Happy Birthday, Baby

     Today would have been Barb's 68th birthday. Today is also the day I last spoke to her one year ago.

     She'd been in the nursing home that wound up killing her for two months by this time. By June, they'd taken such horrible care of her that they had to call for an ambulance to take her back to the CCU of the hospital that put her in that pit in the first place.

      This picture was taken on her 61st birthday on July 7, 2017 when she was still hale and healthy. I always made a big deal over her birthday and, since Barb never completely grew up, she loved opening up presents, and there were always many of them, whether it was Valentine's Day, her birthday or Christmas.

      And, until it became apparent in 2020 that she could no longer read, there were books. Lots and lots of books. One of the most appealing things about Barb was her great love of books. Virtually every night for 10, 11 years, when I'd go in the bedroom at night, she'd almost always have her nose in a book whether it was by Dennis Lehane, Christopher Hitchens or yours truly. She couldn't live without books.

      And even after she'd lost both pairs of eyeglasses I got her in 2010, while I wrote Hollywoodland a decade later, I'd read her the chapters one at a time when they came off the printer. I had a queasy awareness it would be the last novel I'd ever write while she was still with me and I was bound and determined that she at least heard it even if it was through my half-assed, haphazard narration.

      I will always say that she was the best woman who ever walked into my life. She was supposed to be the one. And I know there will be some who will roll their eyes at this and call it "whiny" (I'm thinking of one person in particular) but I don't give a flying fuck what they say. It's my fucking place and I can and will write whatever the fuck I want on it.

      If you never met the love of your life as I had nearly 15 years ago, even I, a writer, cannot hope to convey to you the depths of my grief over losing her. Trying to get you to appreciate how much I loved her would be as fruitless as trying to describe music to a deaf person. My youngest son, Jake (whose 30th birthday was yesterday) told me four days after Barb died that the grief will never leave and that I'll have to find some say to live with it. And he was right. It comes and goes like the tide. It never stays away forever.

      I last spoke to her one year ago today to wish her a happy birthday. I wasn't allowed to visit her because her guardian ad litem wouldn't permit her to have visitors, which still doesn't make any sense to me. It was a surprisingly lucid conversation and as I spoke with her for this final time, I tried to imagine where she was at that moment because I used to work at that place in 1996.

      I asked her if she'd heard from her sisters, even though I already knew the answer. She said, "I'm still waiting" and I almost cried on the phone. I asked her if the nursing home had done anything for her birthday or even acknowledged it and she said they hadn't. Remembering what a big deal I made over her birthday from 2010 on, all the lunches and dinners out, all the presents, the cakes, it broke my heart to think that no one but I had acknowledged what had proved to be her final birthday.

      Two and a half months later, she was dead. I got the news one Saturday morning in a four word subject header of a blank email from her completely useless lawyer that read, "Barbara Peters passed away." No details, nothing. I never even got back her personal effects. They treated me as if Barb and I never met.

      As with my son after he suddenly lost his girlfriend in 2021, when Barb died, I lost literally everything. I have the right to say that just as I have the right to express my anger over the way the entire sorry spectacle panned out and at how shabbily they treated the both of us.

      So, that was how it ended, not with a bang but a whimper, as T. S. Eliot put it. But I refused to let today go by without telling what few people who will see this that today is Barbara Ann Peters' 68th birthday and she was a far better and finer person than anyone I'll likely meet or have already met.