July 4, December 1, January 8, November 28, May 21, June 6, June 16. These are all anniversaries my body celebrates without my consent.
My body does a lot of things without my consent: random nausea, migraines, periods. Things I have no say over and can do little about. I know the dates are coming, and I can brace myself for them, but generally speaking, I just have to push on through to the other side.
Some of these are grandparents. All of mine have passed. A result of being a late in life baby. One grandparent passed when I was very young, and though my last grandparent lived to be late into her 90's, she died in 2012.
Another is my dad. None of us saw that coming, though we did feel like we got additional years with him after his aneurysms in 1998. It still doesn't feel like enough, since he was only in his 60's and we were only in our 20's and 30's.
The other dates are trickier. By all accounts, I have no rights to grieve them. My body shouldn't mourn them. I wasn't that close to them in life, so why does my body remember them? They were both troubled young men who I watched from the periphery of their lives, and enjoyed seeing their successes and was saddened by their frustrations. Our connections were tenuous.
The June 6 one was the same year as Dad, and so that's very likely why. My body was in "let's make this particular young man, who is special for this particular reason, even more special" mode. So every June 6, my body marks the anniversary of his death.
The November 28 one was special, not just because that's my birthday, but for other reasons. I feel like I'm surrounded by ghosts on my birthday. Ghosts of those who should be there, celebrating with me, but who aren't for various reasons. I grow older and they don't. I surpassed one within a few hours of his death and will hopefully surpass the other in about twenty years. The November 28 young man was in my life for just a little while, but he left his mark in a special to me way, so I was sad to hear of his death. It was the beginning of all the deaths of 2009, all the memories my body made. All the grief my body is carrying on a cellular level.
It's not just death that causes bodies to keep score like this. Trauma can do it. I'm fortunate enough I haven't had anything like that in my life that my body has felt needed tracking. Though it does feel the need to almost completely ruin May and June because of Dad. Every major event in those months is tinged with grief for him. (It doesn't help that a lot of things happen in those months: our anniversary, end of school programs he would have wanted to be at, Father's Day, his and Mom's anniversary, his birthday.)
My body just decided at some point that May and June are Grief Months, so we shall Grieve in those months. I hurt. I have migraines. I'm nauseated. I just want to sleep all. the. time. Very little tastes good. I can cry at the drop of a hat. I have almost zero motivation to do anything but what I want to do (watch tv in bed while cross stitching, mainly). It's almost like being in the second or third week of the aftermath of a death, when the initial shock has worn off and you're just weepy, and at loose ends. But for two months every year. I don't love it.
Grief isn't a timeline, where you go through first one stage, then the next and so on until you're done, and I think people who haven't had to deal with it in a major way may not fully understand that. It's a cycle and sometimes you bounce around the circle. One day, you may be fine. It may have been years, then you look up and something small happens, and *bam* you're irrationally furious or desperately sad or would be willing to kill your next door neighbor to have that person back, or to have had that horrible thing not have happened. You think you're through with the worst of it, but there's always going to be tinges of every part of every stage left over. Your body keeps track of how everything felt to pull back out on your Grief Days to remind you...and sometimes on in between days. Depression will do that, too.
I've also managed to develop a somewhat supernatural ability to pick fiction books with dead fathers and father figures during the May/June period. I can't remember the actual number, but it was something like 75% of the books I read last year during that time frame had dead or dying fathers. This year, I have mostly avoided fiction, sticking to interesting podcasts and non-fiction books, and I've still managed to have two books with a dead father and a dying father figure and a movie with a really sweet father/daughter relationship that made me weepy. I read five books in May. And the book club selection for June apparently has a woman working through her father's death. The meeting is a few days before Dad's birthday. I'm working up to that book. It's a weird talent I've developed.
Sometimes, we just feel sad, and there's no real reason for it. And sometimes there is. We're sad because our body is reminding us of someone we loved who is gone now. Our bodies keep track and keep score, even without our asking. Death, and trauma, scars us, maybe not physically, where everyone can see it, but deep down, where we may not even realize it, and sometimes those scars surface in the form of tears, or melancholy, or lethargy, or just feeling "off." So if someone is off, it may not be anything they can really put their finger on. It may just be their body taking over for the day without their consent. A long ago date inscribed on their internal calendar that their conscious mind has long forgotten, but their internal calendar never will.
