Thursday, April 08, 2010

What's in a Birthday?


I celebrated my birthday on the 2nd of April. Well, to be accurate, the celebrations began a week earlier and some of it continued into the next week. It was a bit of an extended birthday, you could say!

We tend to have varying reactions to birthdays, don't we? Some of us, like me, might not consider birthdays a big deal. I would feel a bit low if absolutely no one wished me, but I've never really wanted to make a big deal of it either. Of course, being able to hang out with friends over beer and food and go paragliding doesn't really hurt, but I still wouldn't mind a low key birthday either. For others, birthdays are just morose...we're only getting one step closer to the grave after all! And then for some, birthdays are events that absolutely must be celebrated with the adequate amount of raucous behavior!

Having a birthday is usually a celebration of life. It's the day we came into this world and set into motion a lot of things that would happen later in our lives, including the way we may touch other people's lives. From then on, at every birthday, we take stock of all that we've achieved in the past year. When we're kids, our parents gloat over "how big you've become!" As teenagers, we revel in the attention of our friends. As grown ups we revel in the attention of our spouse and children. But does this celebration of life end once we're gone? Will the 2nd of April ever be remembered as Julian's birthday when I'm not here?

I logged into Facebook yesterday and at one point found myself looking at the list of birthdays for the week. That's when I realized that it was Jignesh's birthday that day. If you haven't read my earlier post, Jignesh was a good friend who passed away on the 19th of February in an automobile accident. Although it's been more than a month now, I don't think I've completely gotten over his death yet. Facebook's reminder of his birthday was also a reminder of how much we missed his presence around the office. Out of sheer curiosity, I visited his page and found that a lot of his other friends felt the same way. His Facebook wall had messages from many of his friends, wishing him a happy birthday, wherever he was. I couldn't hold myself back and posted a message myself, hoping that wherever he was, he would know just how much he was loved.

Can death really be the end of it all? Looking at Jignesh's wall, I would have to say "No"! We can only hope that when our time is up, we would have succeeded in touching enough lives so that although the celebrations might end, the memories of a good life will remain.