The Last Birthday

A little over three month ago, a beloved friend from college died in his sleep on

a ski vacation. We hadn’t spoken in four and a half years.

But the evening before he died, literally hours before….

I reached out to wish him happy birthday. I didn’t plan it. I wasn’t keeping a calendar of old friendships. Something in me simply said: reach out now. So, I did. And the next morning, he was gone.

I’ve sat with that for weeks. Not with grief alone, though there is grief.

With wonder.

I believe our souls know, somewhere within thirty days, that we are coming to

transition. We don’t always understand what we are feeling. We just feel the

pull, a quiet insistence to call, to say the thing, to close the distance.

I’ve learned, in this work, to trust that pull. It is rarely random.

But here is what struck me most, and what I cannot stop turning over:

I was saying happy birthday to someone who was about to die.

Sit with that for a moment. We make such a beautiful fuss over birthdays. We

throw parties, we light candles, we gather the people we love and say, we are