I don’t want a wedding anniversary any more

Last weekend it was my 17th wedding anniversary.

Except, it wasn’t, really.

Because in my mind, wedding anniversaries require there to be two spouses involved in the celebration of the day.

Indeed, it was 17 years since I frocked up in a tulle skirt and held brightly-coloured flowers and walked the 22 steps down the aisle of the Conargo church and exchanged vows with Pete.

The irony that my bridesmaids and I walked in to the first 1:38 of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony on that day because I loved the instrumental music (and I refused to stroll into Pachabel’s Canon #5 and lose a bet to the many attendees who were wagering on the entrance music) is not lost on me in my current situation.

2022 was my 4th wedding anniversary I have ‘celebrated’ alone.

Last year I lamented that it felt different to the ones before.

This year was even moreso.

Because wedding anniversaries - by their very nature - are the celebration of the marriage of two people BY those two people. They are not really about anyone else.

When one of them is dead, it’s hardly a celebration.

There are plenty of people who say I should celebrate it anyway. What we had. But we did that. When Pete was alive.

And now, it just seems a really odd thing to ‘celebrate’. I spent this year basically trying to ignore it.

The upside of wedding anniversaries is that after a while no one else but you and your spouse remember it … and if many couples are to be believed, after a decade or so even them remembering seems to be a challenge.

I suck with dates and constantly thought it was the 25th, not the 26th…

But like I decided to take back Christmas,

I decided that my wedding anniversary was not for me to celebrate anymore, but a day to note only.

Granted I acknowledged it with good wine and a dinner of my choosing, but it felt weird and wrong and, frankly, exhausting to do anything more.

I don’t want to make a fuss about it. Because Pete is dead. And has been for a while now.

And it hurts to be reminded of that now. It’s exhausting thinking about what it was. Because my life has changed significantly from those first years of crying into champagne and drinking gin for breakfast on March 26.

But I don’t want people to think I’m some cold hearted woman - I loved our life, I loved being married to Pete… but he is dead. And in my brain I can’t be actively married to a dead person.

Many widows think differently. And that’s the ‘bonus’ of grief... everyone does it differently.

The other day when I was telling someone I didn’t think I really wanted to acknowledge it, I likened it to a divorced person. The marriage has ended - through whatever means - and no one would expect a divorced person to celebrate their wedding anniversary. But as a widow, I am.

So I took March 26 back.

Some wonderfully thoughtful people remembered and acknowledged it. I love them for it.

But also I decided to do it my way.

And that included wine. Chicken schnitzel and pepper sauce. Kissing a man that wasn’t Pete, but who seems to like me quite a lot, goodnight. And ticking off another date on the calendar of hard things.