How do you celebrate the birthday of a dead loved one?
I wish I had the answer. I wish there was an answer. But the reality is, there’s no clear set of directions for what you’re supposed to do when the calendar says it’s time to celebrate the day one of your favorite people was born, but no matter how great of a party you plan, the guest of honor won’t be able to join.
Whenever days like this start looming closer on my calendar, I start overthinking. It’s that anticipatory grief, trying to prepare for a day I’m dreading, without actually knowing how I will feel when it gets here.
This year, I was reminded that my overthinking and planning can only go so far - what I really need to do on days like this is be open to what the universe (or maybe my mom) has in store.
The morning before Mom’s birthday, I woke up on the couch at my friend’s house in Portland. We had gone out to dinner the night before and I decided to sleep over. I was slowly waking up and trying to motivate myself to drive home and get things done around the house. So I did the exact opposite of what would motivate me to get moving: I scrolled Instagram.
You know that feeling when you’re scrolling and scrolling, not sure exactly what you’re looking for, but you feel like you’ll know when you find it? It usually doesn’t actually lead anywhere except dopamine and a little nervous system regulation.
But this time… I actually found it.
A friend’s Instagram story from the night before showed they had gone to a 40th anniversary of the movie Stand By Me - my mom’s favorite movie of all time. It had been in Seattle, so I quickly searched to see if it was coming to Portland.
It was. In 8 hours.
Now, if your brain is anything like mine, you might currently be thinking, “ok, the movie came out 40 years ago, so if they’re celebrating it on the anniversary, that’s just a coincidence that it’s your mom’s birthday weekend.”
But the movie was originally released in August. The cast started doing this anniversary tour in December 2025. The tour runs through June. You’re telling me it’s really “just a coincidence” that the showing closest to where I live is the day before her birthday? Tell me that if you want, but I won’t believe you.
Obviously, I bought a ticket. I didn’t try to find a friend to join me, because my mom taught me long ago how nice it is to go to a movie by yourself. So I would sit alone - surrounded by thousands of other fans of the movie, of course.
I arrived downtown and parked, remembering the time years ago when my mom visited me and we totally lost the car in downtown Portland. We spent at least 45 minutes walking around and laughing while we searched for where we parked it.
So this time, I took a picture of my spot and marked the location on my phone. Thanks for the reminder, Mom.
Sitting down in the theater to watch the movie, the emotions started hitting. Being in a room surrounded by others who loved my mom’s favorite movie felt powerful.
I have to admit, it had been decades since I watched Stand By Me. So I kind of forgot that the movie is really a story about grief and loss. When the movie started and this realization hit me, I locked in for extra tears. (Side note: a friend saw my Instagram story about going to this movie for Mom’s birthday, and responded, “You must really like crying, don’t you?” And he’s not wrong.)
The movie was amazing, of course, and then came a Q&A with three of the members of the original cast. It was hilarious and totally unhinged, as they relived their preteen glory days of filming this movie. Mom would have loved getting to hear all of the behind the scenes stories they shared.
Of course, it wasn’t all laughs, as there were some important people missing from the stage. There were two empty chairs, for Rob Reiner and River Phoenix.
But that wasn’t the only empty seat in the theater.
When I bought my ticket earlier that day, my seat was the only one available in the row. But no one ever showed up to sit in the seat to my left. I will never know why that person no-showed. But to me, it felt like that seat was saved for my mom.
After the show ended, I realized that I had been so excited for the movie that I forgot to eat dinner. It was now 11pm on a Sunday, which, even in a lively city like Portland, meant that there weren’t many food options still open. But you know what is still open at that time?
Falafel food carts. And that is exactly what Mom would have picked for her birthday dinner.
I ate my late-night falafel (which had SO much sauce on it - and Mom always asked for extra), and thought about all the times we went out for Greek food for Mom’s birthday when she was alive.
When I woke up the next morning, it was her actual birthday. I knew I needed to get home and be productive, but I had to make one stop on the way: to buy Mom her favorite flowers.
I asked my friend where she thought I could buy some tulips, and she said I could just stop at the nearby grocery store. But for some reason, I decided to drive to the flower shop by my old Portland apartment.
On days like my mom’s birthday and Mother’s Day, sometimes I like to look for a card or a present that I would give her if she were alive. It’s fun, in a torturous way… So after I picked out my bouquet of tulips (nice and colorful, like Mom loved), I browsed around the store. And I found an entire section that looked like Mom set it up herself.
My mom loved fairies and all kinds of magical creatures. So much so that she turned an entire area of our house into “Fairyland.” It was a big shelf covered in fairies, frogs, gnomes, and other mystical figurines.
And now, here, on her birthday, in the flower shop I randomly chose to go to, there was a little Fairyland. If Mom were alive, and had a job at this little shop, this is exactly the kind of display she would have begged the manager to let her set up.
As much as I wanted to buy every single frog and fairy, I restricted myself to one little frog sitting on a mushroom. Then I finally headed home.
By this point, I felt that I had done a good job of celebrating my mom’s birthday. I had done so many things that she would love. But later in the day, I started to feel like I was missing something.
I had gotten so caught up in doing things for Mom’s birthday, that I kind of forgot about the whole feeling part. Maybe this is just a me thing, but on days like this, I always feel like I need a good, deep cry. Otherwise I can tell that I’m blocking myself from truly feeling the grief. But again, I do clearly like crying.
And as much as watching Stand By Me had brought up some tears, it wasn’t that full, deep, cathartic release I knew I needed.
Later that night, with only a few hours of her birthday left, I got a text from one of Mom’s best friends. She wrote it as if she was talking to my mom:
“Happy birthday wherever you are, Cin!” it read. “Go to a movie, ride your bike, eat some Taki’s and send us a message somehow!”
This wasn’t the first text I had received about my mom today. But this one opened the floodgates.
I had spent the past 48 hours thinking about what I would do with my mom for her birthday if she was here, but I hadn’t thought about what she could be doing right now. I don’t know exactly what I believe, but I definitely believe that she is out there somewhere, watching what we’re all doing, visiting me through frogs (and open movie theater seats), making new friends with other people’s dead loved ones, and finding the joy she didn’t get to find in the last years of her life.
I don’t know why, but thinking about how she and her new dead friends might be celebrating her birthday really hit me hard. That image is both comforting and heartbreaking. Picturing her being somewhere else in the universe, getting to do what she loves - if she still exists out there somewhere, that makes things a little bit more ok. But it also makes it hurt even more that I’m not the one who gets to hang out with her.
But I kind of am. Sure, her physical body wasn’t sitting next to me at the movie, she wasn’t eating a falafel with me, and I didn’t get to buy and give her a birthday present from the flower shop Fairyland.
But can I really say she’s not here? That she didn’t play some part in making all of these things happen?
So thanks, Mom. Thank you for making sure I celebrated your birthday in exactly the way you would have wanted to. Thank you for being such a fun person to celebrate - can you imagine if the things you loved doing weren’t things I love too?
Maybe I’ll never figure out the “right” way to celebrate your birthday without you. Maybe instead, I’ll just try to spend the day doing things that bring back memories of when you were here. And noticing all the ways you’re still with me.
Happy birthday, Mom.
