One Year and a Lifetime

One year ago tomorrow, fate tore a gaping hole in our world. It was a Monday. It was cold and brisk. It was a perfectly average winter day. The kind of day that no one expects death to come.

We have counted the months. We have passed the milestones: the anniversary, Anna's birthday, his birthday, the holidays. And tomorrow is the last first. This will be the last time that it's the first February 18th that he's not here. February 19th, we have endured. But tomorrow...tomorrow is the day that we cannot forget. It is the day that is burned into our memories forever. We will relive it for the rest of our lives. But tomorrow is the last first time that we have to memorialize it.

Tomorrow is the day that I will have no choice but to acknowledge what I was doing this time last year. That I had lunch at Last Resort. That I stood outside on the sidewalk and listened to Mom give me a harried report from her arrival at the ER while the wind blew cold and dry through my hair, around my legs. That I sat alone in the conference room at work just two hours later and heard in her voice - if not in her words - that he wasn't going to make it and I put my face in my hands and cried. That I packed and prepared for the worst. That, truth be told, I could feel in my bones that the worst would happen. That I wore the long-sleeved red shirt and a olive quilted vest and I drove to Atlanta knowing knowing knowing that when I got there, he would die. That I held his hand...that I told him I loved him...that he died.

Grief is not a straight line. It is a winding path. It is two steps forward and eight back. It is denial and anger and acceptance to the nth degree in no particular recurring order. It is forgetting for a second and remembering the next how everything has changed. It is juggling your own pain with everyone else's; it is meeting and failing to meet the odd expectations that spring up in the wake of death. It is feeling not yourself and feeling like only yourself exists. It is seeing your life in fragments, in eras, in before and after, in complete shambles. It is the ashes from which we rise again. Tomorrow is the last first. And then the next day will be...just another day that we get up and push through and move forward.