What a strange day. It would have been your 60th birthday today - what an accomplishment! Still so young and still so many years to go. Or maybe not.

But now i suspect that you've moved on to a place where birthdays are irrelevant, where you can just as easily be 6 or 600 and feel that ultimate vitality and freedom that earthly birthdays don't offer. Do you even notice? Does that sort of time have any meaning now? It does for us, at any rate, while we're here, so i celebrate your birthday today.

It's interesting how being in touch with others' birthdays gives a reason to contemplate our own origin, birth, life, mortality and immortality. We celebrate birth as such a glorious thing, yet for the baby it's probably at least as shocking as death. A baby leaves its warm, safe, blissful womb to enter the not nearly as blissful world. At death it's the other way - from the troubles of life and the worries of growing older to enter into a different kind of blissful womb, an infinite and glorious place of its own, where maybe we can play forever, with nary the care of a child.

Life on earth has its own happiness - family, friends, fun, emotions, learning, adventures, nature and just day-to-day events that make our time here so worthwhile. So worthwhile that we're very often afraid to have birthdays, grow older, see another decade go by, look in the mirror, reflect on our lives. Because we want to live as well as we can for as long as we can, and honestly none of us really know what happens when the birthdays end, although we like to think that the life goes on better than ever.

Dad, you had a full and happy life. I'm sure there were so many things you didn't get to do, or would have done differently, or had on your list of things to do in the coming years. Now there are different things to do (well, if we'd not be asking you to help us every 5 minutes, maybe you could get on with doing some of them, eh? : ) For once this birthday won't bring anxiety about health, retirement, what was done or not done, nor will it bring a celebration with your dear friends and family who were always so truely blessed to have you with them for another year.

As usual on this day, i wish that you are happy, healthy and celebrating your birth and life for yourself and with us. For my part, i'll celebrate your life and remember you dearly. And i'll light a candle to symbolize our hopes for immortality, and to give some light and warmth to counter the sadness that we can't help but feel today. It's not much of a birthday when the birthday boy isn't here, but we can be happy knowing that you might be having your most blissful birthday yet.

Selfishly, i wish you were here so i could call, or maybe even pay a surprise visit for the big 60, or send you some strange and wonderful thing, and watch you blow out a candle. Instead, i sang the Happy Birthday song to you in the calm quiet of the morning, and know that you were smiling.

Happy birthday, dad - i love you now more than ever...

- stacie