Today is my Life Celebration Day – thanks for taking a few minutes to celebrate with me! What, you may ask, is Life Celebration Day? Well, let me tell you a little tale. Three years before we met, and six years before we started dating, Rob and I each nearly died on days that were a mere four months apart. Rob did die, actually; he flat-lined after a heart attack at the decidedly uncomical age of 32. (The doctors never did have any definitive theories about the cause, but they do definitively give Rob a clean bill of health now.) My threat, on the other hand, came from the outside – the wrath of an angry ex.
For the first seven years after these cataclysmic events, Rob and I had “damn-near died anniversaries” which, as you might imagine, were cheerless events causing symptoms such as moodiness, overreacting, purposeless driving and snapping at people for no reason whatsoever. Typically, symptoms would present a solid week before the anniversary itself hit, setting us up for full-tilt grumpiness the day of. Once Rob and I started dating in year six, we added company to the usual routine, which amounted to someone hovering nearby while oozing a completely unrealistic desire to somehow make it okay.
Of course, it’s ever so often the very obvious things that we are the last to see… such as the fact that while we were still wasting time shaking our fists at what amounts to a couple of really bad days (really, really bad), everything else was going great. Really, really great. So, we took a move from Karl Rove’s playbook (may he be forever stuck in a limbo of meaningless speaking engagements) and decided to spruce up our anniversaries with a little redefining and fancy syntax work. We needed a catchy title with a positive slant, hence Life Celebration Day. I’ll admit that the name is a little musical-greeting-card for my taste, but it does the trick. Like a well-named business, it concisely communicates its purpose, which is to spend that day feeling grateful for having lived through our worst moments and arrived here, at our best moments.
Hurrah for happy endings, right? Well… I think even Karl would tell you that syntax will only take you so far. A nice phrase can set the framework for a paradigm shift, but it’s only flowery speech if there isn’t a cognitive reworking, too. I mean, it’s easy to remember how great everything is on an average day, but the bad juju built into our anniversaries didn’t just pack its bags the second we slapped on a fancy name. Maybe it would if events like that were just events but they never are – they’re just the stone dropped into the puddle. In the radiating rings are all of the collateral events and emotions, the self-blame, the people who were there for us and those who disappeared for fear of the uncharted territory Rob and I were on, and the dump truck loads of leftover fear that ultimately center around the question, “What if this was merely a preview of the worst day of my life, and not the worst day itself?”
So yes, I will spend today thinking of the players on that crazy day 11 years ago, and I will think about forgiveness and fear and loss. But hopefully, I’ll spend more of the day with my sweet husband, basking in our sweet life, thinking about life’s evolution from worst to best.
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