Tag: Dead wife

Anniversary

Anniversary of death looms like doomsday

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How do you get through the first anniversary of the death of your wife, your life companion, your soulmate?

You can’t be with friends who knew her, and celebrate her life together because none of them lives anywhere near you.

So, since you’ll be alone, do you tough it out and re-live the good times in your mind and get good and drunk in the process?

Do you try and ignore it and pretend it’s just another day in the 364 days of sorrow and loneliness that preceded it?

Or do you decide to handle it with poetic tragedy and on the day of her death fire a bullet into your brain?

The day looms in your mind as a personal doomsday that could “turn” either way.

I say “turn” because “anniversary” is from the Latin words annus for year and versus, past particle of vertere meaning “to turn.”

Drawing from another etymological tidbit, the Old English word for anniversary is mynddæg, which means “mind-day.”

Which brings one back to dealing with the day by reliving the good times in your mind, drinking to her memory and so forth. That would clearly be a “mind-day.”

Trying to ignore the day just wouldn’t work. So it seems the two choices are to end the loss and the sorrow once and for all, or to get out the Jack Daniels and deal with the loss and the sorrow by making it a mind-day.

I say let’s be a gentleman about this.

First anniversary of wife’s death

 

Dreams of S.

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You wake with a start. Your heart is racing. You reach across the bed to touch your wife. “Are you okay, honey?” A brief whimper escapes your lips. She’s not there, of course.

You realize it was a dream. She was in danger. You try to remember the details, but the details are lost in the darkness. You look at the digital clock on the bedside table—3:11 am. 

That was her birthday—March the 11th. Coincidence? You realize today’s date—November the 21st. She died eleven months ago today.

Was this a rehearsal for the main event—December 21st? Will the bedroom be filled with the ghosts of dead loved ones for the occasion? The four men—your father, two brothers and your son—dressed in black. Your son was a bit of a card—perhaps he will wear a black top hat so he can doff it to you. Your mother will wear that beautiful black dress she wore at the funeral of her first-born son, killed in a car crash at twenty-four.

And when the digital clock clicks to 3:11 and you wake with a start and reach out and touch the empty pillow, someone will be singing ‘Hallelujah’—Leonard Cohen perhaps.

It will be a beautiful event. Don’t miss it.