Footnote

It’s my wedding anniversary today, and since I started writing here I have always noted where I’m at on that occasion. It’s not a date that means anything to anyone else anymore. And, truth be told, I don’t really know what it means to me this year.

Some anniversaries since he died have been filled with memories of our wedding day, or of our anniversary celebrations for the ten years we were married. Some haven’t. Some have felt like they needed marking. Some haven’t. It’s never the same.

Today, it dawned on me that it won’t be all that long before I will have been a widow for longer than I was a wife. Being widowed at forty and not quite making it to our eleventh wedding anniversary, the hoped for likelihood is that I will be a widow at least three times longer than I was married.

When I was first widowed, I promised myself that Steve would remain as much a part of everything as I could possibly keep him. We would talk about him, bring him into the every day, keep memories alive. We would find ways of bringing him with us.

And it’s not that we haven’t done that, because we have. But time fills life with things. And you can keep the memories alive, but the further back in time they happened, the more memories are still being made without that person in them. And you can talk about how they might have felt in the memories they weren’t there for…. but they weren’t there.

It is not always as easy as promising yourself that they will remain part of everything. Even as you try.

I’m sure some people do it better than me. But to me, today, rather than thinking about the past, the wedding, the anniversaries, the meals, the trips, the gifts, I’m wondering about the future, and whether there will be a day when my marriage feels like a footnote, so far in the past, such a small amount of time in my life. And I don’t know how to feel about that, either.

Being a wife shaped me, no doubt. My relationship made me grow, learn, compromise, dream, build. Steve gave me love, support, confidence, challenge, comfort, security.

But it’s fairly sure I’ll be a widow a lot longer than I was a wife. And so the loss of the relationship that was supposed to be life defining is perhaps going to be more life defining than the relationship itself, which isn’t how anyone would want it, but there we are.

I realise this isn’t exactly uplifting for an anniversary post, but I’m not melancholy about it. I just find, sometimes, that the next right thing is to acknowledge the reality of how it is.

You promise “til death do us part” imagining a full life until that day. And we don’t all get it. Being Steve’s wife was never the entirety of who I was, though it was a cherished part, a part I was proud of, and a part that always will have been. Being his widow is not the entirety of who I am nor who I will be, but it will be the formative part of a big chunk of my life.

And this anniversary, number six on my own, I haven’t felt the need to walk down memory lane, or to take myself out on a date. I have poured myself a single glass of prosecco and bought myself treats from Hotel Chocolat, because I can’t let the day go by totally under the radar (and did you know that there are habanero and peppermint selectors at Hotel Chocolat now?). But knowing how to handle these dates that carry significance becomes perhaps more confusing as I collect more of them spent by myself. Because I cannot and will not enter the realms of the performative for the sake of it. I can only go with what feels right in the moment, even if I’m also questioning myself.

And maybe it’s in the small things that the past carries into the story as yet unwritten, even in the most innocuous ways, even if only I know they are there. Maybe not the main narrative anymore, but not yet a footnote.