ANNIVERSARIES

Last Sunday was the 15th anniversary of my father's death. He was 84 when he died after a fall which damaged his brain. About a dozen of our extended family witnessed his death, which occurred moments after he was detached from mechanical life support in the hospital. I held his right hand on one side of his bed. My mother held his left on the other side. The life slowly flowed from his unconscious body as we spoke to him. My parents had been married for sixty years.

This Sunday is the 15th anniversary of the first meeting between Peter, my domestic partner, and myself. It was one week after my father's death. I was crippled by the aftermath of cancer treatments. A wraith with a cane. I looked twenty years older than my 53 years. Peter was still in recovery from his treatments for the same cancer. We met on a gay male dating site. That statement still causes me to grin. It illustrates the resourcefulness and persistence of gay men of my generation. 

I haven't been very sensitive to anniversaries for most of my life. I shared a birthday, within 2 days, with my mother. She was a strongly opinionated person and loathed birthdays, especially her own. Her mother lived with us and had no precise birthday in her reckoning. She had been born on a peasant farm in Belarus. She had 15 siblings, I believe. My mother would make elaborate cakes for all the known birthdays in our family. She and I shared one. The delight of the cake was dampened by my mother's fatalistic reminders that birthdays brought us all that much closer to getting old and dying.

My first awareness of annually triggered emotions came after the death of my paternal grandfather, who died when I was 11. Our bond was the strongest emotional bond of my early childhood. He was my kind mentor, the teacher who accepted my neurotic shyness. He generously took me under his wing in a way that I could perceive even when we were apart. I still think of him regularly. I also think of his wife, my grandmother, who told me repeatedly that she would come visit me as a black cat after she died. I have had many very positive relationships with black cats throughout my life. 

The anniversaries which stood forward in my life have been associated with loss. The year after my grandfather died my closest friend and most of his family of eight were wiped out in a head-on collision. That same year a classmate was run over by a car and killed. That same year a girl in my neighborhood who had been born on the same day as myself died suddenly of viral meningitis. I now see that this was coincidental training for my careers in psychiatric nursing and hospice nursing. My adolescent depression and my familiarity with loss were primers in the transitory nature of happiness and of life itself.

The downside of this mental association between trauma, grief and anniversaries is my total lack of interest in the birthday and anniversary fixation in our American culture. I am most likely viewed as a remiss uncle to my brother's three children, now mature adults with their own children. Prior to Facebook's nagging reminders, I was totally out of touch with the dates of birthdays and anniversaries of all but a few intimate friends. If I were heterosexual and had children, this would most likely have been different. But the culture of my time and family made my lack of anniversary awareness seem natural, despite the effect it may have had on my reputation among my relations.

Bells, whistles and fireworks have never appealed to me. I have seen independence, constancy and quiet service as the best practices to express appreciation for life and good fortune. My parents and grandparents were good models for this. It is what I remember as their best qualities, not just at anniversaries but all year long.