Oct 9

Oct 9 Hell week

The photo accompanying this piece is the last photo I took of Adelaide. I love that it is with my mom. Monday marks one year without the bravest, fiercest, strongest human I will ever know. It’s gone by in the blink of an eye and feels like an eternity all at the same time. The following Saturday would have been her fifth birthday. I’ve done my best to prepare for this week: clearing my calendar, calling in emotional reinforcements, planning a very small birthday party. I can’t help but recognize that it’s not so different from this time last year when I was trying my best to emotionally prepare our family for her loss and planning her memorial service.

I hate that the anniversary of my daughter’s passing is a date I now acknowledge. I am heartbroken that she will never celebrate another birthday on Earth. It’s bullshit, all of it. There is a part of me that recognizes that I cannot change what has happened so I should barrel on and make the best of it. Then another part of me shouts back, there is no “best” of this. It fucking sucks, just let it fucking suck. So, at any given time of any given day I am wrestling with these two relevant but conflicting truths.

Many people have told me that they are sorry that the anniversary of her passing and her birthday are so close to one another. I mean, it is a pretty horrific one-two punch. An emotional hell week. But I have to admit, that in my current mental state, I am actually appreciating their proximity. The anniversary of Adelaide’s passing is not a day I have any desire to celebrate. Remember her? Absolutely. But there is nothing celebratory about the day. In fact, the better I understand the intricacies of grief, I’m not sure the day has much to do with Adelaide at all. It is a day for those of us she left to openly express our pain. Grief is an incredibly selfish emotion, it won’t bring Adelaide back, it doesn’t make those around us feel better but it is still something that needs to be expressed, to be released.

Her birthday, on the other hand, that is a day to celebrate her. To share the happy memories and recognize the massive impact she had on all those she met and beyond. We will never know her at age 5, 12 or 20 - her birthdays from here on out will always be “the day she would be turning…”. But by having the anniversary of her death just five days before her birthday I am able to devote one day to the shittyness of her loss and the next to the celebration of her life. Each relevant truth gets their day.

This is not to say in anyway that I am not grieving and celebrating her the other 363 days of the year. Trust me, I don’t need an anniversary to curl in my bed and leave a nice mascara stain on my pillow case. But I also don’t need one to scroll through photos remembering the weight of her body in my arms, the baby softness of her skin or the way she would squeeze my finger when she didn’t want me to leave her at night. That’s the thing, these two dates are just that, days. Days on a calendar with the weight of whatever emotional significance we assign to them. So, I will give these two days their due because I’m not sure I could avoid them if I tried.