Six Years Later…
This time of year is really tricky for me.
Prior to Chelsea’s passing, this was my favorite six-week stretch of the calendar, as her birthday was late September, my birthday is mid-October, and our wedding anniversary was at the end of October. While we were the type of people that never needed reason a celebrate, we always enjoyed having a few additional reasons to celebrate as we settled into fall.
And then she died, forever complicating this time of year.
True to form, last year’s experience was emotionally complex: Chelsea’s birthday was tough, although my daughter and I spent some time together that morning talking about Chelsea and creating some space for E to ask questions and for us to eat pastries (that was one of Chelsea’s favorite things to do with E as a baby: strap her into the car and go find a central coast bakery that they had yet to explore). I enjoyed coffee and conversation with my daughter, but the time we spent really brought home that sense of absence/emptiness associated with someone’s passing. Later that month, we spread Chelsea’s ashes, which proved to be a lovely event, presenting its own set of odd feelings (b/c how can you be happy saying good bye, and yet…I was?). I have historically struggled with how to celebrate my birthday, as it drives home the point that I’m one year older than Chelsea will ever get to be. But I did come up with a good compromise ‘celebration’ a few years ago: I swim 100 yards for every year of my life (which is adding up these days), then go out and drink a stein of Munich-style Marzen a la Oktoberfest at the local beer garden. So that part was typically fun, but of course last year there was the mathematical significance of the 5th year anniversary of things, again complicating the calendar.
I came up with the analogy of emotional ‘hurricane season’ to describe this time of year (giving hints to where I grew up): there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll experience significant, emotional events during this stretch of the year even if it’s unclear precisely when, where, or how big those events will be. But then a funny thing often occurs after a hurricane blows through: it’s such a powerful storm that it sucks a good chunk of the energy out of the atmosphere and leaves calm, peaceful weather in its place. It’s like some sort of atmospheric catharsis that echoes the kind of emotional catharsis I often experience when I get hit hard by a grief trigger.
This year, as we approach the six-year mark, and I’m right smack in the middle of hurricane season, I’m reflecting on where I am, how far my family has come, and trying to pause to appreciate my life (both past and present).
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At the 20,000 ft level, we’re doing amazing. I’m living the Hallmark movie (being the widower dad who fell in love with and married his daughter’s preschool teacher), our family’s been rebuilt, and I feel life stabilizing in a way that it hasn’t in a half-decade.
But I’m still subject to the powerful emotions associated with loss.
On Chelsea’s birthday, I experienced the emotional equivalent of a tropical storm: same game plan as last year, coffee and conversations with my daughter, although to be honest the conversation felt a little forced this year. It did help to ask her if she had any questions, which pivoted the conversation to my daughter questioning where Chelsea might be and what she might be doing if she exists somewhere out there in the Cosmos. I asked my daughter what she thought and she said that Chelsea was probably knitting her dad (E’s grandpa) a pair of pajamas, b/c he liked to wear pajamas. I loved that answer, as it was such a brilliant combination of childlike innocence and dead-on insight into her family members hobbies and eccentricities. She asked me what I thought, to which I gave the stock answer of hoping Chelsea is working on her 7th PhD at the University of the Cosmos, Oxford extension campus, listening to a great lecture by someone like Kant or Galileo (I assume they’ve figured out the language barrier thing in the great beyond). As I’ve discussed, my struggles with religious belief make this whole exercise a speculation game, as I hope these ideas are right, but have no evidentiary basis on which to believe them. Still, it’s a healing exercise to experience with my kid and makes for a fun activity to remember Chelsea.
Of course, after I dropped my kid off at school, I stopped by the house briefly on the way into work and absolutely lost it, feeling powerful emotions I haven’t experienced in a while. Just a reminder that those emotions are still there, buried beneath the emotional strata of every day life, but still powerful enough to burst through at the right time of year (I feel like I used the analogy of a volcano at one point in the past…at the risk of mixing metaphors and complicating my hurricane season analogy).
What is it about birthdays, as that’s now a few years in a row that Chelsea’s birthday has trigged some big feelings? Maybe it’s just the simple reminder that another year has passed and she’s not here to get older anymore (the birthday seems to be the clearest reminder of this)? I think I got lulled into a false sense of confidence this year, as I forgot that last year’s birthday was tough and I only remembered the positive experiences of the memorial in the SF Bay, so leading up to her birthday I forgot to emotionally brace myself and got knocked off center by the storm.
This year also marks another strange ‘anniversary’, in that the days of the week in the month/calendar match the days of the week in 2020 when she died (6 years + a leap year means the days of the week have cycled all the way around). I’m not sure how that will feel, but the plan is to go up to the Bay Area and spend the weekend with one of my best friends, which is exactly where I was six years ago when all hell broke loose. Not sure why, but that seems like the right move given the circumstances. And I’m hoping that my awareness of the event means I’m less likely to get blind-sided by big emotional punches.
So again, as we approach the six year mark, I’m grappling with a series of seemingly contradictory emotions and life tensions: feeling gratitude for my life but also pain associated with grief; a sense of fulfillment with my current family, but also emptiness/absence associated with Chelsea’s loss; feeling grateful for the past without getting too emotionally anchored to it.
Learning how to hold onto these contradictory emotions simultaneously has been one of the key lessons I’ve learned from my grief journey, but it’s still difficult to do, even with six years of practice.
