Happy Birthday Brittany
The beautiful Valentine baby who taught me true love exists.
Brittany Marie Knupper was a Valentine’s baby. She was born on February 14, 1986. This year she would have been 38. The picture above was taken on her birthday in 2021.
She didn’t like being a Valentine’s baby. Having a birthday on a holiday can be a bummer, and having a 2/14 birthday really sucked for her. It was hard to make plans on her birthday, because either people had romantic goings on or they wanted to keep their calendars open just in case. The double whammy of Valentine’s Day and her birthday made any relationships that began at the beginning of the year feel very weighted - that was a serious deadline for a guy to decide whether or not he liked her enough (or vice versa).
True to form, she carried it all with a lot of grace. We spent a lot of time at the hospital, and every single person she interacted with had to identify her via her name and birthdate, and I’d say easily 75% of the time this happened the person would say “Oh, a Valentine’s baby!” And every time she would offer a genuine smile and say “I am!” and every time she would make it seem like no one had ever made this staggeringly obvious observation before. I would have blown my lid the fourth time it happened; I watched her go through it literally hundreds of times, and never once did that smile flag, even when she was at her sickest.
She hated the birthday but God couldn’t have chosen a more fitting day for her to be born. If anyone defined love it was Brittany. She had so much of it to give, and she loved so many people. At our wedding we had a song that played when we kissed and I chose it; it was a re-edit of The Beatles’ track The End, with the emphasis placed on the last line:
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make
In her final days she got so much love from all over the world because she gave so much love. It was her second nature; like the little curled up smile that was permanently at the edge of her lips, she just loved so much.
Now, don’t get me wrong - she could gossip and bitch and moan with the best of them. She was a person, a full and complete person, but she was the best person I ever knew.
Before I met Brittany love seemed like an unlikely thing to me. I believed in the kind of universal, hippy dippy love - in fact that’s my understanding of God - but I wasn’t so sure about the romantic kind. I had been in love, or so I had thought, and every time it had turned so sour. Over time I became convinced that romantic love was a function of hormones and brain chemistry and that successful couples made it through the early stages where lust and excitement gave way to comfort and familiarity, and that the love they felt was more or less the love of two prisoners spending life together in a jail cell. It was what they knew.
But the minute I met Brittany - our first date was at a pub in Toluca Lake, near where she was living at the time - I was in love. We had bantered on Hinge and then on text, so I knew we had chemistry, but you never knew how it would be in real life. The digital spark sometimes gets snuffed in analog life. With her, though, it was perfect. Right away perfect. It helps that she was tall and gorgeous and busty and had a big smile and a dark sense of humor. There was more, though, and that night I felt something.
In The Godfather Michael Corleone feels the thunderbolt when he meets Apollonia, his Sicilian wife. Sometimes when I told the story of adopting my beloved dog Oliver Reed I used that thunderbolt analogy, how I had seen him across a field at an adoption fair and had been struck by the thunderbolt. But with Brittany it wasn’t a thunderbolt.
It was a click. A soft, quiet and satisfying click.
It was the feeling of two pieces, perfectly tooled for one another, clicking into place. It was the feeling of completion. Finally, at last, I was whole.
That night I was a gentleman and I walked her home and I asked her out on a second date. She agreed, and then she went to her room and got on her phone and immediately began asking her friends why I hadn’t kissed her. The truth was that I was so afraid of ruining it with a clumsy pass and so hung up on not coming across as a creep that I held back all of my instincts and didn’t lean forward to give her the kiss I so badly needed.
From then on I was hers. And I know it was true love because it was tested, truly tested. The bad times that we had - they were Biblical. I know that it was true love because there was never a point where leaving her was an option, no matter how sick she got. No matter how outside my comfort zone I had to go as a caregiver. No matter how afraid I was of what darkness was looming before us. Nurses at the hospital would comment on the fact that I was always there; many men in similar situations run. Many, many men.
We had the best time. There were six truly trying months but we had four truly beautiful years. We laughed a lot. We traveled as we could, which wasn’t much, but we had a great time when we did it. Hawaii, Big Bear, Berkeley, her little home town. We were more than content just sitting side by side, watching TV or playing on our phones, her legs draped across my lap or my toes tucked under her thigh. We got each other, on a fundamental level, and we understood each other in a way that is described as intimacy but that word doesn't cut it. Intimacy isn’t intense enough when describing a situation where another person feels like an extension of yourself.
We shared ideas and dreams. We locked down together in 2020; she moved into my place much earlier than anyone thought wise because in the initial weeks of lockdown her roommate lost her mind. This girl began peeling her face off, looking for bugs under her skin. That space was no longer safe, so I had Brittany come stay with me in my one bedroom and I am so glad I did because after that we spent all of our time together. Some couples need space, but it turns out we didn’t. And I don’t mean that in some kind of a codependent way - I encouraged her to go do things with her friends, and she did the same for me, but where we wanted to be was with each other. You get a sense of whether or not it’s real when you’re spending 24 hours a day together seven days a week as the world melts down outside your window. And you really know it’s real when those days are happy memories, even with all of the fear and uncertainty just beyond our front door. 2020 was a miserable, shitty year but in many ways it was one of the best years of my life.
I know that true love is real because of how I feel today, waiting for the clock to tick over to her birthday seven months after she died. I know that true love is real because I have true agony in my heart; the completion I felt has been obliterated. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all, but I gotta question that. Before Brittany I had relationships and I had times that were good, but it wasn’t until her that I had true love and now that it’s gone I know what I’m missing. I know what I don’t have. Before Brittany I could tell myself romantic love was a function of hormones and brain chemistry, that it was a thing we made up to sell cards and chocolate, but after Brittany I can’t return to that blissful ignorance.
I have felt the light and the warmth of the impossible enormity that is real, true and nurturing love. I have been fed and strengthened by it, I have been touched and changed by it. And now I don’t have it and the emptiness is as massive as the previous presence. I know true love exists because how could something that didn’t exist leave this much of a hole in me?
All of that flowery stuff aside, I wouldn’t change a thing about that first date. I wouldn’t go back and tell myself to ghost her, I wouldn’t go back and warn myself of how this would end. To do that would be to rob myself of four years of a feeling of wholeness I had been looking for my entire life. It sucks that I only get four years of it, but maybe that “loved and lost” shit is right after all… I’d rather have it than to have never had it. I hate that it’s gone, that she’s gone, but I am so grateful to have ever had her.
Happy birthday, baby. I’m so glad you were born and that our paths brought us together, even if for only four short years. Being with you was the highlight of my whole life, the entire reason I was ever on this Earth, and being loved by you was the greatest privilege of a very privileged life. I hope I made you even a fraction as happy as you made me, because you made me happier than ever seemed possible. And I know that you didn’t like Valentine’s Day being your birthday but it’s just so fitting - amid all the commercialization and cheapening of the concept of love, someone was born who truly embodied it.
And reader, if you’re sour and grumpy about Valentine’s Day, I am sorry to tell you - it’s all real. The hearts and the joy and the happiness and most of all the deep, swooning, enveloping romantic love. It’s all real. I know, because I’ve been there.