Another birthday for you

A couple of months ago I was cleaning out my old room at my father's home and I found an old newspaper obituary page dated July 2007. My father had spotted the name of the mother of one of my high school classmates that day and saved it for me. Out of some kind of morbid interest, or enthusiastic disinterest in any actual cleaning, I ended up absorbing myself in that page for a half hour or so in the creaky chair in front of my old bed.

I read through the words dedicated to Sean's mother once or twice, reveling in what few but warm memories I have of her. And after that I scanned the rest of the entries too. I don't know what I was looking for, exactly--a kind of kinship, maybe, or another name I would recognize. There was none; only the long faceless patter of names and affections played out on any midweek obituary page, the doctor who loved, the father who tried, each glimmer equal parts familiar and faraway.

But then a small sheepish rectangle of text on the periphery caught my eye. This is what it said:

In Memoriam: Mitchell Evan Gordon

7/26/54 - 9/12/87

Another birthday for you, Mitch, without you being here. Though the years have been slipping by, our love and thoughts for you are always in our hearts, and always will be. You have left us with so many beautiful memories and we are holding on to them lovingly. We will never stop missing you.

Love and Kisses,

Mom, Dad, and all of our family

That was all. But I couldn't stop reading and rereading it. Just thinking about what went into writing that piece. And how they write to him in the paper on his birthday, year after year. And whether it's the same text, only copied-and-pasted. I doubted that. Whether it's easy or hard, and whether it hurts them or helps them, to pay for this intimate ritual every July for three decades, to write it and then see it in print. Whether they can afford it, and not just financially. Who these people are.

Who Mitch was. What it must be like to die at age 33. Just under three and a half years after I was born Mitchell Evan Gordon passed from this sphere. And how it must make him feel, if he's looking down on them through cherubic morning spectacles from that big breakfast table in the sky, to know that at least one day of the year there'll be something just for him. And whether he would care that it's so public, or if he minds that his little obituary box looks so small and unassuming sandwiched between all those big time captains of industry and dearly beloved recently departeds.

I grabbed some scissors and cut out the entry for safekeeping. What else could I do? It felt important enough to do something with.

Sure enough, though, time passed. Somehow or other the worn and grease-staining clipping ended up in my car. I'm lucky it didn't get thrown away in one of my bicentennial purges. I found it just the other night and immediately the same feeling came flooding back: that this was something to protect. This time, though, I couldn't help wondering if there was some larger significance. Why it was that providence brought this little snippet from another world to my attention once again?

My own 24th birthday draws near, filling me with anxiety about the future. Am I moving quickly enough toward my goals? Will I ever reach them? Do I even know what they are? Am I already too old? Am I talented enough? Am I wasting time? Am I in the right line of work? Will I even be able to pay my rent next month?

But the joy of life lies in weathering its challenges, and none so greater than those within. In all I'm profoundly lucky to be alive, and I know it. The alternative feels, at times, merely a hair's breadth away, that minuteness of a box on the obituary page that few, if any, ever read.