We’re 2 days away from D-day around these parts. I am, shockingly… okay. What’s the difference between okay and alright? Maybe it’s alright that I am. One of them, anyway. Whatever the worse one is.

In all the work, writing, and miraculous goings on around here I seem to have brought my husband into the present with me in such a way that I can stare May 19th in its stupid little face and not shatter apart in the sun. I can see it as the least important day of his life, and not just because he only got to live 1/6th of it.

My daughters and I will mark it by installing some plaques on trees for him on a hike (officially buy a memorial tree: $700. Buy a brass plaque off Amazon: $16.99. I CANNOT tell you how much this plan would have thrilled my husband- right up his alley.) We’ll make a dinner, and the girls have decided they’ll have a jam session in the living room and play some of his songs. And that will be the day. And then we begin the second year.

Yesterday I sent out a text to our friends and family, most of whom were on the boat to scatter his ashes (leaving off the mother in law), and we’ve been sharing pictures and memories and laughter.

In the last month or so I’ve been writing purposefully about all I am thankful of in this past year, and about many of the memories I had with him over the decades. I keep my eyes on gratitude and the beauty the world has in it still and it soothes the heart in ways that have helped. Did I read to do that? Or just extrapolate it from some of the lessons in my life (and therapy) in the before time? Nudged from the other side? I’ve kinda stopped asking “why” to damn near everything, honestly.

I look at my life now and I feel like I’m constantly trying to marry an Art Deco aesthetic to a Brutalist one. There is beauty in everything… even the ruins. Everything crumbles, but my doesn’t it fall so gracefully? The tree is cut at the base, but look at the spirals of new growth! Something like that.

Interestingly that last image is the ancient heraldry of my maiden name’s clan: Clan Ewen. All the way back there in the 1400s there had been some rebellion or misdeed or something and the clan was disbanded and not allowed to have a chief anymore. Instead of being absorbed into clan Cambell, they held on and have been chiefless since then. They kept their clan name, tartan, made the new heraldry a tree stump that has sprouts regrowing from it, and the motto of Reviresco (I Grow Strong Again). Bless those stubborn bastards because being a Cambell sounds so boring. And it’s all so vaguely Chumbawumba sounding, no?

Maybe this, then, is the family tradition, of refusing to be defeated by destruction, though just like the Hank Williams Jr song, rest assured there is literally a TON of alcoholism in there as well, so don’t let me oversell the bloodline or anything.

All I know is I picked a different path from my mother’s, a woman who loved to revel in defeat and went looking for it to sit in. I wasn’t always as good at this all as I am now, or even knew what I was doing most of the time, but the distance I made in my personal practice from hers was marked.

And if I was somehow preparing for this past year, or was just blessedly served well by it, I don’t know. But at it’s root is a belief the world is a beautiful place and that defeat is never permanent. Rest assured I’ve seen plenty of darkness over the years, but good god it isn’t all that’s out there so I try to focus on the other parts. I am good at it, at this point.

Something.

Something like that, without sounding egomaniacal, is the root of survival for me this past year. And I’m very thankful to be here and standing. It very much does feel exactly like having been cut to the fucking quick and yet now be sending out those tendrils of new growth from the stump. Sure, I wish I was still a tree. But new growth reaching for the sun is enough for me, in the here and now. I have a thankfulness to be alive that legitimately stuns me, when I compare it to the bleakness of last year in June and July. I am thankful to be alive.

I don’t know what is to become of this life of mine though, now that I’m back to doing all this living. What shall I make of it? And though it seems to be everyone’s question to me these days: no, I can’t fathom a new partner. You can only sprint into the arms of one person when you spring off the mortal coil, after all- and I certainly know who’s arms I’m falling into over there on the other side. How on earth do you start dating again and look someone new in the face with that truth hanging over your head, I wonder? How do you look at someone and know you’d have no hesitation to run full speed away from them and towards someone else? That seems unfair and I don’t like being unfair. Though there is a lesson somewhere in loving all three of my children. And in loving Asher now not meaning I love Wally less. But this isn’t a cat we’re talking about here, either. Sigh. It just isn’t something I can wrap my own head around. Though I guess I learned this year to never say “never.” (Don’t say “always” either, I’ve found.) I wasn’t made for casualness either, unfortunately. I was made for adoration, mores the shame.

I will say I have been having to face this concept as all the “you’ll find someone else” and “you’re still young” comments have ramped up these past few months… as if all I cared about was the role my husband played in my life, and not the person himself. If alI I wanted was a husband, sure. I’m sure I could find another one. The role itself could be filled. But damn it is the “who” and not the ‘what” that I miss in my life. And I usually am quick with a response, but I haven’t found a good one to those comments yet. There is snarkiness on my tongue that I don’t let out because I KNOW said snarkiness is a cover for something… so I don’t indulge it. When I know what it’s hiding then I can say that… but until then I say nothing. I’m betting it’s fear. Or anger. Or fear and anger. I’m not quite sure yet. There might be more down there even.

Anyway. Somehow I’ll figure it out and it will all shake out, or change, or not. Who knows? Not I. A concern for the future, perhaps. So I’ll leave it there.

Back to this day I stand, not even shakily, and am prepared to walk through the next two days. If I fall down on the other side of it I have faith it won’t be for long. (You know how hard that sentence was to format so as not to be actual Chumbawumba lyrics?!)

I texted my friend the other day that it very much has the feeling of it that while I’ll carry my grief forever, that I think the sorrow gets laid down on Tuesday. To which she replied by asking me who the fuck drops a line like that over text- which made me laugh. But the sorrow. The sorrow gets laid down after 12 months and one day, a timespan mentioned in a song (not a Chumbawumba one, this time).

And it does mark a new era.

Reviresco indeed.