Anniversaries

by Lucy S. 

Today was my wedding anniversary. We didn't celebrate. We’ve been separated for quite a while, living in the same house – long enough that we don’t even have a path to follow for any of this anymore. What is acute becomes chronic and then shifts some more until it is just what life is.  We are the only ones who understand the absences we’ve lived with, and the grueling years, and the toll they took.  I think sometimes now about how the day will come sooner or later when one of us really will be gone – not off to start a new life – but just gone from everywhere. A morose thought, but I can’t help it. It comes to me at times now. I wonder if when that time comes the person left will wonder what the problems were all those years and why they couldn’t simply be worked out. The enormity of a life is never felt so much as when it is gone.  And a person’s fragility – their little hopes – their irritating ways that so often become more endearing in memory – all of that can come flooding into the survivor's consciousness with loss. 

Matt surprised me by bringing a small pot with miniature roses to honor this anniversary.

Tomorrow is Rose’s birthday – another anniversary.  2006 was the last birthday she celebrated with anyone.  She missed 2007 by a month. She is gone. Her death makes September (the death month) and October (the birth month) hard. What are anniversaries, anyway - I tell myself - so arbitrary. But still, her life and death sit close to the surface of my thoughts at this time of year. 

The 21^st was my parents’ anniversary (and my sister’s birthday – different year). I was thinking about when we lived in California, and my sister and her husband flew in as a surprise, and then as the next surprise, they and we and my brother (and my kids) all took them to stay in Dana Point. We ate at a Peruvian restaurant there.  I don’t think we’ll ever all be together in California again.  I don’t think we’ll ever even all be together for my parent’s anniversary again.

The 20^th was Gloria’s and Jerry’s, who are divorced now, but I always still remember it – maybe because it’s a day before my parents’ and not far from my own. I think about how we used to all be so afraid that Jerry – as jealous and angry as he could be – would kill Gloria if she ever left him. But she did, and soon he was asking in his likable, friendly way (the “Jerry” he always was for others, but not her in the married times) if he could go over to eat breakfast and sit in the backyard by the pond at her and Martha’s house. For some reason, their sustained relationship after the divorce has always struck me as more poignant than their marriage did.  They aren’t partners, but they are family, just the same.  I start to cry at times thinking about it. It’s as it should be.

Then I thought this evening of when Sean was born, because I read an article about a woman whose baby died a few hours after he was born – who pumped breastmilk after his death to donate to premature babies who needed it.  First, she and her spouse and kids held him and sang to him for the four hours that he lived.   My friend Ana had a baby girl born prematurely who she held in her hands while she also lived only a few hours.  We were lucky. Sean’s problems were not nearly as severe. He developed pneumonia right after he was born.  For a week, he was in an incubator most of the time with many instruments hooked up to him, providing extras and measuring if he was okay.  Less than 24 hours after he was born, the hospital discharged me because my insurance required it. I was weak, and couldn’t go home to rest. I stayed at the hospital most of the day and night. Sean was far too weak to nurse; even bottle-feeding went so slowly.  But these were the times I could take him out of the incubator and hold him, feeding him for about two hours because he swallowed so slowly. Then there was the pumping; I followed the feeding with the pumping so it would always be ready for him. He could benefit from breastmilk instead of formula.  And still, the doctor stuck a feeding tube down his throat one day. He screamed such a raw, pained cry. I told my mom about it, and she expressed her misgivings. Matt disagreed. He and I ended up in a big argument over it when I said I wanted to ask the doctor if that was necessary.  He vehemently disagreed. I accused him of always wanting to do what every expert said.  He accused me of always having to be a problem.  Even now, I feel the ghost-surge of my own sense of rightness. The doctor said it wasn’t that crucial to do it when I asked him. He said I was doing well feeding him.  I wanted to grind that vindication into Matt at that moment.  Soon he returned to Germany to finish out the last of his time there (the kids and I had returned to the States a couple of months sooner – me 7 ½ months pregnant with two 3 ½ year olds and a 7 year old).  We didn’t part on very good terms. Not terrible, but with the absence of something so needed, even back then.

That same week that Sean was in the hospital, Gloria's father died unexpectedly of a major heart attack. I could not go to his funeral. 

Sean remained a bit weak for a few weeks, and he never did catch on to breastfeeding. I felt it as a personal failure back then. I continued pumping, and the machine-like quality of that action depressed me, even as I tried to congratulate myself for sticking with it. Finally when Sean was two months old and the kids and I were staying in my parents’ family room, a kidney infection hit me hard. I knew the pain in the back to the right – I’d had a bad one when I was pregnant with Justin.  But my parents were gone for a week, and getting my kids and myself to an emergency clinic, as worn out as I felt, sounded hard. I tried to just hold out a couple more days until they returned. Finally, one night, I couldn’t bear the pain any longer. I called one of my parents' friends. He called another friend, who watched my kids, while the first one drove me to the emergency room. They put me on medications and told me to throw out what I pumped for ten days. But I just stopped pumping at that point. 

Sometimes, when I remember all of that, I think instead about my parent’s friend Bill karate-ing the umpteen spider webs between their juniper bushes and their parked car as he walked through, and I laugh. Those spiders were such speedy spinners.

And sometimes I think of Sean in his incubator with his fist clenched so tightly, fighting with what I imagined back then as a healthy, strong anger at all those clinical tubes and cords. That makes me smile and cry.

Today my cousin Johnny’s baby granddaughter had surgery on her shoulder. She was born with the bone there hunched and twisted. She is doing well tonight.  This will be a happy anniversary.

I tell myself sometimes that anniversaries are constructed anyway - products of our particular way of marking time - evoking emotions in ways I sometimes suspect.  Why attach so much symbolism to one day? But maybe there is in this a determination to hold on to the circularities of time - to seasons - days that come back, the same but not the same - a resistance to inhuman linear forwardness. In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse writes that "there are only islands of good where one can find refuge for a brief time" (47). He says - about art - which surely can apply to life: "Actually it is not a question of the happy end; what is decisive is the work as a whole. It preserves the remembrance of things past" (48).