Anniversary(s)

Ethne eating her 1st birthday cake.

Our lives are riddled with anniversaries.  Some we celebrate, others we ignore, and some we may try to ignore and fail.  We even name some of these anniversaries to signify the event they mark.  Birthdays, marriages, holidays, and of course deaths mark many anniversaries.  When the event is happy we celebrate, often with gifts and food.  When the event is benign it will often go ignored and when the event is unhappy we either ignore it or fail miserably to do so.

I have seen a few loved ones pass on to the next life.  For the most part I ignore the anniversaries of their passing.  It is easier to ignore these sad days than to live with the reminder that they are no longer with us.  The same often goes for the birthdays of those already gone.  If we ignore these anniversaries we can forget the sorrow of their passing and remember more the joy of their lives, we can forget how long we have been missing them and better remember the time we did have.

Ethne's 2nd birthday cake.

But there is one anniversary of a passing that I fail miserably at ignoring.  I push it out of my mind as much as possible, I hope that maybe time will stop and it won't come, but no matter what I do the Earth continues on its relentless course and it does come.  Then I am reminded of how long she has been gone, reminded of how I miss her, and reminded of what little time we had together on this earth.  We do our best on her birthday to remind ourselves of the eternity we will have after this life by attending the temple and remembering her short life, but on this day it is difficult to think of eternity when it seems only a speck so far off in the distance.

They often say that the first year is the hardest, when you experience the first birthday, Christmas, Halloween, anniversary, etc. without them.  And I think that I mostly agree.  The firsts of these many anniversaries without Ethne were extremely difficult.  But I think this coming year may be close in difficulty since we will mark more time without her than with and Mr. E will celebrate more birthdays than she did and start many new experiences that Ethne never had.  And then again, this year also marks one year closer to that speck on the horizon that means I will see Ethne again and never have to let her go.