First Birthday...Memory

My first birthday without Chris has come and gone (28 again – I swear!). Ironically it wasn’t my actual birthday that bothered me so much it was two days later as I spent my Labor Day cleaning the house, filing paperwork, trying to get things organized that haven’t been organized pretty much since May as we kept just moving things around in different locations through each “life moment” that happened. Rob was working the fair which left me home to my own devices, and my own thoughts…….

Every year Chris invariably forgot my birthday and it would be a day or two afterwards that I would call him up and say – “nice job a**hole – you forgot my birthday again – so what are you going to buy me!!” And just about every year – at least from when I was 14 through about 24 – he promised to take me shopping. Which then became one of our many jokes - he even started doing it for Christmas at times….or at least telling me that when I would ask him what he was going to buy me for Christmas since I was his most favorite sister in the whole world!

My 18th birthday he did actually buy me something and he bought it about a week and a half early. Of course, that is only because I was at the mall (this was when he still worked at Ruby Tuesday’s in Montgomery Mall, PA) and I asked him how much money he was planning on spending on me for my birthday. I told him that I found a terry cloth bathrobe that I wanted and since I was leaving for college that weekend and needed one there – he should just give me the money to go buy it. He did that – I went off and bought it then gave him the bag to wrap it up for me - heh. This of course resulted in him throwing some napkins from the restaurant in the bag as tissue paper and giving it right back to me since I was the one who always wrapped his gifts for him!

And of course, my 21st birthday he had a gift as well. For my 21st birthday, my dad, both brothers and my godparents all chipped in for a limo to go to Atlantic City – timed so that I would walk onto the casino floor at the stroke of midnight as I turned 21. When each of us turned 21 dad took us to go gamble for the first time – since I was the youngest, when I turned 21 we went all out! I remember that Darren bought me a bottle of Dom Perignon for the occasion and Chris, in usual Chris fashion, bought me just about everything else he could find. There was a case of beer, there was Aftershock, there was the liquor that is chocolate on one side and cream on the other and you pour it out together, and there was champagne. Of course Chris had to ask me later whose champagne I liked better. I had to admit I preferred his $15 bottle over the $200 bottle – what can I say – I’m a cheap date (Rob and I even had $5 bottle Verdi as our official champagne toast at our wedding!) Of course, Chris being Chris used that to let me know that it was just really because he was the better brother!

There are my moments now when I still can’t believe that it is true – when I feel like this has all just been a horrible dream and Chris and I are just in another phase of our lives where we aren’t talking as much as usual. Chris and I used to talk about that on Tuesdays – how he kept hoping that it was all just a dream, that any morning he would wake up and realize that this whole “cancer-thing” had just been another nightmare he had and everything would be fine. I used to tell him that he didn’t need to wake up – that everything really would be fine someday – we just had to go through this crap to get there. He would tell me that his one nurse would ask him how he was coping with having “incurable cancer” and I would get so angry that she dared say that – there was no such thing as incurable, simply just not finding the right “chemo-cocktail” yet – ironic considering I was the one telling people to not live with regrets because I was trying to get others more involved. Now I just have to tell myself over and over that this isn’t really my own bad dream that I can wake up from, that it really has happened and as much as I secretly hope that this whole summer has just been another of my nightmares, that I know it’s really not.