our grief anniversaries really matter
and they’re rarely confined to one day..
There are dates in most people’s year that herald a time of remembering
We package the good days up neatly as birthdays, wedding anniversaries, the day we met, ‘that’ kiss. We light candles, we write cards and maybe we bask in the glow of other people remembering us.
But the anniversaries of absence and trauma make a different kind of orbital return;
the loss,
the origin date of our grief,
the due dates we had so much latent expectation around,
the birthdays of people we miss,
the time our world collapsed…
these anniversaries wriggle loose of the containment of one day.
Anniversary, derived from the Latin ‘returning annually’ - has an etymology that doesn’t promise this is will be a twenty four hour kind of thing.
Sad anniversaries can come and sit next to us for weeks before and linger long after the day itself. The mellowing of a season, a scent in the air, the way the night sky looks, the seasonal sights and sounds; they’re all a constellation of remembrance- and potentially very reactivating to our nervous system and soul.
Some years they have a lot to say. Some years less. I think we’re often unprepared for the cyclone that can accompany them. And it’s not easy to gain the empathy or connection we seek when we share ‘it’s the time of year my life was irrevocably changed forever - and I don’t know what to do with it’.
The anniversary that undoes me - it turned eight years old this year. At one year old it took my breath away. Experienced as a visceral rug pulling from under my feet, it turned out to be the fall I needed to really look at it. As the years have spiralled round, some have hit me hard all over and left me felled. Latterly, I’ve taken hold of them early and celebrated instead, in spite of, because of. I couldn’t hurry the readiness to do that. And I am no longer surprised that the annual return spans more than a day.
In baby loss awareness week, we have a week that is ring fenced to remember.
In it’s twenty first year now, BLAW holds many layers of significance. It might not be an anniversary that is personally date specific (though for some, it is) but it is a space that calls for our attention and asks for acknowledgment. We need this space to exist. It’s a beacon that calls out to the world ‘this happens, it is happening, it happened and we need you to know’. We can gather, honour and tend to the grief that is so often unseen, misunderstood and private, meeting darkness with a global light.
And - we do get to have an and. The span of BLAW has extended far beyond a week for so many of the women I work with. It is sewn into the fabric of October. It’s a multi-faceted experience of personal pain, sense-making, ritual, a coming together and actually, in the face of trauma that is still burning brightly - it can be almost too much to bear.
It also feels important to acknowledge, that as our chambers of social media feeds merge into a narrated live stream of baby loss awareness week - if we have never been pregnant, our fragile sense of belonging meets empathy meets the shadow side.
BLAW it has a constellation of its own. Take care of your heart under that night sky. Honour it as you need, in the privacy of your own heart, in wide open space or, not this year. We get to choose this. And to celebrate the choice that’s right for us this year.