Anniversary

Since Jen's death, there have been the usual significant dates - wedding anniversary, birthdays, Christmas etc - to experience without her. There's always the sense of someone missing - when we're altogether, we're not all there. Yet for the three of us, it's just one more reminder among the daily ones. For every meal without visitors, there are three of us not four, and Jen's place opposite me is empty. Jen's side of the bed is always empty (unless Secundus appears there in the early morning).

So in this context, the anniversary of Jen's death, July 21st, was just another day - indeed one that was too busy for any reflection. The weather was quite sunny in parts, as it was one year ago. There are moments when I want the world itself to somehow mirror grief - as Auden wrote about Yeats, "What instruments we have agree, the day of his death was a dark, cold day" - but everything and everyone goes on oblivious.

Of course it's not everyone, and I know of quite a few people who remembered the anniversary of Jen's death. I was grateful to receive a few cards, and emails of support. The responses of others do give shape to an otherwise arbitrary moment - the earth has gone around the sun once since Jen died. Just as for most such anniversaries, it's the social focus that gives it meaning. I can see that future anniversaries of Jen's death will probably be shaped by the traditions that we evolve - even if that is in fact non-observance. Since her death is close to both the boys' birthdays, I hadn't wanted to make the anniversary a major focus -- in some aspects their birthdays were hard enough for me, especially writing the birthday cards. Yet the constant experience with grief is that I can't really choose how I feel, although I can choose to have a focus on Jen when I want.

We have tried to give ourselves a framework of objects and places for remembering Jen - the memory box, the photo books, the bench seat where her ashes are buried, the chair in the kitchen garden etc. It's yet to be seen what we will need as time goes on, whether these ones will serve us well or not. It was certainly a deliberate choice to have multiple 'sites' of remembrance, rather than a focus on one - e.g. a grave. I'm happy with what we've done, but I can see that having the one place gives a more natural focus for an anniversary.

The final aspect of the first anniversary is the significance that other people (and perhaps even myself at first) give to that period of grieving. For example one often reads advice that one shouldn't get remarried 'in the first year', and that's something that Jen and I discussed several times. Again it's an arbitrary period, and grief doesn't observe such boundaries. Perhaps deeper down, I suspect that some people see the one year mark as a time to 'move on' - you've paid your respects, now do something else. The effects of Jen's death continue to wash over us, and its fruitless to expect much else. Change will come but it doesn't observe the calendar. Indeed, rather than grief ending, it will overlap and coexist with those changes when they do come.