Disclaimer: I don't own Monk. In the TV show Marcia is played by Rosemary Forsyth


Make a wish. Those words make me want to laugh out loud. When my daughter was still alive I knew I had no need to make a wish. My life was perfect. Now I only have one wish.

I smile lightly at my husband as I look up at the candle on my cake. What's the point of making a wish? I wish for the same GOD-DAMN thing every day of my life and it never comes true. Every day I wake up and she's still not alive. I know that my wish would never come true.

"Honey," my husband says, "are you okay?"

Am I okay? That's about as classic as 'make a wish'. I'm alive but far from living. I take no joy in living anymore not without my child.

I used to find it so easy to be positive. Even when situations happened where I could see why some people would choose to get mad I never made that choice or any other choice that was negative. My husband never did either. It was so easy to keep focused on love. Love was always the key.

Now I am so filled with every bitter feeling I didn't feel until this year. It's my first birthday without my daughter. I know she was 35 but she was still my baby girl! Some bastard took her away from me! GOD knows why but she's gone and I hate that son of a bitch that stole her from me.

Is there a special rule that on birthdays your wishes come true? If that were the case there would be 4 people at this table and not 2. It would be my daughter, my son-in-law, my husband and I at that table, just like it was last year. I love my husband and I love my son-in-law as if he were my own son but it's incomplete. We're both trying to pretend that our hearts aren't so broken but we both know that they are.

She beat so much illness, when she was 6 and again when she was 15 and 24 and yet she was killed in a freaken car bomb! H.A. that isn't funny, as my son-in-law calls it is definitely not funny. It was too late to snag the bastard in his own trap. This is like emotional labor with nothing good coming out of it. Someone once asked me if it was easy to make decisions or hard.

Well there is one decision that is a piece of cake for me. That decision is what to wish for. I blow out the candles and wish for the nearest and dearest thing to my heart. I wish for the only thing I would ever want. I wish for the one thing I can't have.