Their birthday, again

Another year. Another birthday that belongs to someone who isn't here to have it.

The first one was sharp. You may remember it clearly or barely at all. But this isn't the first one anymore. This is the accumulation — year after year of counting an age they'll never reach.

After someone dies by suicide, birthdays carry a particular mathematics. They would have been twenty-five. Thirty. Forty. Fifty-three. The number keeps climbing, and with each year, the gap between who they were and who they might have been grows wider.

You find yourself imagining the life that didn't happen. Would they have finished their degree? Had children? Moved overseas? Changed careers? Found help? The imagined life runs alongside the real one — yours — and the distance between the two is its own kind of grief.

Your relationship to this day will change over time, and it won't change in a straight line. Some years the birthday will flatten you. Other years it will feel almost manageable — and then you'll feel guilty for not being more devastated.

Some people find the day shifts from pure pain to something more complicated. Sadness mixed with gratitude. Missing them mixed with something that, on a good year, might be called celebration. Not celebration that they're gone — celebration that they existed. That distinction matters, and it's one that only you can draw.

You get to decide what this day is. Every year, you get to decide again.

Some years you might mark it with a ritual — a candle, a meal, a visit to their grave or their favourite place. Some years you might spend it with people who knew them, sharing stories. Some years you might spend it alone. Some years you might do nothing at all.

None of these is the right way. The right way is the way that's true for this year, even if it's different from last year. The relationship with their birthday is alive — it changes as you change.