wife, but the Great Depression has even yet never really ended in South Georgia, so I can only imagine what the mood was like then.

My mother would have been nine years old when the Second World War ended. She would have been 13 when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, and she would have been 19 when Albert Einstein died. She would have been almost 29 when the March on Selma demonstrated how truly shallow much of our nation’s commitment to justice and equality was, and she would have been 32 when the Watergate was burglarized by Nixon’s clowns, just months before her death. She was 24 when I was born and I was 12 when she died. She was gone before I was old enough to think to ask her about her life and how she felt the first time she heard “Rock Around the Clock” or if she screamed when she saw “Psycho”.

She died of breast cancer and it took quite some time. She underwent several surgeries, which seemed at the time more like ritual mutilations; perhaps the doctors were Aztecs. Cobalt 60 made her hair fall out and made her tired. The creeping realization of the inevitable made her eyes anxious but her words remained strong and the conflict between the two could not be emotionally reconciled by a 12 year old mind. Towards the end, morphine made her incoherent and after her death I was forced by well-meaning adults to view her lifeless corpse, as if I needed such confirmation after having watched the life slowly leak out of her for over a year. Her grave is on a hill underneath some large oaks which do not contemplate the briefness of their existence.

It is impossible to estimate the true impact of the absence of something, but I know my life is not what it would have been had she not died so young. Perhaps she could have given me some clues about overcoming the foolishness that comprised the greater part of my youth. Perhaps she would have helped me care about things that were really important. Perhaps she would have helped me be less flawed in many ways. No one can say. Some physicists believe that the quantum structure of the universe requires all possible outcomes to be manifest in some amended version of our reality in all the infinite combinations dictated by random probability. While this is not necessarily all good news, since theoretically somewhere Hitler won the war and Disco is still king, it would mean that in some version of reality my mother is around to enjoy her 74th birthday, a privilege denied in this so much less than perfect crapshoot of a world.