It’s been peeking around corners at me for weeks, as the rabbit brush turns to bloom, as mornings bring colder light, as fall begins.
I’ve pushed it away, dreaded its re-approach, and pushed it away again.
I didn’t want to think about it (so, of course, all the while I have been). It’s depressing. It’s scary. It’s hard. It’s a take-a-deep-breath topic, a downer, a somber note that threatens to creep into conversation.
It’s in every newspaper and has been playing on the radio for a week. The pictures have become iconoclastic – we can close our eyes and see it, hear it, as if we were there, as if it just happened, as if it may happened again. I wanted to avoid it, to think of something else.
At least, that is how I felt until my friend told me a story that was seemingly unrelated.
She told me about looking for a banana cream pie. “Why is it,” she said, “that you can never find banana cream pie in early September?” It was Tyler’s favorite pie. Her son.
And she wanted to buy the pie for what would have been his 22nd birthday. He died when he was 18.
She gets a banana cream pie every year. It is an anniversary for her, for her husband and for her daughters – one of many anniversariesthat mark another passing year, another year of him gone from their day-to-day.
She never did find the pie at the store. She baked a banana cream pie instead – and then walked head-on into her hard day. I won’t presume to know what that was like for her, or for any of her family. I just know they walked the day, and have before and will again.
Anniversaries. A year-day, a mind-day. They are a way to keep pace, bead-count-on-a-string, tally up, mark our big moments, however happy they were, however tragic.
The happy ones are easy. But, the sad? After a few years you hope they won’t affect you this-year-around, that you won’t think about it this time, that you can play been-there-done-that and imagine yourself free and clear to cruise right by the date. But then the light rises with the sun and, sure enough, the day is different.
As it should be.
Tomorrow is such a day. The anniversary of 9/11.
Tomorrow is a day to remember the way that they died, and to remember the way they lived.
It’s not a day for fear, or politicking, or color coded threat warnings. It is a day to make-mind, to take pause, to note, to feel.
You can try not to think about it, but the funny thing about anniversaries? They’re in our body, somehow pressed into our brains like a child pushing a shape into soft clay. The impression remains no matter what you do and returns each year, as it should.
And this year, about this time, school has just started, Labor Day is gone, the air is snapping at just past summer, and in a field somewhere, someone is turning pumpkins to ready them for Halloween. Fall is a time of settling and gathering.
It is also an anniversary.
It will be here tomorrow. Give pause. Find a way to honor the people, to think about them, to talk about them.
Grief is movement, like water, flooding us, cleansing us, healing us, sometimes seemingly drowning us, but always movement. It’s part of what makes us whole. Hold it tomorrow and then let it go. Grief is never wasted.
