June 6

Written by RJ on June 5, 2014. Posted in Healing

There are two anniversaries that stand out for me. Our first was June 6, 1982 and Coleen was pregnant with our daughter who would be born six weeks later. I was working at a job that didn’t pay very well after being out of work for several weeks before. I would actually get a new job, one that would last for 22 years, just a few weeks after our anniversary. But times were tough for us that first year and we had very little extra money, making a big anniversary celebration unlikely. We found a way to overcome that though. The credit for that goes to Coleen. She found a special offer in the paper for a dinner at Tony Roma’s restaurant. I don’t remember the details but it was buy one dinner, get one free or something like that. So to pay for the one dinner, we rolled a bunch of change we accumulated over the year and had more than enough for a pretty nice night out. Not fancy, but nice.

Our 25th Anniversary was eight years ago. Our children had a surprise party for us which was very nice although we kind of figured out the surprise before we got there. It was a lot of fun and there were many people there whom I did not expect to see. A few days after the party, Coleen and I took our children to dinner at Coleen’s favorite restaurant, Hutch’s. We had a wonderful evening and dinner and we loved that we shared our night with our kids. It seemed very special.

Anniversaries are special to a couple in love. Holidays are nice, but the anniversary is a day just for that couple. I didn’t always buy gifts or send flowers but the day never escaped me and I always paid special attention to my bride on a day like that. And I certainly wasn’t going to let our 25th get away from me without doing something special. Our wedding photographer was not very good. He was a friend of a friend and although he took a lot of photos, they were pretty bad. And as if that wasn’t enough, when he developed them for us he gave them to us as slides. Remember those? Little tiny squares that looked like a negative surrounded by cardboard. You needed to put them in a projector to see them. We looked at them a few times but for most of those 25 years our wedding photos sat in a box in a closet. I decided to dig them out, sort through them and find the best of the bunch. I took those to a photo developer and had them converted to 4 x 6 inch prints, bought a nice photo album, put the photos in it, and wrote a note to my bride inside the front cover. I liked that for a gift, but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more. I wanted jewelry and I knew exactly what it was I wanted.

I told the girl at the jewelry store, “I am looking for a necklace. White gold. Nothing too big. I want it to have two hearts connected to each other or intertwined. Do you have anything like that?” She did and I bought it. That might have been the easiest thing I ever bought.

After our anniversary dinner at Hutch’s we came home and I gave Coleen the gifts I was so proud of. She opened them and was so touched. I had tears in my eyes as we all looked at the wedding album. After all this time she finally had a collection of photos to look at from our wedding day. And the necklace? Well that became her favorite and she wore it a lot of the time. Not always, but certainly more than any other. She has it on in many of the photos I have of her and it always made me smile when she wore it. Two hearts intertwined forever.

Tomorrow is the first June 6th I have experienced in the last 33 years that I will not be Coleen’s husband. I wanted to say that tomorrow would have been our 33rd Wedding Anniversary but that is not exactly right. Actually, it is our 33rd Wedding Anniversary and the way I feel right now, it will be the hardest day I have faced since she died. Tomorrow will be our day, the day we always celebrated as husband and wife. It will be my loss to bear alone tomorrow. I don’t know what I will do but I have a busy day ahead. Ironically, I have a session with my bereavement counselor in the morning. I will also spend time volunteering with Coleen’s friend and mine, Rebecca, for a health fair. And I have a wake to attend in the afternoon for an old friend who died earlier this week.

Like all of our other Wedding Anniversaries, I will not let the day get away from me. I have a book of photos, another of poetry, a beautiful necklace, a plethora of memories and a place to go. There are geraniums at her grave right now and I will bring some roses and maybe some champagne. We always drank champagne on June 6.

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