The Irony of Happy Birthday

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to dear …”

Your birthday is supposed to be happy. You were born, people celebrate you, so naturally you should feel joy. Shouldn’t you?

If not, then what is this “happy” in the “happy birthday” song?

Let’s go to the very beginning to find the answer.

Hours before your birth, your mother was in pain. Extreme pain. The closer your birthday came, the worse it got. Was she “happy” during all this?

When you were born, you were crying. They surely weren’t tears of joy. You were crying due to fear and confusion. For years, you kept crying: at school, losing teeth, losing toys, failing to meet expectations, navigating puberty, heartbreak, illness, the weight of fitting in, and what not.

Yet we call it a “happy birthday.”

Fast forward a few more years and there is another first cry!

Now you are the parent holding a baby in your hands. And she keeps crying just like you did when you were born. And you can’t prevent her from crying no matter how much you love her.

In the end, death comes to take you, to set you free from all these sufferings, to make you stop crying for yourself and for others. But you don’t want to leave. Why is that so? 

Do your struggles add some meaning to your life? Or the life itself means something to you? Something you don’t want to give up. Only you know that!

But your child still cries. She is mourning the loss of her parent, the loss of you.

What if we question this instead?

  • If happiness is really the baseline, why does life require such constant effort to maintain it?
  • When you look back at your “happy birthdays,” how many were actually happy?
  • What are we denying when we insist birthdays must be joyful but death must not?

I think all of us have enough life experience to accept that our birthdays mark the beginning of our struggles and pain. Considering it a “happy” incident is a great indication of our ignorance. Don’t you think?

...

Thanks for understanding,

from Khavi Darpan.

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