Every Anniversary...

Every Anniversary, I take the day off.

A day to rest, and remember. A day to be kind and gentle to myself, and remind my heart and mind that it is ok to not be ok.

Hearts are made of muscle, not bone. They do not break, but bruise and tear, and take time to heal. Some anniversaries I cry, sometimes I am merely quiet and keep to myself.

I make a point of doing things that remind me of her. Like lancing a wound, the initial pain is necessary before the healing can take place. Things we used to do together, or things she loved that I used to do only under protest.

I also do the things that remind me of my tethers to this life. Going for a walk surrounded by nature (and sweating up a storm to remind me why all of human history has been a trek to get as far away from nature as possible). Calling loved ones who are still here to reminisce. Little, meaningful, things that remind me of the good times.

I do my best to recall the sound of her voice, the echo of her laugh. The hundreds of things that drove me insane, and the thousands of things that made me love her in the first place. We were very different people, despite our similarities, and it was sometimes hard to reconcile our viewpoints.

Love doesn’t fade over time, but the way we experience that love can change.

Passion can fade. Ardor cools, and energy levels drop with time. That doesn’t mean that the love that once and still fuels those things has died, merely that it has taken a different form.

Love lasts.

Hardier than a desert plant, with more evolutionary potential than a single-cell organism, love survives as long as there is affection to feed it. Even Death cannot stop love, only delay it for a while. The rituals we perform to remember that love keep the love going.

As time goes on, perhaps those rituals will slowly cease, as I find I have less need for them, in comparison to the way I clung to those rituals of affection in the early days of heartbreak and loss. Perhaps one day, I will no longer feel the need for them at all. Or perhaps I will continue to perform them for the rest of my life.

Who can tell what the future holds?

For now, let it be enough that they are a comfort to me, even if I no longer need them to keep from drowning in grief.

Some days the grief is softer, almost a comforting nostalgia that reminds me that no one dies as long as they are remembered. Sometimes it's as sharp as if the loss was only yesterday. Most days, I think of them as if we merely have not seen each other for a long time, as if I could pick up the phone and tell them about an adventure or activity that they would have enjoyed, or meeting a person that I think they'd like to know.

Rituals of affection keep them alive in my heart, even when they've long since become ashes and dust.

When I saw this challenge posted, it was on the 20th anniversary of my twin's death, and the first thing that sprung to mind was the little rituals I still do in her memory.

Watching the movies she loved because she was no longer there to see them herself. Wearing black that day as a sign of continued mourning. Surrounding myself with family who miss her just as much as I do.

That made the bulk of this entry easy to write, though it took nearly two months to write the ending.