They Said

I was born on a sad day. My family told me yesterday, and they said it just like that. You were born on a sad day. We were talking about years, the ones where we stayed here for Christmas, the ones when we went there, or there. We were talking about 1981, the year I was born on August 6th. My first Christmas, they said, was spent in Bethesda. Bethesda? What was in Bethesda? My uncle, they said. The one who died. My mother's little brother. He was in the Navy and he said his leg hurt. The Navy said walk it off. He couldn't. They sent him to the hospital in Bethesda, but it was bone cancer, advanced. The doctors said things like too late and very soon. And do you want to know what day they said those things to my mother about her little brother? August 6th. Within hours of my birth, they said. When I was pink and crying and my mother was pink and crying - that was when they said those things. You were born on a sad day. I said nobody ever told me that, WHY DIDN'T ANYONE EVER TELL ME THAT? We're sorry, they said. Sorry.

So we went to Bethesda for Christmas that year, to the hospital where my uncle would die a month later. I wonder if they let him hold me, if he could. We were cheated out of an uncle/niece history, out of hide-and-seek and backyard football. But I wonder if he felt a connection. I was my mother's baby and he was her little brother. She doesn't have many pictures of him, but in the ones she does have, he looks just like her. I look just like her, too.