birthday

while i will turn 29 tomorrow, today would have been my brother joshua's 30th birthday. it's strange to even call him my brother in a way, as my siblings and i never knew him. he was born to our parents almost exactly nine months from their june wedding (they didn't waste any time!) and what should have been a joyous occasion when he was born turned immediately frightening and sad as doctors discovered that joshua was missing a heart valve. after three weeks in chicago and surgery to give him an artificial valve, he passed away. i can't imagine how devastating it was for my parents and how they moved on from that. but they did, and i was born a year and one day later. i had the cord wrapped around my neck three times and they had to knock my mom out for a c-section but i was otherwise fine and my parents started to rebuild. i don't think about joshua very much, though i'm sure my parents do, but for my siblings and i it was something we weren't around for, like their wedding, and it's not in our realm of thinking. but today when my mother called to ask me to go to breakfast for my birthday she mentioned that joshua would have been 30, hard to believe. as a kid i used to wonder aloud to my mother what he would have been like, at three weeks his dark hair lightened up a bit and he had a cleft chin, like me. i would wistfully say how neat it would be to have an older brother but as i got older i understood when my mother explained that had joshua survived, i would most likely not have been born, as they probably wouldn't have rushed to have a baby so soon otherwise.

i still wonder what he would have been like though, and i still thought it was important to remember his birthday and honor him in a small way.

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