Mark was killed two days prior to the day that serves as my birth day. In 2017, feeling celebratory 48 hours after receiving the gut punch of knowing your only son was gone was impossible.

The following year, I realized I didn’t give two shits about anyone knowing it was my birthday. My better half talked about celebrating halfway through the year. Being born in January means that the day signified with cake and ice cream (or your own special guilty pleasure) is usually cold and foreboding. But any day with cake can become a great day.

I haven’t had much cake over the last three years. The summer party never appeared—the idea was a good one, it just lacked a trigger for execution—namely me giving it the green light. Again, losing Mark made celebrating another year of life seem like an exercise in futility and the kind of self-indulgence that grief and loss robs you of.

Mark loved bell hooks’ writing. I was also a fan. Shortly after Mark’s death, I bought her book All About Love: New Visions, at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick.

Yesterday, after a friend of Mark’s had reached out on the anniversary of his death with a quote from hooks, I took the book down off the shelf and re-read the following passage:

Just as we are often unable to speak about our need to love and be loved because we fear our words would be interpreted as signs of weakness or failure, so are we rarely able to share our thoughts about death and dying. No wonder then that we are collectively unable to confront the significance of grief. Just as the dying are often carted off so that the process of dying will be witnessed by only a select few, grieving individuals are encouraged to let themselves go only in private, in appropriate settings away from the rest of us. Sustained grief is particularly disturbing in culture that offers a quick fix for any pain. Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life, where the hip do not get bogged down in mourning.(–bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions)

I shut off the thing on Facebook that alerts people to my birthday (at least I think I did—one never knows about FB anymore). I’ve decided that only the people who really pay attention know it’s my birthday: the love of my life (Mary), some close family members, a friend or two (if I still have friends), and weirdly, some new co-workers.

Today, I will “celebrate” as well as a dad without a son can celebrate during the dark days of remembrance that come every December and January with the roll of the calendar. Mary bought me a few things that celebrate my new passion—the guitar. She also found a photo of me with the very first guitar I owned back in Indiana, so the guitar isn’t some new “flavor of the month” for me. In this photo taken in Indiana (Mark was probably three at the time), I was obviously younger, slimmer, and had more hair. I really liked the “photo shopped” postcard Mary “created” of me jamming on the stage at Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace in Bakersfield. We stopped there on our way from the beach to the desert back in 2017 on our sad vacation in California. Mary also found two ornaments: one for “Yammy” my Yamaha acoustic and another for “Danny” my Danelectro electric. Mary doesn’t share my passion for music or performing. However, she knows it means something to me and she found a way to “touch” me with her act of kindness and remembrance. She personifies love and had a big hand in teaching our son about what love really means. She also managed to do what so many mothers fail at doing—not fucking-up their sons with their own fucked-up-ness. I know the latter all too well.

Anyone can play guitar, even the JBE.

I’ve shared with a few friends about life these days. Recently, another friend of Mark’s was checking-in, asking about us. In responding to Mark’s friend and former Brown MFA colleague, think I captured the frame of life for me in 2020:

I feel like three years out from Mark’s death, my life is simple. I get up, go to work four days a week, and on most of these days (save for Friday, which is my “long” day), I’ll come home and play guitar before making dinner for Mary during the week. Most weekends, I try to play a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Being in Biddeford these days, I realize I may as well be in Bangalore. I say this because while people who know me are within an hour’s drive of a place that’s on the move, rarely if ever does anyone bother to shoot me a note to say, “hey, I’d like to stop by.” We have two (three?) great breweries, fine restaurants, a downtown worth spending time in and we’re damn close to the best stretch of beach in New England. What’s your reason for not paying a visit? Sometimes I think I must give off a vibe that repels people. I’ve basically lost everyone but fewer than a handful of people from my former life. One of them reminds me often that it’s not me. That’s appreciated but hard to believe when my life is full of abandonment.

That’s fine. I’m filling my loneliness with guitar time. That’s probably why my playing has grown exponentially over the past year.