I wish I could have sat down to write this morning and repeated my often-stated sentiment that I don’t have anything to write about…and that’s OK.  I had hoped that today, of all days, is something that doesn’t affect me as much any more, because “time” and all. Even if I thought about Megan more today, it wouldn’t throw my day off or caused any heightened sense of grief. 

But it isn’t true.  Today would have been Megan and I’s 14th anniversary.  I mean, it still IS our anniversary, but we’re not exactly getting a nice dinner and flowers.  Nope…she gets to sit in a box in our dining room, and I get to go to work, with the rest of the world unaware that this day is any different than the rest.

Anniversaries are the worst.  At least, they for me they are.  They are a “created holiday”, unlike a birthday or death day.  They’re, for the most part, arranged, planned, scheduled, analyzed, and executed on a very specific day by the two parties involved.  They’re “chosen”. Sometimes, the reason they’re chosen is simply because it’s a Saturday, or the reception hall had an opening that day, but nonetheless, they’ve been chosen as “the day” for one reason or another.

So, August 6th was the day we chose.  It was a Saturday in August, which just plain seemed like a nice time to get married.  We weren’t thinking about it being a day that I would go on for the rest of my life both loving AND hating.  There was no conversation about her death or if it would be the best time of the year to mourn her. (For the record, I now wish we had been married, gotten her transplant, and had Shelby precisely on her birthday, which I also wish coincided with Mother’s day…get all of that crap out of the way at once).  

We weren’t thinking about death when we were planning our wedding day …and we’d have to be nuts to have done so.  

But at the same time.  We knew she was going to die young.  We didn’t know when exactly, but we knew.  We knew that it would likely be in the hospital, struggling to breathe because of her cystic fibrosis, and that I would be by her side, but knowing how much time between our wedding day and that day would elapse was a mystery.  (It was almost 3400 days, for the record).

Considering the ramifications AFTER her death of whatever day we chose was not a concern though.  Why would it be? We were getting married, not planning a goddamned funeral.

So I’m here now, 5 “semiversaries” later, struggling to figure out why we chose August 6th.  There wasn’t any reason not to, and there wasn’t any reason to do so, other than convenience.  It’s a date that is significant to pretty much only me, at this point. Megan and I chose it. We did not “luck” into it, nor did fate intervene.  Nobody else in our sphere helped in choosing it.  

It takes on a larger significance to me, because as far as dates go, it was the one day that Megan and I made a decision that would be OURS.  It was the day that only she and I shared and celebrated.

While I will always be thankful to have this one day a year that nobody else has, it also means that it is mine alone to pine over.  Even “doing something nice for myself” just seems, well, selfish and counterproductive. It would only cause my brain to go into over-analyze mode and realize that I’m doing something nice for myself because it’s only me.  

Try as I might, today was, is, and always will be a difficult day to go through.  Not because it’s August 6th, per se, but because today was the day that we chose to celebrate each other, long before death.