The Ghosts of Birthdays Past

This morning, I woke up to a semi flipped over on the highway outside my farmhouse window. Emergency cones. Crumpled steel. A heavy-duty tow rig with LOVSTON painted on its rear, like the word "lost" in disguise. My ex-boyfriend, who I still live with, told me to look out his window for a better view. Then he left for work. No hug. No coffee. No birthday acknowledgment. Just another wreck on the side of the road and a quiet suggestion to have a good day. It was 8:07 a.m. on May 12, 2025. My 39th birthday.

And here’s what’s new this year: rectal cancer.

Here’s what isn’t: the crash.

It’s become a bit of a tradition, this annual detonation. One way or another, my birthday always ends up as a pileup. The first time the brakes gave out was in 2017. I was 31. Still believed in birthday sex and grand gestures. That was the year the candles didn’t blow out so much as fizzle in silence. The year I stopped expecting anyone to show up. The year I learned that grief has a season, and mine blooms every May like a weed in cracked pavement.

Whoever decided to put my birthday the day after Mother’s Day clearly wanted to run a psychological experiment in emotional whiplash. When you’ve already buried the person who gave you life—and now you’re fighting to keep your own—the whole concept of birthdays becomes a little... fucked. I don’t want balloons. I don’t want cards. I don’t want a Pinterest board of “ways to celebrate yourself.” I want my mom. I want a different diagnosis. I want to not feel like the whole calendar is conspiring against me.

This isn’t a birthday timeline. This is a crash report. This is the black box of my life cracked open and replayed, frame by frame. This is every version of me that got dressed up and hoped someone would remember. Every version that blew out candles and made the same wish: Just don’t leave.

May 12, 2017 — Age 31

I bought the dress off Amazon. Tight, plum, with a neckline that dared someone to notice. I was seeing a guy who was in process to relocate to New York who I thought was everything. Thought he might surprise me. Thought he might show up. He didn’t. Didn’t call. Didn’t text. Didn’t remember. I was at Sevens Steakhouse in Minneapolis with friends pretending to be fine. My posse warned me: “If he’s not here on your birthday, he’s never going to be.” I got too drunk. Sent him a breakup text from the bathroom stall. No reply. Not that night. Not the next day. Three days later he wrote back to tell me I was “so easy to talk to.” Like that was supposed to be a consolation prize. I ended the night with my false eyelashes hanging on by a thread, reheating frozen pizza for a group of men I didn’t like and didn’t want, just so I wouldn’t be alone. That was the first birthday that crashed.

May 12, 1990 — Age 5
The one where the clown was named Bingo and the world was still soft.

I wore a red plaid dress with little black Scotty dogs stitched along the hem, the kind of outfit only a mother could love enough to iron. My mom curled my hair that morning with hot rollers and Aqua Net, the kind that left a mist in the hallway and a smell that clung to the whole day like a promise. She painted a red heart on my cheek with a drugstore makeup kit, the kind with cracked plastic lids and sponge applicators that fell apart after one use. She tied a matching red bow in my hair, and I felt beautiful. But not in the adult, weaponized way that beauty later becomes. Beautiful like a cupcake. Like a balloon. Like someone being celebrated just for existing.

We went to Ground Round, a budget-friendly chain restaurant popular in the early nineties with peanut shells on the floor and laminated menus sticky with syrup from the last kid’s root beer float. There were paper placemats that said Happy Birthday in crayon-colored fonts, and Bingo the Clown—God bless that underpaid grown man in a polyester jumpsuit—made us balloon swords and poodles and hearts that squeaked when you touched them. My friends and I drank orange soda from big plastic cups and fought over who got to sit closest to me. I was the epicenter of that day, and everyone else orbited me.

There was chocolate cake with thick icing and trick candles we couldn’t blow out no matter how hard we tried. The waitresses sang off-key and offbeat, and I didn’t care because my mother was clapping loudest of all. She was alive and laughing. My baby brother sat in her lap, dressed like a little man in a tiny tuxedo onesie, oblivious to it all. But I saw it. I remember everything. Her. The sparkle. The certainty.

Back then, birthdays were uncomplicated. They weren’t freighted with grief or absence or diagnosis. They weren’t shadowed by what’s been lost or who forgot. They just were. My mother made me feel chosen. Special. Sacred. Like my existence was a gift to the world. And I believed her. That little girl with frosting on her fingers and clown glitter in her hair didn’t yet know that birthdays could ache. She didn’t know there would be a year when her mother wouldn’t call. A year when she wouldn’t be able to blow out the candles because the grief would sit so thick in her chest it stole her breath.

But on that day, in 1990, I was five, and everything was whole.

May 12, 2018 — Age 32

My birthday and Mother’s Day shared a bed. Like a drunk who plowed through a stop sign, the calendar made no effort to swerve. My mom had hung herself from my ceiling fan just months before. I’d moved to a new apartment to escape the smell of death, but the grief followed.

That weekend, I told people I had plans. I didn’t. I sat alone in pajamas with a bottle of whiskey and a blunt. I walked to the gas station for cigarettes. Two men followed me in a car, shouting compliments I didn’t want. I took a longer route home so they wouldn’t know where I lived. Then I drank myself to blackness.

I don’t remember cake. I don’t remember cards. I just remember the silence. My first birthday without her. My first Mother’s Day without her. And the certainty that the person who always made me feel special was never coming back.

But if you checked Instagram that year, you wouldn’t have known. I staged a photoshoot a week before. Bought rose gold balloons I drove all over town to find—3 and 2—and posed in front of a floral wallpaper backdrop like a woman reborn. I curled my hair. Wore lipstick. Smiled wide enough to pass inspection. I posted the photo with a caption about “choosing joy.” But it was a lie. That version of me was a decoy. A last-ditch effort to fool the algorithm into thinking I was still worth liking. Still alive.

May 12, 2024 — Age 38
My dad had just died from dementia. The slow kind. The kind that robs you molecule by molecule, until you’re left with the shell of a man who used to make you pancakes and now forgets your name. I had spent the last year watching his mind flicker in and out like faulty wiring, and then one day it just didn’t come back on. There was no great, cinematic goodbye—just a call from the facility and the sudden quiet that follows bureaucracy. His death felt like the final eviction notice. Like I’d officially run out of parents.

That birthday, I decided to be... reasonable. That was the word I kept telling myself. Be reasonable. Be healthy. Be the kind of grieving adult who drinks mocktails and makes polite conversation about the latest marketing campaign with a client you barely know but didn’t want to blow off because they “meant well.” So I curled my hair. Put on a denim jacket. Ordered something citrusy with no alcohol in it and smiled like someone who knew what they were doing with their life. There’s a photo of me from that afternoon, holding the glass up like I’m toasting to a future I actually believe in. It looks like peace. It even fooled me.

But when I got home, the silence was waiting. It climbed into bed with me, took up all the space. I cried into my pillow and then got mad at myself for crying into my pillow. That was the year I realized I had spent my entire thirties grieving. Thirty-two, my mother’s suicide. Thirty-eight, my father’s funeral. In between: dead friendships, dead dreams, dead ends. Every birthday another obituary, written in invisible ink on the inside of my soul.

You learn how to perform wellness after enough grief. You master the nod, the soft “thanks for coming,” the filtered Instagram story with just the right amount of saturation. But inside, you’re screaming at a God you still can’t decide if you believe in. That birthday was the performance of survival. And I gave a hell of a show.

May 12, 2025 — Age 39

The semi crash was the most honest birthday card I’ve received in years. Mangled metal. A cleanup crew with cones. A reminder that sometimes, no matter how careful you drive, you still end up in the wreckage. No boyfriend again this year. Which is… consistent, if nothing else. My ex who I still live with woke me up with a text that said, “look out my window.” I used to hold out hope—somewhere between the candles and the cake—that maybe this would be the year someone would surprise me. That someone would remember. That someone would show up.

This year I thought maybe—just maybe—that someone would be the hunter. But I’ve long since accepted he probably won’t even remember it’s my birthday. And even if he did, what would we do? Go to the Potato Museum? That fantasy expired the moment Arley chose him over me.

And yes, I made the impossible decision to let the hunter keep him. Because Arley—my loyal, sensitive, ridiculous soulmate in fur—has already chosen. He follows him like a shadow, sleeps curled beside him like I never existed. And I can’t even blame him.

He loves Idaho. He loves the hunter. And if I’m being honest, I moved here so he could.

Some Saturdays I watch from the window as he trots back from the field, covered in dust and pride, like a little boy who just came back from war, antlers in his teeth. And I know I did the right thing. Even if it feels like grief. Even if I’m already mourning a dog who hasn’t left yet. Even if I’m spending my 39th birthday in a bed that smells like neither of them.

There won’t be a cake. Or a boyfriend. Or a card. But there will be me.

Birthday Ghosts with Wi-Fi

I used to wake up to birthday texts. A dozen pings. Friends. Clients. The occasional ex who remembered just in time to be useless about it. This morning, I woke up to silence. No pings. Just a flipped semi on the highway. No card. No hug. No “hey, it’s your birthday and I’m sorry this is your life right now.”

Facebook still remembers. Sort of. Every time it pings, it sounds like a single piano key in C minor. Not a song—just a note. Just a vibration that reminds me someone I haven’t seen since 2014 still thinks I deserve a “happy birthday” from their couch. It’s always the ones you don’t expect. Not the ones you helped move. Not the ones you let cry in your lap. Not the ones you still secretly wish would text. Just ghosts with Wi-Fi.

It’s always the girl you sat next to in 10th grade geometry. The one who posts minion memes and somehow still signs off with “XOXO.” It's your coworker from 2014 who hasn’t liked a single life update since Obama was in office, but she shows up like clockwork once a year to write: “Happy Birthday hun!! Hope it’s a good one!!!”—with three exclamation points and zero sincerity.

Meanwhile, the people who know what this year cost you—who should know better—are silent. The friend whose baby shower you planned down to the cupcake toppers? Now she’s “taking a break from social.” The life coach you spent thousands on, now he’s leading his latest qigong retreat. The girls from that one spin class you shared cocktails and trauma bonding with? Not a peep. Guess birthdays don’t count if your core isn’t engaged.

And the crush? Oh, the crush. He’s online. You saw the green dot. You know he saw the reminders. But he’s out here reposting stories about box breathing and "living in the moment." Meanwhile, you’re sitting in your bed—cancer in your rectum, grief in your throat, and one muted piano key echoing every time a stranger says “hope it’s magical!”

It’s not magical. It’s May. And you're mourning three things at once: your dead parents, your health, and the myth that people will show up for you just because you showed up for them.

Facebook birthdays expose the algorithm of relationships. And the code is broken. Or maybe it never worked in the first place.

May 12, 2026 — ???

Maybe I’ll make it. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll spend it in a chemo chair or a canyon. Maybe the cancer will be gone. Or maybe I will. But I know this much: birthdays don’t get easier. They just get quieter. I no longer wish for grand gestures. I wish for less pain. For soft dogs. For a friend who doesn’t forget. For a cake that doesn’t taste like survival. For someone to say my name like it’s still mine. Maybe that’s what next year will bring. Or maybe just another crash site. For the best view you get on your birthday not to be a flipped semi from the wrong window.

Either way, this is 39. It’s my birthday and I’ll cry if I want to.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer