“When is this tree’s birthday?” he asked, gently patting its rough base.
An image of trees celebrating with helium balloons and sheet cakes and silly games flashes across my mind, as I add this question to the always-growing list of reasons I am profoundly captivated by children.

I know what he is asking, that he is being perfectly literal, but I answer with a perfunctory adult response anyway: “Um…do you mean, how old is this tree?”

“No, I mean, when is his birthday?” he reiterates, a little agitated, as if I am misunderstanding entirely.

I answer again, with a teacher response: “You know what, I’m not sure. We wouldn’t do this, but if we cut it down and looked at the tree’s trunk, there would be all these rings. And if we counted them, we’d know how many years old it was. So if there were 4 rings, this tree is 4 years old, just like you.”

The teacher never wants to utter the words, “I don’t know” to a child who genuinely wants to know, and in this case, I don’t want to admit that, in all likelihood, no one knows when this tree’s birthday is.

“I think he’s older than me. He’s really big,” tipping his head back, as if a little more scrutinizing will successfully lead him to an answer—a day, a month, a year.

“He’s probably older than me even. How old do you think I am?”

He ponders for a good thirty seconds, looking around at the other kids and adults on the playground, and shivering a little because it is early spring in New York City: “A hundred?”

“Nope! A lot younger than that. I’m 22.”

As if continuing on from his original question, he says, “Because if we knew his birthday, we could have a party for him.”

“I know, I was thinking the same thing. Okay, give me your hand, we gotta go.”

********

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear….” My body quivers and stiffens as I hear this being sung to a patient down the hall the moment I am staring out the hospital window at a row of evergreen trees. When is this tree’s birthday? Where is that little boy now, seven year later? The heartbreaking reality of working at a daycare center is the never-ending string of goodbyes, to children you spend months teaching how to tie shoelaces and wash hands. Because if we knew his birthday…. The song ends.

I stop looking at the trees and instead watch the slow drip of the IV bag, that mesmerizing regular movement of liquid emptying into my bloodstream by way of my hand. What is it I always think but rarely say to describe these grueling hospitalizations? For all that is being pumped into me gradually, and at other times, rapidly, my spirit’s lifeblood is gradually, and at other times, rapidly, draining right out of me. Physically, I make it out alive, but mentally is another story.

After six years of fighting a disease with no cure, it all seems to culminate in this poignant moment of remembering a tree and a child, a moment that feels light-years away from where I am now, physically, mentally: I am going on day five of nothing but clear liquids and day two of nothing but a daily 8-oz glass of water, which I extract with a tiny ridged sponge on the end of a plastic stick, as skinny as a twig. I am waiting to have my large intestine surgically removed so that I don’t die from severe ulcerative colitis or its brutal drug therapies. Or by own hand, for that matter.

Having narrowly missed spending a birthday in the hospital, there existing too many possibilities of doing such, I work out the math for the trio of surgeries required—there is a good chance I will be sung to right here, on my 30th [Day of the Dead] birthday. If I dread this milestone of a birthday, it will be for reasons that involve stretching my pain tolerance to a horrific, nearly unbearable degree. If I look forward to this milestone of a birthday, it will be because I could never face this annual event thinking, yet another year gone, but rather, yet another year, very fortunately, lived.