As a countdown to my 30th birthday on March 18, I’ve committed to offering 30 people, things and experiences I want to celebrate from the last 30 years. Grab a piece of cake and enjoy reading!

On Christmas Day in the year 2000, Stephanie – my stepmom – told us she was going to die.

That summer, she’d been diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer and had spent the fall fighting it to no avail. Her body was wasting, her lucidity was intermittent and the drugs were simply prolonging the suffering. In the unreliable medium of memory, her proclamation that it “was time” stands clear. She asked me to summon my father and I listened from the other room while she told him she was done fighting.

Three or four weeks prior to that, I had elected to take incompletes in all of my college course and fly home to either participate in her caretaking and unlikely recovery or to walk alongside her with family and close friends to the end of her life. It quickly became the latter.

To watch someone you love waste away and die is a certain kind of private hell. I remember fits of rage and an ache that pierced every part of my very being.

If I was writing a series on  “the events I’d change if I had a magic wand” or “the experiences that have brought the most pain,” this event would be at the top of the list. But to be honest, it truly belongs in this category, the place where I celebrate what has brought the most meaning to my life.

In part I celebrate the dying and death of Stephanie because I believe such a significant experience at such a formative and young age has enabled me to more easily tap into two significant hallmarks of the human experience: its unpredictability and its brevity. The cockiness of youth that allows us to believe we are invincible melted away and in its place I discovered empathy, openness and passion.

I also celebrate the dying and death of Stephanie because it was one of the funniest, most intimate and alive periods in my life. 24/7 caretaking makes anyone loopy as does morphine for the patient. You add a household of very funny people and suddenly the constant need for ice chips results in nothing short of a stand-up comic routine and the hearse doing a u-turn becomes a moment of hilarity.

In the end, though, I suppose this belongs as a celebration because the practice of staying awake in that private hell and taking the sacred walk with someone I loved to death’s door led me directly to the threshhold of heaven. To an unwavering belief that light always pierces the darkness, that there is no separation between us and God and that, in the end, it’s all just about love.

(This picture was taken by Stephanie of my dad, my brother and me during one of her last lucid moments shortly before she died.)

As a final note, I’d like to dedicate this post to my dear friend, Liz, who lost her mother to ovarian cancer when she was just a teenager. Liz was a necessary guide and partner through my grief following Stephanie’s death, always keeping tabs on me, providing comic relief at just the right moments and being transparent about her own life. If you were here, Liz, I’d take you out to the Olive Garden and we could do the crazy dance.