Death anniversaries are complicated...

By Lisa Sugarman

*TRIGGER WARNING: This post mentions suicide and may be triggering.

It’s 46 years today since my father took his life—a secret I discovered only 10 years ago. But that’s a story for another day.

Today, on the anniversary of my dad’s suicide, I’m thinking only about how much I miss him and about how many of these death anniversaries I’ve accumulated up to now. And, even more so, how uniquely each anniversary hits every year.

Back in the day, the ache of reliving my worst day was so toxic and raw that every holiday or celebration or milestone was just automatically contaminated with a deep, unending sadness. Kind of like when you go into a dimly lit room and you just can’t see things clearly so you’ve got to squint to make out what’s around you. That’s the way those first August firsts felt to me.

If I’m being honest, I don’t remember when the shift happened, when I stopped being quite so frightened to rip off the July calendar and cross over into my worst month. But it did happen. And I think it was my heart doing that natural regeneration thing hearts do which is to grow back the part of itself where joy used to live. Because, eventually, I did start to see colors again and the blurriness was replaced with a different kind of clarity.

That’s when the first of every August started to become more about celebrating that my dad was my dad and less about grieving the fact that he wasn’t here anymore. Because while there were (and always will be) days when I longed to tell him about my life and share my accomplishments and relationships with him, the acuteness of the pain attached to those things had changed. I mean, I hate using cliches, but I can’t avoid saying that time did soften the open wound. And somehow, over the years, I gained the capacity to feel something other than sadness when I thought about my dad.

In time, I found myself smiling when I’d think about the endless miles we walked together on trails up and down the White Mountains in New Hampshire. And when he taught me to juggle in the front yard of my childhood home and I became the only kid in the neighborhood who could actually juggle like a grown up. Or when he taught me to change the oil in his race car that lived in the back corner of our garage. Those memories became like a sort of umbilical cord that kept me attached to him, which I loved.

Our loss eventually incorporates into our life like a scar that we can still see and feel and recognize as a wound, but the intensity of the pain is muted with time.

So, while that doesn’t mean my days of crying over him are over, I did find a new place in my heart where grief and joy could co-exist. And after grieving so deeply for so many years, that became a place of great relief to me.

See, no one wants to live in a state of grief forever. But grief isn’t quite the terrible awful thing we’ve been taught it is either. I’ve come to realize that one of the reasons why grief never really ends is because grief is just another form of love. And since we’re always going to be reminded of our people and, consequently, of our loss, we’re always going to be grieving but we’re also always going to be loving, too. And our loss eventually incorporates into our life like a scar that we can still see and feel and recognize as a wound, but the intensity of the pain is muted with time.

My memories became like a sort of umbilical cord that kept me attached to my dad, which I loved.

I guess what I’m trying to say is death anniversaries are hard on so many levels but there’s value hidden in them if we open ourselves to the possibility that they’re not all bad.

These yearly markers give us the chance to honor the people we’ve lost and celebrate the impact they made on us and the world around us. Plus, they’re also a crucial part of the grieving process because they enable us to reflect on and process our loss, which is something we all need to do to heal. And they also give us the opportunity to preserve our person’s legacy, which means that, to some degree, they’ll always be with us.

So yeah, the reality is I’m sad today because my father has been gone for all my adult life. But I’m also grateful for the ten beautiful years I had with him. And I’ve learned, over the decades, to meet my grief exactly where it is in the moment, even if that grief looks and feels entirely different than it did two or five or eighteen or forty years ago. Because when we meet our emotions exactly where they are, that’s how we know we’re processing what needs to be processed so our feelings don’t come back and bite us in ass somewhere down the line.

If you or someone you know is struggling with grief, please call 988 and a trained counselor will be there to help. You can also go to lisasugarman.com/grief-loss-resources and visit my Grief & Loss Resources page for more support.