By Susan Tweit
One morning in August, I woke in the half-darkness at five o’clock. I lay there hoping I’d go back to sleep, and then remembered what awakened me.
“Happy Anniversary,” I said softly out loud.
I wasn’t talking to myself, though I do that often. (I’m a writer. I live alone. Both good excuses for talking to myself, it seems to me.)
It was the day that would have been Richard’s and my 29th wedding anniversary. (To be accurate, the day before would have been our 29th as well. We got married twice.)
I curled up under the covers on the bed he built for us and remembered that Laramie weekend almost three decades before. I smiled at my mental image of us with then four-year-old Molly, Richard and I so young and with a lot to figure out yet about how to be together, but so in love.
We had begun living together after our first and only date that January, sharing Molly with her mom, who lived across town, already committed to building a life and a family. On that August weekend, we made our private pledge public and legal.
I was, frankly, terrified, having had a bad experience in my first marriage. And then there was the fact that Richard’s divorce had only become final the Friday before, and we were moving across the country to West Virginia, to his first faculty post the Monday after our wedding(s).
There were hard times ahead that we couldn’t of course see, including child-custody issues, meeting Molly’s needs, my homesickness for the West, and eight moves in our first eight years together, following Richard’s career.
But somehow along the way we figured out how to nurture and nourish the gift of love that had brought us together, what Richard called the “body of love” we shared. That carried us through.
That body of love grew stronger and deeper over our years together. It didn’t just happen, we worked at it, getting help from others when we couldn’t see past our own mounds of baggage, and renewing our intention daily to live up to the blessing of the love we had stumbled on when neither of us was looking for it.
We needed the strength and steadfastness of that love, especially during the journey with his brain cancer, the challenge we would never, ever have guessed would have stuck a guy who was so strong and healthy his whole life.
We called on that body of love to help us walk his time in grace, and we did a pretty darned good job of it. We weren’t perfect, and didn’t claim to be: I have had reddish hair much of my life, and a temper to match, and Richard’s stubbornness was no secret to anyone who knew him well.
Despite our flaws, we managed to grow that love right through to his end, an end that Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “is also a beginning.” (“Our lives,” wrote Emerson, “are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. That there is no end in nature; every end is a beginning.”)
Which is why I woke in the darkness before dawn that August morning conscious of wanting to celebrate the anniversary of our marriage, even though my beloved spouse died last November. I wanted to mark how blessed I feel to have had Richard in my life, and to have shared that love for the better part of three decades.
The love’s still here with me; Richard’s just not, at least physically. I don’t think marking our anniversary alone is morbid, or a sign of “not moving on” with my own solo life.
Taking the time to acknowledge that anniversary is about acknowledging the love we shared, and the grief I feel to not have my love beside me still.
It’s about embracing the yin and yang of life, the opposites that make life what it is: a rich and complex journey, one where (ideally at least) we grow along the way. That’s what I’m working on: growing along the way as my own cycle continues turning toward–whatever is next.
Even the word “anniversary,” harkens to that cycle: it’s Middle English, from the Latin annus, “year” and versus, “turning.”
So another year of my marriage to Richard has turned, and I walk on. Alone, but filled with gratitude for the body of love we shared, a love that continues to grace my days.
Susan J. Tweit is the award-winning author of WALKING NATURE HOME, A LIFE’S JOURNEY, and 11 other books, and can be contacted through her blog & web site, susanjtweit.com
