Another Birthday

In Germany, there is a tradition to "celebrate your birthday in," that is, you start to celebrate the night before, coming up to midnight, as it turns into your birthday ("reinfeiern").

For the past 25 years, I have celebrated my birthday in with Cliff and a bottle of champagne or sparkling wine.

When we first got together, he took me out to a very exclusive restaurant in London and at the end of the evening, he ordered champagne before presenting me with a large bouquet of daffodils, my favourite flower, apologising all the while that they didn't cost very much. They were beautiful.

There were a few notable exceptions.

When I turned 40, he said that perhaps we should wait with the champagne until the following day, a break from all tradition. I had no idea why until he woke me up at 6am the next morning and told me to pack my bags. We flew the Piper Saratoga to Morocco and spent a long weekend in Marrakesh, where there was equally no champagne but we had some illicit warm beer to make up for it.

I was in London at midnight before my 51st birthday. I had three different opportunities in three different countries all collide into the same three week period. My birthday present from Cliff that year was that he cancelled the trip that he planned for my birthday so that I had a spare week in which to organise everything else. I returned on the evening of my birthday and he greeted me at the door with a bouquet of roses, a bottle of champagne, and the information that my bath was ready.

For my 53rd birthday, Cliff bought me an expensive bottle of Veuve Clicquot. He had only one glass and then had to go and lie down. We didn't know, then, that it would be the last alcoholic drink he would ever drink. A few weeks later, I felt so guilty because the doctors, suspecting alcoholism, wanted to wait for him to have gone six weeks without a drink before intervening. If it wasn't for my birthday, he would have done the six weeks already. Now I just feel guilty that his last drink was my favorite and not his.

By my next birthday, he was gone.

I remember someone buzzing at the front door of the building, telling me that he had flowers to deliver. For a moment, I thought that maybe they were from Cliff, that he had managed to place an order before he died to ensure I got flowers on my birthday. It all happened much too suddenly for that, of course. It was a potted plant that someone had sent me for condolences, someone who didn't even know it was my birthday that day. I remember thinking that it was a bad idea to give a plant to someone who couldn't even keep her boyfriend alive. But the plant thrived despite me and eventually I gave it to someone who would look after it better.

This is, to the best of my knowledge, the last bottle of Demon Champagne from the batch that Cliff commissioned in 1998. We had a tradition where I had to "earn" a bottle through short story sales but on my birthday, I could have as much as I wanted.

People tell me that it'll get easier and I'm sure that it is true. I try to remain focused on the future and on the beautiful things around me. I am still experiencing life and I am planning more adventures. But for tonight, I just wanted to be left alone with my champagne and my memories. We never had an anniversary but he always told people that we had a special song: "She's My Girl" by Tom Lehrer. I might try to listen to it when the champagne gets low.