The Twelfth

Tonight I feel the strength of the anticipation of grief, the anticipation that squeezed you with such force that you can scarcely breathe. I look back on the fear, on the unknown, on not knowing how I can be, or will be, on the day that has ceased to be a day.

It is inevitable that I buy milk, cheese, eggs that expire on the 13th of May, it is almost like a warning: it is coming, it is coming.

Now, these years, I feel it come, and it's warm, salty water washing over me, I'm a diluted form of myself, a film over my eyes for several weeks. I know the dim light will warm, and that the day will bring what it will bring. But still I stagger through the world, amazed that they all schedule doctors appointments and plan to grocery shop on the day that isn't a day for me anymore.

But that first year, it was fear I felt, pure and plain, and the fear was of not being able to stop the day from coming. I was paralyzed by the fear, immobilized by my inability to do anything to make anything better. Could it be that if I stopped the day from coming, that somehow the twelfth of May would morph back into the day I realized she was in peril, and the baby was saved?

It is the only day I could have saved her, and by the time I get to the thirteenth, it is too late. It is too late every time.