Sometimes calendars do more than chart the days and months of any given year.
We’re almost a week into this new year. By now, you’ve probably placed your new 2022 calendar on your refrigerator or tucked it away in a desk drawer. Maybe you’re like me and have a variety of calendars. I especially like the ones with pictures that bring a soothing breeze in summer or warm me in winter, you know, the ones with that picture of a beach house nestled on golden sand that unfolds into crystal clear water, or a cozy cabin surrounded by fresh snow in the mountains. Then I’ve got the spiritual calendars with scenic nature pictures and Bible verses for each month.
But my favorite calendar is the one my wife makes. She starts long before the new year, meticulously selecting photos of our family, then she sends them to a company that creates a calendar from her selections. It’s quite the undertaking because she makes sure she has individual pictures of family members on their birth month, plus she finds photos from family gatherings and special occasions appropriate for each month.
Lori also includes those who are no longer with us. For Harrison’s birth month (July), she chooses photos of happy times with him. Harrison will have been gone four years this October, but he has been in every calendar since.
Why does Lori include the dearly departed in our calendars?
For us, it’s a way of remembering that they are still with us.
Author, Joanne Didion, who recently died, wrote her book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” reflecting on the grief she experienced during the year after her husband’s death in 2003. At the time, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized in New York with pneumonia which developed into septic shock; she was still unconscious when her father died. Then she died of pancreatitis in 2005. Didion later wrote about Quintana’s death in another book, “Blue Nights.” Both are memoirs, books about life, relationships, and mourning the loss of those relationships.
In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion wrote, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
Yes, it’s true: keeping the memory alive is part of keeping them with us.
But, sometimes the pictures are too much, too soon. The stark reminder of their absence feels harsh and unbearable. The burn is still red hot. And who knows how long before the open wound forms scar tissue?
It’s been almost ten years since a friend told me she couldn’t have a family photo unless her deceased son were in it. “I can’t display a new family portrait. Not yet. Not without him in it,” she said to her husband.
Her grief still hovered over her like a black cloud that no fair wind could whisk away.
Didion is right. We want to keep them alive, though we know they are dead.
But counterintuitive as it seems, we can also keep them alive while letting them go. I’ve noticed that Lori doesn’t need to keep calendar pictures of our parents, all of whom, except for her mom, are now deceased. In years past, even the mention of their deaths brought tears. But now, it’s good enough to place their photos tenderly around the house. The thought of their absence isn’t as raw. We let their love rest, though it’s no less present with us.
It reminds me what Didion wrote in the completion of that thought about keeping the dead alive. She went on to say, “I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
Even though their pictures may not always be on the calendar, they are still here with us. We let them go and rest in peace, even as we touch them still, even as we live our days, marking our time on calendars, where others will think of us, one day, someday, as somehow still being with them.