09/26/2025
Why dont we have a candle vigil for those who pass each year? It was what we did when I was Director over hospice. Thoughts?
Are their chriches in the community who hold these vigils? Just asking for aome of my clients.
Why Don’t We Celebrate A Deathday?
We throw confetti for the day we show up but go curiously silent about the day we leave.
Birthdays get cake, candles, bad singing, and gift receipts that never make it back to the store.
Meanwhile, the day someone we loved took their final bow slips by each year like a gray shadow on the calendar. We call one a ‘birthday,’ but the other? Nothing. Just a date, empty, unsaid.
And yet, if you think about it, that second day is at least as defining. It’s the last word in a story, the period after the wild, messy, beautiful run-on sentence of a life.
Shouldn't that be worth commemorating? Not as a grim ritual in black clothing, but as a celebration of what was lived, the echoes still rattling around in us.
Here’s the thing…I think maybe we need a new tradition.
If we can name a whole day for the fact that we showed up, why can’t we name one for the day we become unforgettable?
We could call it a ‘Lifeday,’ or a ‘Remember-Day.’ Something like that.
On that day, instead of crying and living through the day in silence, we could cook their favorite dish, even if it’s as questionable as boiled hot dogs with mustard. We could tell their favorite joke that no one actually laughed at, or wear their old band t-shirt, even though it’s two sizes too big, or just raise a glass, not just to mourn, but to toast to the beauty of them.
After all, birthdays are weird if you think about it. Who really deserves the credit? The baby, who just showed up screaming? Or the mother, who actually did all the work?
Yet we’ve built an entire industry out of balloons and cakes. While deathdays go by almost unnoticed, though they mark the end of a story we know by heart.
Maybe it feels too heavy and too sad. But sadness doesn’t cancel out joy. It sits beside it. And if birthdays are about beginnings, why can’t deathdays be about the whole complete story?
The legacy left behind?
So when that date comes around next…make the day theirs again, not just for the loss, but for the love that never went anywhere.
Gary Sturgis -
