When the Birthday Still Breaks You
- Alexis Walker
- Oct 9
- 3 min read
This day happens every year. And yet, it still catches me off guard. Like a shadow that quietly waits in the corners ready to pounce without warning.
Though we’ve walked this road of grief for several years now, days like today are a reminder of the tender places in our hearts that haven’t yet found full healing. Perhaps they never will, at least on this side of heaven.
It causes these questions to be rekindled in our minds that we’ve held for almost four agonizing years. These beautiful sayings we hear in church that are meant to bring comfort but don’t actually penetrate our hearts. Things like, “You are worthy. You are loved. You are valuable. You are God’s treasure.” And yet, on days like today, those truths feel distant, like echoes that don’t quite reach the heart. Instead, we feel forgotten, disposable, undeserving, everything but what those words proclaim.
Days like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries awaken the anger that I’ve hidden deep down. My family so innocently will ask, “What do you want to do for Ellie’s birthday?” The truth is I want to disappear beneath the covers, to cry and mourn without interruption. To sit with my grief without trying to explain it or mask it with the familiar refrain, “It’s going to be okay.” Because there’s just days where it simply doesn’t feel like it will be.
What do I want to do?
I don’t want to talk.
I don’t want to hear, “We’re praying for you.”
I don’t want to see the stories, the photos, the memories of her in someone else’s hands.
"What I want is to imagine who she might be today, turning seven.
To see her and Savannah racing through the house, laughter spilling like sunlight down the halls.
To picture her at school with the other girls, her backpack swinging, her world growing.
To help her write her Christmas list, filled with the silly, impossible things she’d beg for.
To watch her dance in the living room with her sisters, barefoot and free.
To know her favorite color.
To sing with her her favorite song.
To curl up beside her and watch the movie she loves most.
I want to watch her blow out candles, tear open gifts, and eat too much sugar, the kind of sweet chaos every birthday should hold.
But instead, I find myself searching online for ways to honor the birthdays of those who are no longer here.
And as I sit in the quiet, I can’t help but think how wrong, how unbearably unfair, this all feels.
Yet even here, in the ache of what will never be, I sense the faintest whisper of God’s grace, that love is not bound by death, and that somehow, she is still near.
Maybe the truest way to celebrate her life now is to live mine with the same laughter and light I imagine in her.
Maybe this is the sacred work of grief, learning to hold both the ache and the hope in the same breath.
To weep and to worship.
To miss and to remember.
To grieve what was, and still trust in what will be.
Because even in the breaking, love keeps breathing.
This is the tension we live in, the ache of what’s been lost and the hope of what’s yet to come.
But even here, God meets us. He sits in the sorrow and whispers the promise of resurrection.
He teaches us that heaven isn’t only someday, it brushes near every time love refuses to die.
I’m learning that healing doesn’t mean the ache disappears.
It means learning to breathe again, to let sorrow and hope share the same space within my heart.
And maybe that’s where love lives now, in the tender place between what hurts and what holds me together.
Happy 7th birthday Ellie.
Having hope in the fact that eternity will be spent with her is powerful. Happy birthday Ellie