The night before

Eight years ago, today looked a lot more like this:






(Sorry for the totally sucky photo above. I was feeling too angsty and lazy to actually scan it, so I took a photo of the print with my cell phone. L.A.M.E…but easier.)



Eight years ago. Our rehearsal for our wedding, followed by the rehearsal dinner at our home.

Eight years now since I got married. Seven years now since I got to celebrate that anniversary while actually being married.

I wish I had an answer for how I am.

Mostly, I'm just tired.

Things have been busy busy busy lately--but not in a bad way, necessarily. Between work, taking care of Anna, running my photography business on the side (which means in the evenings after Anna's in bed), helping out with dance team practices once a week, and occasionally trying to do something fun and social, I've barely had a chance to sit and relax in a long, long time. Overall it's an improvement--a huge improvement--over the gray clouds, gloom, and stress that hung over my spring and summer…but at the same time, it's not like life is swimmingly peachy either.

It's going. It's busy. It's…I don't know what.

The upside is that I haven't had much time to stop and think (in that utterly loaded widow way) about what tomorrow is: what should have been my eighth wedding anniversary.

The catch to not having any time to stop? I don't know what to expect out of tomorrow.

As soon as we passed Thanksgiving, all the usual cues started reminding me what was just around the corner. Our anniversary. Charley's birthday. Christmas. Another year of…this. Then, I was glad for the busyness and distractions.

But over the last day or two, the awareness started to sink back in, like finding oneself wearing an old, too-large, inherited jacket. It doesn't fit, it's awkward, and it gets in the way…but there's something oddly comforting about it at the same time. This was us. This was our life together, I can breathe in from its folds.

After working nonstop yesterday from 8am til about midnight and then today up until about 6pm, I finally had to stop. I knew I wasn't going to get anything more done--I'm too fried, too tired, too worn thin--and I knew I needed to pull this stored garment out of the closet, wrap it around me again. Why, yes--hello, Grief. It's that time of year again.

I'm aware of what tomorrow is. My body and heart know the conflict. And if I stop to think, it makes me sad and start to cry. It'll never be okay with me that Charley died when he was 28, when our life together was just beginning, when our daughter--and the only child we'll ever have--was so young.

But honestly, there's another element that provides a different, but no less melancholy, tone to today:

It's also the two-year anniversary of when my friend died.

Which makes photos like these--taken eight years ago today and tomorrow--all the harder to process mentally and emotionally:

At my rehearsal dinner

…because she was also my maid of honor.

We'd been estranged for several years when she died. Her mental illness and active suicide attempts started shortly after Charley died, and as a brand-new, 27-year-old widow with a one-year-old baby, I had no ability to cope with it. For my own safety and survival, I had to cut her out of my life…but it didn't stop the barbed attacks over email, the middle-of-the-night suicide "notes" via text messages and voicemail--or her mental illness.

I've only seen her twice since Charley's funeral--once at the dedication at PIR one week after he died, and then once almost a year later, after I'd had to call the police to check on her that she hadn't killed herself. I don't even know the last time I talked to her or actually received an email from her. Three years ago? Four? More? Even in my shock and numbness during that first year of widowhood, I was aware of how fucked up it was that I was having to deal, even if only obliquely, with a good friend's suicide attempts.

The person I was friends with since sixth grade disappeared a long time ago, our friendship unraveling by degrees from the moment I told her I was pregnant just over a month after my wedding. Charley's death and her mental illness--whatever the official diagnosis eventually was--only complicated matters.

It's all so sad, and tragically unfair. We all wanted her to get better so desperately, to find a treatment that would help. And it's days like today, where I reflect back on the people who've died so young--on the lives we'd hoped for as teenagers and adults that never got to happen--where the familiarity of grief is a comfort. It feels right, appropriate. How else should I react to my former best friend dying right after she turned 33, and my husband before he was even 29, before we'd celebrated our second wedding anniversary?

And until I actually stopped and sat down tonight, started to peel off the layers around my emotions, I didn't know my friend's death was lingering under the surface. I remembered about her death early this morning after I got up--but I remembered mostly because I realized first that it was the day before my anniversary…and only afterward did I connect that it was also the day I'd found out two years ago that she'd died.

In the truly bizarre workings of a grief-influenced psyche, I briefly felt guilty for forgetting. I remembered her birthday a month ago and emailed her mom…but would I have remembered her death if it weren't for my anniversary?

Bah. Grief can be crazy-making.

(And in an even stranger twist, as I was writing here, I went back to my old emails to find the one where I was told she'd died. And it turns out I might not even have the day right; she might have died on Dec. 5. Oh, the macabre irony…but I gotta say, that little twist did turn down the dial on my angst, guilt, and emotions. How could I react so strongly to the date if it's not even the correct date?!? Sheesh….)

An emotional roller coaster? You betcha…even if it's a much smaller one than I had to live with in those earliest years of widowhood.

But it's as good of a note as any to end a discombobulated blog post, pour myself another glass of wine, and go watch brainless TV off my Tivo….

And so my plan for tomorrow? I decided late last week to be naughty (or would that be wise?) and take the day off from work, even though I have no paid time off. I have support group in the afternoon--which will be well timed even if I'm not overly emotional--and I'll go to dinner afterward with a few friends from there (or myself if needed). But the part I'm looking forward to (and hoping isn't a repeat of last year's debacle)? I was uber naughty and scheduled a fancy-pants rain-shower massage and a facial for the late morning and early afternoon. (I confess: I partially planned it that way so I could have my parents pick up Anna from school and I could avoid parental duties. It's been a long time since I've had any kid-free time to myself when I haven't had something else going on…and if I can't do it on my wedding anniversary when my husband is dead, when can I?)

I'm relieved I decided to do something…but it's also traditionally one of the suckiest days all year…so we'll see.

If nothing else, there will be wine and chocolate dessert in my future tomorrow. Hooray for wine and chocolate tartufo….

And I'll remember, too, and raise a toast in honor of my friend--and the memory of a day where she was absolutely at her very best. Because regardless of all that came before and later, she really was a totally awesome maid of honor….