The Year of Firsts
A common refrain I’ve heard from fellow members of the world’s sh&#iest club (e.g., the young widow/widower club) is that the first year is always the hardest because you have to move through milestone events like birthdays and anniversaries for the first time without your partner.
Mercifully, my year of firsts is coming to a close, although the year put up quite the fight this week and nearly knocked me out.
My birthday was this week, yet another event in this six week fall stretch that includes Chelsea’s birthday, my birthday, and our wedding anniversary. A stretch that, in year’s past, was cause for celebration, but has now taken on a completely different meaning, as Chelsea passed about a week after my 40th birthday and about a week before our 10 year wedding anniversary. I guess I was somewhat lucky in that the timing of her death fell between events, staggering how I would experience the firsts of this stretch. Last year, I only had to deal with our wedding anniversary.
This year’s stretch actually started out okay, as Chelsea’s birthday ended up being a softer experience than I anticipated. And like Chelsea’s birthday, I haven’t historically made a huge deal out of mine; it was more an opportunity/excuse to have some friends over, maybe cook a nice meal and drink some good wine. As such, I was planning a similar strategy for my birthday, gathering with friends, eating food, maybe trying to celebrate the life we have. I was hoping that maybe the emotions of my birthday wouldn’t hit as hard as they might, that maybe I could find some joy in the here and now.
Holy s*&t did I get this one wrong: it was a brutal day. Or rather, it was a brutally empty day.
I felt the emptiness of Chelsea’s absence in a profound way, more so than the first day I dropped E off at preschool, or my first day at work. The emptiness of the day hit me hard, and I’m still trying to work out why. Again, it’s not a sense of acute sadness, or pain, it’s this tremendous sense of emptiness that is so obvious you can reach out and touch it with your hand. And of course I’m sad, but the sadness is a down-stream consequence of the emptiness.
The experience was also odd in that I felt the emotions coming a few days out and was mentally preparing myself by downplaying the day. I was trying not to think about it, which is out of step with my normal strategy of taking things as they come. But it still didn’t work.
So why? What was it about this particular event that activated this kind of response?
Maybe it’s because I recall memories of last year’s birthday, the last weekend I had with Chelsea.
Maybe it’s because next week is a year, and this event is the ‘last first’ of the year (meaning, the last time I’ll have to go through a yearly milestone event, like a birthday, for the first time after Chelsea’s passing). Maybe there is some significance to the fact that the first year is wrapping up, reminding me both of how far I’ve come, but also what I left behind a year ago.
Maybe it’s the curse of the prime number birthday (I’m 41).
Regardless, the day really kicked my a*#, a not-so-subtle reminder of the powerful emotions that still lie beneath the surface, even when I trick myself into thinking that things have calmed a bit.
Thankfully, I’m better today, and the year of firsts is coming to a close.
