Sweetest Andrea,
Today would have been your fiftieth birthday. I wanted you to see this day so badly. So did you. When you were only forty-eight, you told people you were fifty. That’s how much you wanted to get here. “I have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my end goal,” you once wrote.
It wasn’t always like that. Before you were diagnosed, you were ashamed of aging. So much so that you once said you were grateful for the masks we wore throughout the pandemic, because they hid your wrinkles.
I never understood that insecurity. From where I stood, the lines on your face were lines of poetry. Once, I made you a certificate naming you the recipient of the Best Face in the World Award. I printed it, laminated it, and had your best friend co-sign.
That was for your fortieth birthday, the first we ever spent together. We’d only been dating for three months, but already I loved you so much. Neither of us knew yet that your life would be more lightning than steady flame. But even then, I wished I had had more time with you.
So I gave you forty presents—one for every year I’d missed. For weeks, it became my full-time job. Dreaming up everything I could give you. I like to think I served that position for a decade. And that I’ll never have to retire. That the rest of my life will be spent finding new ways to show you my love, dressed in a thousand different wrappings.
After your diagnosis, when friends would complain about the physical evidence of getting older—the age spot, the skin sag, the detritus of living—it stung us both. We knew how unlikely it was that you would live to see your hair turn completely silver.
What is more valuable than silver in a loved one’s hair?
I won’t lie. Sometimes I see men with white mustaches and think, Why them? Why not you? I see couples with canes in the grocery store, softly arguing in the ice cream aisle, and wonder, Why not us? Why can’t we be old, taking life for granted together? Debating frozen pizza brands? Mistaking what’s important sometimes?
But you didn’t want to take life for granted. You would have rather lived the way you did in these last four years—fully inside your own heart, lit from within by love—than lived longer outside of it, in darkness.
A year and a half ago, when we found out the cancer had broken through the treatment and metastasized to the bone, I was fiddling around on my phone, numbing my own pain, when I discovered an aging filter on TikTok.
When I saw my reflection staring back at me, aged forty years in the future, I knew what I had to do. I had to show you. I filmed myself singing our engagement song, “You’re Still the One” into the camera’s eye.
This could be a state-of-the-art manifestation tool, I thought. Because if you could envision the future in such precise detail—down to the liver spots on my temple—then maybe you’d go into remission. If I sang, “Looks like we made it,” and “We beat the odds together,” then maybe we would.
Call it magical thinking, but what were you if not a being made of magic?
What were we?
You played the video again and again, crying, kissing the screen, both in front of me and in private. I’d turn a corner and discover you weeping at the phone in your hand, repeating, “I love her, I love her.” The faint sound of Shania Twain would linger from the other room and I knew you were still watching me, suddenly your elder. Septuagenarian Megan was your phone background for weeks.
You wrote about that day in your newsletter:
“Never in my life had I seen myself so clearly as I did when I saw Meg like that. No photo had ever captured me with more exacting detail than a photo of Meg old. I had never felt so infinite, so unsinkable, so buoyed by love. I could see myself living in Meg’s eyes. I could see my spirit in the shyness of her smile. I could see that we were still together and always would be, whether I had a body of my own or not. And in seeing that, I understood anew that I could not die. None of us can. We live on in each other. We are each other already.”
After, I invited you to try the filter too. Because what could be a better vision board for longevity than your own skin, wrinkled with the gift of so many more years?
I see those videos of you now and almost lose my mind with grief. Because it’s proof of something that has always been true: I would have loved you at eighty. At one hundred. At one hundred and forty-two. I would have awarded you with that Best Face in the World certificate again and again and again.
My hope is that, for the rest of my life, people will look at me and see you. They’ll see many smile lines and know you were responsible for every one. They’ll see that every kiss you pressed into my cheeks still blooms beneath my skin. That my eyes, deep and so full of water, are lakes you are forever nightswimming in. And they’ll know, without needing to be told, that I am still your wife. Still so wildly in love.
Last year, on your birthday, all you wanted to do was to take me shopping. I didn’t understand at first. But somewhere between the dressing room and the mirror, I caught you watching me—not the clothes, not how they fit—just me, smiling without thinking about it. That was what you were after. Shopping for my smile. Is that what birthdays become when you know you’re running out of them? Not about what you get, but about what you give away before you go?
Or was that just who you are?
You once wrote, “I make her happy. Is there anything left to do in this life? I don’t think so.”
That’s just who you are.
So today, on your birthday, which I will celebrate forevermore, like a national holiday, my only plan is to do things that make me smile. Because that’s all you ever wanted.
I’m thirty-seven now—an age you haven’t seen me. But I have to believe you’re still watching. Still weeping. Still repeating, “I love her, I love her,” as I get older before your eyes.
So happy birthday, Baby. I miss you so much.
Love,
Meg
PS. You’re still the one.
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