Tomorrow would have been his 29th birthday.  When we were together, every February as my birthday approached I could look forward to him teasing me about being an 'older woman' and a cradle robber.  I had a particularly expressive eye roll that I saved for such occasions. 

I'm not looking forward to tomorrow.  

I wrote to his parents, because I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it will be for them.  I always worry about what to say - can I say anything to them about him that won't hurt?  So many times I've started to write and just found myself unable to say anything.  But I couldn't not write this time, whether it hurts or not.  So I wrote about the gifts he gave me. 

I learned new ways to appreciate music and film from him.  He was interested in the technical side of media, and he taught me to listen to how a song is mixed and the way a film is put together.  Sometimes, listening to us talk over coffee after one of our regular trips to The Charles or The Senator, you might think we'd just seen entirely different movies:  I'd be exclaiming over the script and the acting, he'd be critiquing the cinematography and sound design, and we sometimes had wildly divergent opinions of the movie as a result.  Despite my natural preference for the verbal over the visual, something was bound to sink in over the years, and now I have a much richer appreciation of film in particular, although his way of viewing media affected how I watch TV and look at more traditional art forms, as well.

He had a way of being in the moment that I learned to appreciate deeply.  I don't know that I learned it myself, but it was a pleasure to watch him  immerse himself in whatever he was doing at the moment, and let other concerns go.  It happened most often when he was painting, but he had a capacity for just enjoying things - a good meal, a cigar, a song - that I didn't entirely understand, but at least grasped that it was possible.  He helped me learn not to live in my head so much.

Most of all, he gave me his support.  He said 'Don't worry about me', never 'don't go'.  And while I'm still not over the loss of that support, the loss of him, I also now know that I have lots of other people offering me their own gifts: their love, their concern, their time, their attention, their own ways of being in the world.  I wish there was a less final, and a less painful, way to have learned the value of that, but I have chosen to think of it as his last gift to me.

'Poppies' 

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

~Mary Oliver