Their Birthday, When They Are Not Here for It

Your phone does not know. At seven in the morning it tells you it is their birthday in the same gray box it uses for the dentist.

Then you have a whole day in front of you, and a decision nobody warned you about. Not how to feel — what to actually do. Whether there is a cake. Whether you say anything out loud. Whether you go to work and let the day pass like a Tuesday.

There is no correct answer here, and I am not going to invent one. What follows is the range: what other families do with this day, set out so you can pick something, or pick nothing. The day your child died is a different problem with a different shape, and the anniversary has its own page. This one is about the day that used to be a party.

Do we mark it or ignore it?

Both are ordinary. Both are chosen by parents who loved their child exactly as much as you love yours. The Compassionate Friends UK, an organization run by bereaved parents, says it plainly in its 2026 leaflet Coping with Special Occasions: "There is no right or wrong way to deal with significant dates."

What makes a birthday harder than most dates is that it arrives with a script already written. A cake. Candles. A number. Everybody in the house knows how the day is supposed to go, which means everybody in the house can feel precisely how far from that it is.

So the first thing worth saying is that the script is not binding. You can keep it, rewrite it, or put it down. Some families do the whole thing and find it is the one hour in the year when the house sounds like it used to. Others cannot be in a room with a cake. That is not two different amounts of love.

And it can change. Marking it this year does not sign you up for next year. Skipping it this year has not decided anything.

What do other families do?

Roughly three shapes, and none of them is the advanced version.

Out loud. The cake gets made in their flavor. People are invited. The name is said all day on purpose. Some families release something, plant something, or do a kindness in their child's name and tell people why. The Compassionate Friends UK leaflet describes parents who keep marking the birthday by eating a favorite meal or going to a place that mattered.

Quietly. One candle on the kitchen windowsill. Their song, once, in the car, alone. A message typed into a notes app and never sent. A walk at the hour they were born. Nobody else in the world needs to know it happened.

Not at all. The same leaflet describes parents who find the date too painful and prefer to ignore it as far as they can. That sentence is in a bereaved parents' own leaflet because it is a real answer, not the absence of one.

If the small private rituals feel foolish, it may help to know they are not. In experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2014, Michael Norton and Francesca Gino found that people who performed a ritual after a loss reported feeling more in control, and that this restored sense of control was what tracked with lower grief. They also found that simply being told other people use rituals did nothing — the thing had to actually be done. That is not an instruction to hold a ceremony. It is permission to stop apologizing for the candle.

Here is what my family does, offered as one more option and not as a template.

Everyone wears their Living Undefeated shirt. Then we meet up at a wing spot and eat wings, because hot wings and the show Hot Ones were a favorite of his, and ours.

I know how that reads written down. No ceremony, no candle. A basket of wings, a stack of napkins, everybody in the same shirt. It is not solemn and we did not design it to be meaningful. It is the thing he liked, done by the people who liked it with him, and it turns out that is enough to build a day on.

The shirts are the part nobody arranged. They came out of one decision in the first week, which I have written about in the first two weeks. This is the other end of that thread. Something we chose once, for a single afternoon, now turns up every year on everybody, and the wings are what we do while wearing them.

There is also the question of the number, and families split hard on it. Some say he is nine. Some say he would have been nine. Some stop counting. Whichever one comes out of your mouth is the right one, including the one that changes mid-sentence.

What if I cannot face it?

Then do not face it. There is no attendance register.

You can sleep through it. You can take the day off and tell nobody why. You can leave town, turn the phone over, hand the whole day to somebody else and ask them to answer the door. You can agree as a household that this year you are simply not doing it. None of that is avoidance and none of it is a failure of nerve.

It also will not go in order. A fourth birthday can be survivable and a ninth can take you apart, and that is not a relapse. When researchers led by Catherine Rogers followed bereaved parents about eighteen years on, in a 2008 paper in the Journal of Family Psychology, the parents who were doing better were not the ones further from the death. Time elapsed was not what separated them. Whatever this year's birthday does to you, it is not a report card on the years before it.

If you want the reason a day like this can flatten you without warning, that is why grief comes in waves.

What about their siblings on that day?

Ask them, as plainly as you can, and then believe the answer. Children in the same house often want something completely different from what you want, and they are usually relieved to be asked rather than managed.

Some want the cake and the candles and the whole performance. Some want it to be a normal day and feel guilty for wanting that. Some want to go to school, precisely because school does not know. Some want to be the one who decides what happens.

Two things worth having in your back pocket. First, a sibling's own birthday is a separate problem — the day they turn the age their brother or sister never reached is its own thing, and it does not have to be solved on this day. Second, you do not have to be the expert. The Dougy Center, a national grief center for children and families, publishes free tip sheets for families on holidays and special days, and talking to someone who does this for a living is not an admission of anything. We keep a list of free grief support that costs nothing to use.

What do I say when someone wishes me well?

Short and true beats gracious. You do not owe anyone a performance on this day of all days.

Things other people have used, offered rather than recommended:

• "Thank you for remembering. Today is a hard one."
• "I'm glad you said his name."
• "We're keeping it quiet this year."
• "I can't talk about it today, but thank you."
• Nothing at all. A nod is a complete sentence.

Then there is the person who gets it wrong — who says happy birthday brightly and watches it land, or who says one of the sentences that makes your jaw tighten. Most of them are clumsy, not cruel. They are frightened of the subject and the fear comes out as a bad line.

You are not required to teach them on your child's birthday. If you want to, though, what to say on the date is written for them rather than for you. A link is an easier thing to send than a conversation is to have.

Is there anything good in this day at all?

Some years, yes. Not reliably, and not on schedule, and never because you did the day correctly.

What we have found to help, more than anything tidy, is lowering what the day is supposed to be. A birthday with no party and no plan and one candle is still their birthday.

The first one we got through, we got through by being in the same room. We were together as a family, we celebrated his short happy life, and we said out loud how brave he had been and how he lived it undefeated. None of that made the day stop being the day. It gave us something to do with it besides wait.

And there are the years when somebody else says the name first. When a card comes from a friend who kept the date in their phone. When one of their old classmates posts a photograph you had never seen. Those arrive without being arranged, which is the only reason they work. Some families find that doing something for someone else on the day gives it a shape that is not about absence — that is the whole idea behind the joy of giving, and it is an option, not an assignment.

Their birthday is still their birthday. It belongs to you and to them, and nobody — not the calendar, not your family, not a page on the internet — gets to tell you how to spend it.

If this day, or the run-up to it, takes you somewhere that frightens you, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is there around the clock: call or text 988.

Save this for the day you need it.

If you want the other dates: the first Halloween and the anniversary. The books and films other families have found steadying are on the shelf.

Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family.