July 2018, camping in Lost Man
September 16, 2018 is not the worst day of my life. Lots of widows tell me the day their husband died is their worst day. I understand how it could be, but Mike made sure it was not mine. It might even be one of the best (remember though, that I think Cold Mountain ended happily).
On October 16, 2018, I post the picture above. I say this:
It’s been a month since you’ve gone but you’re still with me wherever I go. Death Cannot stop true love.
I didn’t know it was going to be a thing. That every sixteenth after that, for sixty-six months and counting, I would post a picture. And it became a thing. I look for unusual pictures, ones I’ve never shared before, but at sixty-six months in I have definitely repeated myself. Some are favorites. I especially like the quirky ones, ones where we are not necessarily smiling. Pictures where we are being weird on purpose. But they run the gamut. Mike and I stand at the top of mountains, on cruise ships, and in restaurants. We are in Cartagena, Colombia, Tulum, Mexico, La Garita (Mike’s sacred space) and just down the road at The Rock. We are in Parker, marrying each other in our beautiful church and dancing, afterwards. Joy on our faces. I post them every sixteenth, every single sixteenth. My rule is that they have to have both Mike and me, and beyond that there are no rules, although I do generally like to post a picture that was taken around the same time of year. Spring pictures in spring, fall pictures in fall.
At first, the sixteenth is excruciating. I miss Mike unbearably, but still have to bear it. I want desperately to be the woman in the pictures, not the widow with the dead husband, looking at the pictures. I mark the months for a year, and then I keep going. I keep going until counting gets harder. This year it is pretty easy, actually, because five years marks sixty months, so I just have to think how many months it has been since September and add that to sixty.
The sixteenths that mark years are harder than others, the September sixteenths. I don’t want it to be two years, five years since my husband died. I particularly dread the forty-third sixteenth, which marks a line: Mike is now dead in my life longer than he was alive in it. It happens anyway, and keeps happening. Sixteenths come every month.
But also, they mostly get less sad. I start to look forward to them. Which picture will I choose? Which memory is perfect today? The joy on our faces becomes easier to bear, becomes comforting (usually). It’s not the joy on Mike’s face that ever bothers me anyway; it is a relief that I filled the last three years and seven months of his life with joy. It is my own joy, the light in my eyes that left on September 16, 2018. That’s the joy that’s so hard to sit with. But sitting with it gets easier, and I start to be glad it’s the sixteenth. The sixteenth feels special.
This is not evidence that time heals all wounds, or that it will get better, because time cannot heal everything, there are losses we never “get over,” and sometimes, it does not get better. And that light will never be back in my eyes until I die myself and see my love standing there waiting for me, a thing I believe will happen. Maybe it will be like Gladiator. He is waiting at the house and I am walking through tall grass. I will take off at a run, running like it’s the last lap of the Bolder Boulder and I have entered Folsom Field. But faster, even though I am ninety or however old I am. I will be the fastest moving ninety year old you have ever seen. “Look at that old lady move!,” they will say. We will collide with the kind of force that would damage my old bones, if I were still alive. But I’m not. Besides, I shed years as I run, and by the time I reach Mike I am forty-five again. My hair is brown and I am back in 2015 fashions that look really silly in 2055. I have two good knees. Mike does too, something that is not true in 2015.
There will be many more sixteenths before this happens. The Mike and Blythe in pictures will start to look like young whippersnappers. Do old people still say this? Whippersnapper? Probably not, but I will. It will be one of the perks of being old, of being around to be old, a thing that did not happen for my parents, in-laws, or husband. I will say whippersnapper for all of them.
Today, I’m glad it’s the sixteenth. Like the one sixty-six months ago, it is not the worst day.