January 16, 2024

That Calendar

I get it. I really do. It was something of a tradition during our time together.

I had never done it before. It was a practice of Shirli’s from the git-go … transferring birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and death dates from the expired calendar onto the next year’s calendar. Every year, every page of every calendar had more names added to the appropriate blocks. The expired calendar was then placed in a file in the file cabinet and the new calendar hung on the wall in plain view.

It seemed only right, at that time, for me to do that after Shirli died. And I did. Painstakingly with a heart full of emotional pain and tears in my eyes. Honestly, it was torture.

We are sixteen days now into the new calendar year of 2024. I have yet to pick up a wall calendar for this new year. For one thing, in all the rearranging and redecorating that I have been doing, I do not have a place on any wall for a wall calendar. Oh, there are places that I could stick one where, in the words of my dear sweet mother now in heaven, it would look as out of place as a turd in a punch bowl. 

Yeah. That is about as out of place as it gets.

There is another thing though.

This other thing is something born during a hard personal process that involved a lot of retrospect and introspect. I am more than comfortable with the conclusion that I came to. Just thinking about it at first really troubled me. It was like I was letting all those people down if I did not take forward with me the tradition of transferring all those names and dates onto a paper calendar that I would look at every day of every month of every year and, taking pen in hand, add new names and dates as these new dates came to bear.

No. I am not continuing this tradition. Not this year. Not any year in the future either.

It’s not that I have no respect for those who have departed before me. There are some very dear ones who have “gone on before”, very dear ones whom I will never forget. I cannot forget them. Their memories live inside of me. From time to time, something stirs one of those memories to life whether I want the memory stirred or not. There are times when I am not particularly prepared to entertain the memory that insists on making its appearance. There are plenty enough of these episodes without indelibly writing on a calendar that I will look at every day of the year then file away and save for what or who knows.

I got to where I would not even look at the calendar on the wall. I knew it was there and would look past it, ignoring it all together.

Why?

Because I would relive, in some measure, the emotional trauma associated with those experiences that are, all too apparently, part of this trip through life as we now know it.

I will not, I cannot, give myself to the brutal bare-knuckle pugilism of a calendar hanging on my wall. I have to have more than that to look forward to in this moving ahead that I am settling into and so enjoying at this point in this huge life-transition in my life.

The past is what it is. There is no going back to change anything in the past.  The past has already been written in the  book of time. There is only a two-pronged question. What am I going to do with my today and all of my potential tomorrows?