“I was derailed, devastated by my father’s unexpected death—more than an overdue end of childhood, I felt exposed by his death, unsheltered, and all the comforts of connection I’d formerly disdained I suddenly urgently wanted. I would spend a decade finding them and building a home in the world, safe harbor, even as I know (and knew then) that we are never safe; we can only be courageous.”
I found these words by E.J. Levy on a particularly difficult weekend last weekend; the weekend that simultaneously marked the three-year anniversary of my grandpa’s death and Joe’s and my twelve-year wedding anniversary.
When I think of death anniversaries, and when other people mention them, I tend to think, ‘Yes, but.’ My grandpa’s death was worse than unexpected, it involved an official’s report in my inbox and every year since I cannot get the images out of my head; images I wish I never had to read, things I did not see but still imagine.
And every year since then, the death anniversary comes around, and then the next day is our wedding anniversary, and I simply cannot wrap my head around the juxtaposition. It is true, of course, that all pleasure is tinged by pain, and all pain by pleasure, but it is the whiplash that gets me. I find it absolutely impossible to grieve and remember one day and turn around and celebrate the next, to the point where this year I told Joe we just needed to forget it; maybe a Valentine’s Day anniversary would be better each year. And though you would think it would get better every year, in the previous years we at least gave it a sporting shot; this year we didn’t even do a card. Each year it’s still consistently too much.
Grief is like that, I’m told, it keeps coming back, but I think grief is also worse when it is sudden, because when death is expected, it lulls us a little bit. We are able to say things like, “Yes, it’s been coming for a while”, and “We expect it soon now.” We get used to it, and with people who have had a long illness we can even say afterwards, “I’m so glad they aren’t in pain anymore.”
Sudden, violent death shocks us. It should. It still shocks me, three years later. It plays on my feelings of safety and of comfort because I am not used to it, and I didn’t see it coming. Because it shouldn’t have happened, not THAT way, not in any world that I would like to be a part of.
And afterwards, for however long, and I’m still in the middle of it, we are left to deal with the fallout. The what-ifs. The images our mind plays. The specific phrases people used.
“We are never safe; we can only be courageous.”
As Joe and I go into our twelfth year of marriage (and marking that twelve years should surely be a celebration), and into three years of grief that now feel inexplicably intertwined, this is the line that can hold the two events together, even more than the neighboring dates, more even than my searching of our separate relationships for commonalities. Because we are never safe, not really. Not twelve years or in ninety, not in our houses, or in the world. There is no guarantee. I cannot lock down this marriage any more than my grandpa could lock down his life. (I feel like this is an important moment to mention that Joe and I are fine.)
There are not many things left after coming to a hard revelation like that, but there are a few. There is still beauty now, like a few mornings later when we went outside and the frost laced the grass and the cold shining benches next to the walking path, beside whole fields that were turned white without the help of snow.
And there is courage. Someday, it will be needed again, even as it is needed now. And sometimes that courage means stepping out, on a fragile, crunching field for a walk in the brittle morning light.
And sometimes it means a toast with a glass of wine to twelve years, whatever the next may bring.
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