FICTION
Birthday Candles
The Front Range received its first snowfall of the season on the day Sherri Norman began to die. There it was, a silent surprise, when she walked out of the doctor’s office. Fluffy white flakes swirling down like a second chance.
For everyone except her, of course.
She stepped gingerly across the slick parking lot and took refuge in her car, turning the heat up to full blast. While the ancient Chevy’s heating system slowly caught up with her request, she gripped the wheel and stared unseeingly ahead, watching the white whirl against the mountains and blinking through her mental fog to the doctor’s words.
Cancer progressed more rapidly than expected … stage 4 … limited treatment options … get affairs in order …
There was only one word he hadn’t said. The word that had been slinking around his every sentence. The word that was peering at her even now. Die. That was what he’d been saying, really. Under all the camouflage of stammering sympathy and carefully caged sentences and reluctance to hold out hope.
Sherri, you’re going to die.
Warm air was blasting from the vents now, but Sherri’s hands were still numb. Probably because she’d been gripping the steering wheel with a death grip. Death grip. Ha.
She flexed her fingers and drew in a deep breath. Well, so it had come. Death, the expected unexpected. Although in her case, quite a bit less unexpected than for most. She’d known about the cancer since spring, after all. Hadn’t she realized all along that the prognosis wasn’t good? That the radiation treatments weren’t helping? Hadn’t she watched herself shrinking to shadowed eyes and thinning hair and taut-stretched skin over aching bones? Hadn’t she known, really, what Dr. Alliston would tell her, without telling her, today?
Upbeat pop music was still grooving over the car radio, songs about love and dreams and all the other things that were irrelevant now. Sherri flicked it off and started driving into the stubborn snow. Even in this weather, folks were hurrying along the downtown sidewalks — families with squealing toddlers, giggling gaggles of teenage girls, couples cuddling arm-in-arm. With the white whirl of approaching winter and the golden embrace of the glowing shop windows, the scene looked magical, like an enchanted snowglobe. Strange, how all these people would outlive her. How they all enjoyed the luxury of thinking about tomorrow like a wide-open horizon.
Sherri kept driving, away from the lighted shops and happy people and up into the cold starkness of the mountains, along the winding stretch of Highway 34 north of Devils Gulch. Her hands were okay now. The numbness had been ridiculous. Sentimental, her father would have sneered. His description for when she was being too emotional.
Lord knew he’d never had that problem. After he’d suffered the stroke that had crippled him — the one the doctor believed would end him — he’d just given his hard-edged laugh as Sherri had wheeled him out of the hospital. “Been dyin’ since the day I was born anyway,” he’d rasped in that sandpaper voice of his. “Might as well finish the job now.”
He hadn’t, though. He’d hung on another sixteen years, a bitter man in a broken body, holed up in his mountain cabin north of Estes Park. Almost six thousand more sunrises out his window, six thousand tomorrows and second chances and new beginnings. And he’d burrowed a bitter way through all of them, cursing the God he hated and the body that broke … and the daughter who’d given up nearly two decades of her life to care for him. He’d dared death to come, like a dark deliverer.
Sherri blinked away the memories that hung just outside the windshield. Well, she’d do the same. She wouldn’t be weak, the way her father had so often accused her of being. Anyway, he’d taught her everything she needed to know for this moment, hadn’t he? He’d taught her all about how to push through pain. How to keep a stiff upper lip. How to bend without complaining to the will of someone stronger. And most of all, how to let dreams die without a single murmur.
Yes, in every meaningful way, she’d learned how to die for sixteen years. This should come easily.
The mailbox at the end of the dirt drive was still that ugly black model her father had chosen, and when she opened the gate, the hinges still squawked in complaint. She’d been meaning to fix both of those things … on one of the days she’d thought she’d had left.
By the time she reached the cabin, the snow had lessened, tapering into a few flakes here and there, though the air remained cold enough to burn the inside of her nose. The High Peaks were obscured, though, wrapped snugly in a blanket of winter. The road over the pass would be closed tonight, no doubt, the little mountain town accepting the first big snow of the season. Well, so winter had started. Sherri had always prided herself on being one who could tolerate every mood of the mountains, who stayed “from ice-in to ice-out,” as the locals said.
Strange. This time, she wouldn’t be here for ice-out.
She squared her shoulders, unlocked the door, and stepped across the threshold of the little cabin where she’d given the finite minutes of her life to placating a man who’d only lived to die. And in the process, she’d given up her own life too, hadn’t she? No career. No family. No friends. No one to speak at her funeral or put flowers on her grave or even notice when she was laid beneath the mountain soil.
Her father would say that was her own fault. And he’d probably be right. It didn’t matter anyway. Actually, maybe it was for the better. At least she wasn’t disappointing anyone by dying. Not the way she’d disappointed her father all her life.
Doing had always come more easily than thinking and feeling. Sherri forced herself into executive mode, out of her heart and into her mind. Get your affairs in order, the doctor had said. Not much to do along those lines, with the shrunken life she’d lived, but there were some things she’d already started handling. She’d been conscientious, the way a teacher once described her. In fact, she’d prepared herself for the doctor’s news so many times that everything now would be simply a well-rehearsed dance of dutiful next steps.
She’d already checked with a lawyer, back when the cancer first appeared, to confirm that the cabin would go to her father’s sister in Wisconsin. She’d already written her own obituary — quite good, if she had to say so herself — and started a file of end-of-life matters. And she’d already bought some oversized Rubbermaid bins, all ready for her to start dismantling the rest of her life. Most of what she owned could be donated or sold or thrown away altogether. Less for Aunt Ella to go through — afterwards.
Wrangling the bins out of the hall closet and into her room was harder than she’d expected, her breath draining away at the slightest exertion. Yet another sign that her body had already known what she’d been told today. She dragged one of the bins to her desk and sank into her chair as she examined the clutter on the weatherbeaten wooden surface. An outdated edition of Estes Park News, the events page dog-eared — she’d never gone to any of the festivities, though. A framed photo of Hallett Peak on a sunny day. A hiking trails map from the Wild Basin and an off-centered stack of unpaid bills and a mystery novel she’d started reading years ago and wandered away from halfway through. Little unfinished scraps of her life. All of it collected here. All of it worthless now.
She Sharpie-scribbled TRASH across the lid of the biggest box, then started sweeping everything inside. The map of trails she wouldn’t hike. The photo of a mountain she wouldn’t see. The newspaper with events she wouldn’t attend. Even the book. She could already guess how the plot would unfold, anyway.
When the top of her desk was cleared, she opened the first drawer — her “saving drawer,” she’d called it. Bookmarks she’d thought too fancy for everyday use. A paperweight from her one trip out of state to visit Aunt Ella. A package of beautiful ink pens — unused and now all dried up. What had she been waiting for? A celebration more special than the mundane miracle of just being alive?
She paused at a box of elaborately spiraled candles. Oh, she’d forgotten about these. A friend had given them to her at her twenty-first birthday. “Use them on your cake!” she’d laughed.
But when Sherri had shown them to her dad, he’d sneered. “You’re too old for birthday candles.”
Something tugged at her memory. She blinked at the calendar on her desk, the keeper of dwindling days, for a couple of heartbeats before the date had meaning. October 27. Her birthday. Twenty years removed from receiving those candles for the first time.
Her dad was right. She’d been too old for birthday candles. Yet all this time, she’d saved them. Waiting for — what?
She tossed the candles into the Rubbermaid box and kept going, past the notebooks she’d never written in, the stamps she’d never used, the pocket cross she’d bought at a craft fair. She rubbed her thumb across its rough pottery surface. God had been pretty quiet lately. She’d been talking to Him, this God Who had died and lived again.
But resurrection hadn’t found its way to her.
At the bottom of the drawer, her fingers curled around the edge of an envelope. Oh! So that’s where those had gotten to.
She carefully untucked the envelope flap and slid out the treasure inside — pressed aspen leaves. The gold color had browned somewhat, and the edges were crumbling, but they still held the delicate autumn hue of her favorite trees.
And the memory.
She stared out the window at the blurry edge where the forest met the yard. After her mother had left and her father had moved here with her, she’d been overjoyed by the ring of aspens she found in the woods. She’d loved the rustle of their leaves in the wind, the silky texture of their slim trunks, the way they so eagerly made welcome for birds and forest critters — and her. She’d spent whole days as a teenager sitting beneath them, drawing or thinking or dreaming about a future that seemed expansive then. And she’d especially loved them in autumn, when the leaves flashed brilliant gold, shocking the shadows like torches. She’d loved them so much, in fact, that in her senior year of high school, she’d gathered and pressed these leaves.
It was a good thing she had. She’d returned from college at Christmas break to find that her father had chainsawed down the trees while she’d been gone. He’d scoffed at her tears. “They were just stupid trees! Blocked the view from that window. And messy, too, with all those seeds in the spring. Dang it, girl, quit cryin’! You’d think somebody was dyin’! Ain’t nothin’ cryin’ ever fixed anyway.”
A bitter smile twisted one corner of her mouth. Well, somebody was dying now. And sometimes she wondered if maybe she hadn’t started dying, at least inside, all the way back then. Back in that moment when she’d realized that she was powerless to hold onto anything that mattered.
But she wasn’t crying. She’d learned long ago that her father was right about that. It fixed nothing.
If only … if only she could see the aspens turn gold, one more time. But that was impossible. There were no other of the trees on their property — none had dared to grow, probably. And the aspens high in the mountains had dropped their foliage weeks ago. No, the papery ghosts of those long-ago leaves would be all she had to hold onto now.
She kept working, moving methodically through her desk and on to the file drawer, adding important papers to her end-of-life files. Birth certificate, records, paperwork, registration, printed copy of her obituary, deed to the cabin, purchase records of her cemetery plot. All that was left of her life, neatly quantified on stark white paper.
She folded everything into a smaller plastic box and carried it out the door, propping it on her hip as she headed to her car. She’d load it in the back and take it to her storage building tomorrow. That way it would all be easy to find when —
A sudden gust of wind slapped her sideways. Before she could regain her balance, the box tumbled from her stiff fingers. The lid spun one way, the bin bounced another, and papers began pinwheeling like confetti before the wind, rushing like tumbleweeds across the snow-patchy grass.
No, no, no! Sherri dashed after them, ignoring the way her chest tightened instantly and the trembling began in her arms and legs. But it was too late. The wind was strong, and the papers were willing, and all the fragments of her life were blowing away like the empty scraps they were. And by the time she’d stumbled deep into the woods, snatching up only a few papers now wet and crumpled, she couldn’t ignore the needles in her lungs any longer. She sank onto a fallen log at the edge of a small clearing and let the coughing start. The terrible, terrible coughing that turned her inside out, that would finally tear her loose from life.
When her lungs could at last reach for air again, she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and drew in a shuddering dose of oxygen. The winter world was hauntingly quiet. Not a whisper of wind now, not the squeak of a squirrel or twitter of a chickadee. As if the mountains were holding their breath.
And in the quiet, the whole unbelievable truth burst over her like a bubble again. She was going to die. She was going to die.
Her breath snatched again in sudden gulps, her core trembling from a deeper trouble than the cold. Her heartbeats thumped loud in her ears.
How many breaths and heartbeats did she have left?
And was that really life, anyway?
The papers in her hands were suddenly meaningless. They were no more her life than the fallen autumn leaves were the trees. Her life was the rich depth of herself — her thoughts, her dreams, her hopes, her fears, her memories, her experiences, her story.
At least, it should have been.
But here, on her last birthday, alone in the sleeping winter woods, the true tragedy suddenly came clear. The greatest grief was not that she would die as surely as the winter woods. The greatest grief was that she had never lived.
And now it was too late.
The wind gusted again, and it wasn’t until Sherri felt the wetness drying on her cheeks that she realized she was crying. The kind of crying she hadn’t allowed in years. Deep, soul-shaking sobs. She was crying for the ink pens that had dried up before they could be used and the bins holding two decades’ worth of details. She was crying for the trails she had never hiked and the book left unfinished on page 178. She was crying for the stubborn snow and the unlit birthday candles. She was crying for the way the saw must have sounded in the skin of the aspens, for the fallen trees and the fallen leaves and all the finished but unfinished things.
A sudden glow to her left caught her eye. A light? Blinking back the tears, she peered through the trees. Wait — what was that? It couldn’t be …
She swiped at her eyes and started struggling toward the light, visible in snatches through the trees. Ducking finally beneath the thick limbs of a stalwart fir, she scrambled over a fallen log — and gasped.
In front of her rose a ring of slender aspens, stretching strong and hopeful from a circle of silver stumps. And their leaves were the most breathtaking gold she had ever envisioned. The questions collided in her mind. How was it possible? Was she in the same place? The ring of stumps — but it had been over twenty years since her father had felled those trees. How could they have saplings now? And how could they still hold their leaves, when all the other trees had turned and faded?
Maybe it was okay if some things were miracles.
She stepped into the ring, years sliding away to her trusting teenage self. With a familiar welcome, the aspens enfolded her with the glow of their own golden rejoicing, the more-than-light of these trees turned torches. Birthday candles from a Father Who whispered it was never too late to be loved. Trees that had died only to live again. Life that was still breaking through, even now, that would resurrect with a flaming faith from the shadows of death itself.
Until dusk settled like a silent prayer, Sherri stood there, soaking up the glow of a promise. Then she walked back to her cabin between snow and stars. And finally, in the flickering joy of her spiraling candles and the hope of a spring stronger than she’d ever imagined, she settled down with her half-read book — ready at last to finish her story.
A worshiper of the Creator and a wanderer of creation, Ashlyn McKayla Ohm is the author of the contemporary fiction Climbing Higher trilogy as well as devotional and poetry collections. If she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably getting lost in the woods. Follow her writing at wordsfromthewilderness.substack.com.
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