Today is our 4th anniversary. When I awoke this morning, that horrible “Happy Anniversary” song popped into my head as it has on each anniversary prior. Courtney brought me coffee in bed, which still hasn’t lost its appeal after 4 years. He even sat in bed and chatted with me before running off to work.
“I feel like a different person than I was this time last year,” I told him. I’m sadder, more grounded, and completely accepting of the notion that there are no guarantees in life. Safety is an illusion. The future is a luxury. In some ways, this embracing of the present as the only given in life has been great.
But back to our anniversary. This is my first “big day” since mom died. There will be no card in the mail, no check to go out and “have a nice dinner” written in my mother’s neat handwriting. Our first anniversary, we used the check to go to a seafood restaurant in Boston. It turns out it was a chain restaurant and Courtney knew it—I had chosen it because I was starving and my brain was shutting down. Dinner was fine, but I was bummed when I found out it was a restaurant you might find in any major city on the eastern seaboard. The best meal we had in Boston was pho for lunch the day after our anniversary, so I consider that our first anniversary celebration meal.
Our second anniversary we were on Madeline Island. We went to a restaurant for fried whitefish which was amazing, but we had our special anniversary dinner when we got home. Millie’s, I believe.
Last year, I don’t remember. We had just gotten back from seeing my whole family in Canaan, and it was a few days before Dad would call me at my office to give me the bad news that mom’s cold and backache were in fact stage 4 lung cancer. There’s so much about the last year that I don’t remember. It’s strange because I’ve always had a good memory, but perhaps there’s only so much pain a person can stand and the brain has a governor on all that.
Grief is worse now. I’m in the middle of it. I tear up almost daily at some point. Yesterday, it was walking around campus and seeing an awkward young man with a woman I assumed was his mother. Making up stories about strangers is a long standing hobby of mine, and I immediately pegged the pair as a prospective student and his mother. I remembered being that age, being embarrassed by the very presence of my mother, and being irritated by every little thing she would do.
I never expected to miss mom getting on my nerves as much as I do.
