Surprise

Several months ago I mentioned to my husband that this summer I would like to have a party for turning 60 and being cancer-free.

Before we started the planning my sister mentioned she would like to have a joint sixtieth birthday party and to renew her wedding vows.

As background information, I come from a large family. Mom had a baby every year for seven years, then a little bit of a gap for the eighth and final baby. The three eldest are boys, followed by five girls. The first three girls, of which I am the middle have birthdays very close together. Our three birthdays are within ten days of each other. Consequently, we had a joint birthday celebration every year during the weekend that fell in the middle.

Birthday parties were always family events. Except for my sixteenth birthday, when I was allowed to invite a few friends over. Even after moving out on my own, my birthday tended to absorb into the Fourth of July activities. This was all fine as far as I was concerned as most years I forget my birthday.

My first husband moved out on my thirtieth birthday, saving me from the geezer attack at work. There were three of us turning thirty that year so the balloons and other decorations were moved from one office to the next. They were rather deflated by the time they reached my office.

Rather than celebrating birthdays I typically celebrate the anniversary of my twenty-seventh birthday. I’ve been twenty-seven for so long most of the time I forget how old I am.

One of the side effects of the facial paralysis was that my eye stopped blinking and consequently crack and infected. I went through several eye doctors looking for the right specialist for my situation. The eye doctor I was seeing at the time called a specialist on my behalf. He started the conversation with “I have a fifty-eight-year-old woman here ….” It took a second for it to dawn on me that he was talking about me.

Fifty-nine came and went with a focus on recovery then cancer treatment. So with cancer nicely in the rearview and sixty on the horizon, it felt like the right time to celebrate. Within a few days, my sister mentioned she’d like to do a party for sixty as we had done for fifty. She’d be fifty-nine, I’d be sixty and the third sister sixty-one. With these party plans in place, I’d dropped the notion of the party I’d been thinking about.

We had a lovely party in New York with family and friends. A beautiful meal and a shared birthday cake, just like when we were kids.

Weeks went by and all thoughts of the summer party had left me. My husband was chairing the Rotary Crab Feast this year so I thought nothing of the family and friends that were in town to join in the festivities. In addition to the crab feast, my husband planned a barbeque for those that were in town that would take place on Saturday. As the planned hour for the barbeque arrived, other guests started showing up. I gave my husband that ‘what did you do’ look thinking he just went overboard inviting people. After several guests had arrived, he said “Surprise! This is your birthday/ cancer-free party!”

What an amazing party. A legacy moment that will stay with me forever.