Happy Birthday, Sherrie.

It’s Aunt Sherrie’s birthday tomorrow.

She’s been gone for over two years, and the world that she inhabited feels far away from the one I’m currently in, the one we’re all in right now.

Yesterday, when I was driving back from the beach with the kids, wet sand sticking to our wet clothes, Kool & the Gang’s Celebration came on the radio, and I opened the windows and blasted the song, driving down a steep hill in time to the “whoo — hoo” of the chorus.

“Isn’t this kind of inappropriate during coronavirus and everything?” my eight-year-old daughter asked from the backseat.

My face-mask was pulled up over my head like a headband, and we’d just departed graffiti next to the sand dunes - still fresh on the wall: Breonna Taylor, Say her Name.

I looked around. The streets were empty, and I reassured her, something that I decided just in that moment:

When Kool & the Gang comes on the radio, it is okay to celebrate being alive.

This song — I told her — was the soundtrack to every joyous family event in my life: My Bat Mitzvah, my brother’s Bar Mitzvah (every Bar/Bat Mitzvah!) My wedding, every wedding.

Whenever the band played the first few notes of Celebration, we all hit the dance floor, no one faster than Aunt Sherrie. She was a joyful, expressive, beautiful dancer. I miss her.

A friend recently posted on Facebook that when his “memories” popped up from previous years, it felt like salt in a wound!

It made me laugh — looking at what he shared, some innocuous outing the prior summer - and how true it was.

And, still, looking at a photograph (like the one above of Sherrie next to me at my Bat Mitzvah) it hurts in the way it should, mixed with joy. My consolation is celebrating her birthday for as long as I’m alive.

We’re in this for the long-game, God willing, for as many days as we’ve got, to engage in the work: to fight for racial justice, to consider our neighbors as we adjust our masks over our mouths, to ask the hard questions, to remember our loved ones, to celebrate their lives — and our own.

It’s time to come together…everyone around the world. Come on.

Happy Birthday, Sherrie.

Prayer + Action: What Next?