Today I take another turn around the sun into my 39th year in this life. When my friends and loved ones ask how I will celebrate my birthday, I tell them I want it to be a quiet one. It seems only natural that a birthday during a pandemic wouldn’t include much fanfare, and there’s also something about the number that keeps calling me inward.

As I watch others pack their schedules with social distance this or that or say screw the distance all together and emerge from quarantine with a speed that makes my head spin, I notice my own voice’s response splitting in two directions. One is the vibration of anxiety, the tittering voices that taunt me with threats that I will miss out on so much. The loudest one telling me that there will be loss if I don’t choose to follow the flow and make some plans already. The other voice is quieter, and it’s the one I need to listen closely if I’m even going to hear what it has to say. This voice reminds me that I already know what to do and to honor that knowing because it will never lead me astray.

So then when I think of a quiet birthday, why does it make my throat sting and my eyes well up with tears? Why isn’t it something I can simply own from that truest place within? It is true, after all. Inward feels like the call that I am answering at the moment. Eight weeks wasn’t enough time to know what was ready to transform; I don’t want to clutter my life with all the people, all the things and make myself busy again. I don’t want to fear loss but to believe in connection. I want to turn 39 quietly all the while reassuring myself that I am never alone.

On the morning of my 30th birthday, my father woke me up with a phone call. When I saw “Dad” on the front of my then flip phone, I thought he was calling to wish me a happy birthday. When I answered the phone, I could tell he was crying. He was calling me from his hospital room. He was alone.

“Ker,” he said choking back tears. “It’s spread. The cancer spread.”

I was shocked and yet wasn’t. My father had elected to have a Hail Mary surgery to remove his last remaining kidney due to a tumor that grew to the size of a golf ball in a matter of just a few months and had re-entered the hospital about a month following his surgery after complications with infection and C-diff bacteria in his gut that kept him from keeping any food down.

“Dad…” I didn’t know what to say other than this name I had called him for 30 years. Dad, will you play with me? Dad, will you coach my soccer team? Dad, can you come to my swim meet? Dad, can you pay for my college tuition? Dad, can you help me move to Baltimore? Dad, should I marry him?

“Keri,” he said, “will you be here when it happens? I don’t want to be alone…” Breaking into sobs, I held my 58 year old father as he faced the reality of losing his one precious life. As he attempted to digest a kind of alone that has no ending. The ultimate transformation of body to spirit to stardust. “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me you will be here.”

I am a list-maker, a future-oriented planner, a gatherer of the people I love most, and a damn good host. I am also an introvert at heart, a homebody, an earthy wild woman who feels at home getting lost in the trees. When life hands me something big, I take it as a sign to retreat inward. The lists are still made, the plans maybe too, but I stop gathering, hosting, and doing to enter the sacred tent on the land of those who walked before me to simply begin to be... alone.

This is terrifying work for me. So when the tears come around a quiet 39, I let them flow. I’ve spent my thirties saying goodbye to my father, having two babies, nursing them, raising these two amazing humans, reconfiguring a family with Angus that finally feels authentically ours, coming out as queer, establishing a new relationship with Cheri, singing in musicals, getting a Master’s in education only to go back to working as a pediatric occupational therapist, coaching Little League baseball, teaching yoga, supporting trauma recovery, becoming an LGBTQ advocate, making some of the best friends of my life, losing some of the best friends of my life, and finally understanding that I get to say no instead of always saying yes because I am too scared of being alone. There aren’t many more shoulds left guiding my path, and when one comes through in the voices that are not truly my own, when one says, “You should really plan a happy hour with some friends,” I can calmly reply, “not right now” and go back into the tent to continue to be.

My father wasn’t technically alone when he passed. He was, as they say in the obituaries, surrounded by loved ones. But really, he was alone. He left this life alone; we witnessed his passing, but he had to go alone. We promised to offer comfort, and perhaps in some way we did, whether it was by way of supporting his denial or being a fixture in his celadon green bedroom for that month and a half he transitioned. But he transitioned alone and in a grave amount of fear.

There is a lot about my father’s death that is a mirror for me, especially now as I turn 39 during a global pandemic where I am being asked day after day to sit with being alone. The alone I’ve found during this time is sweet and also scary. It is all the things, but mostly, it is teaching me something that’s taken 9 years to incubate long enough to become. And while I want to have the perfect words for what is emerging in this moment in time, it is a shift I am feeling within and struggling to speak aloud.

My father’s way of giving to his children was to provide us with uninterrupted spurts of time where we were together at the beach. It was in these segments of my childhood that I felt his presence and connection, and experienced for the first time a true feeling of joy. My father loved the beach more than any other place on this planet. When I imagine him now, even 9 years after his passing, I often see him standing in the wet sand in his fluorescent orange swim trunks, with a hands-on-hips stance and his gaze set out toward the horizon, hazy as it meets the dark blue sea. His skin is tan and salty, the hair on his arms has long ago turned blond, and his strong legs anchor him amidst the changing tides of beyond. I like to believe that at some level, my father felt a solace in being alone, and it is this memory of him on the beach, his blue eyes sparkling like the water, that brings with it a depth of understanding that his journey was his own.

I am still afraid sometimes, but I am not as motivated by fear. And the fear of being alone is ever-evolving into a reverence for solitude. When my anxious thoughts keep me awake at night or I worry that I will miss out or lose connection or be left behind, there is always the gentle current that pulls me back to my own center, my own truth, my own deepest knowing. And by moving with my own pace, my own flow, I have, in the past 9 years, found my way toward being with myself at the water’s edge, with a fierce stance, wild hair, and a oh-so-tender heart.

I say three words at the end of every practice, every yoga class, every prayer. Om Namah Shivaya. They were taught to me by a dear teacher, and remind me that every ending is also a new beginning. Every journey is uniquely designed with a beginning, a middle and an ending, and the ending always creates the space for what is new to emerge.

I am ending a cycle that started with an invitation, Keri, what are you so afraid of? And as 39 calls me deeper within, it feels like a divine opportunity to begin yet again.