Ways we might have celebrated our 30th Anniversary

Somewhere in a parallel universe – one where you did not die – our family lives a life that I try now to fathom.

You showed up this morning with your traditional red rose, so proud that you got the day right.

Tonight, I’ll make you clams and linguini for old times’ sake and we’ll laugh remembering how we could buy all the ingredients at the local Becker’s. I’d cook noodles in your unbearably hot kitchen – the apartment above the laundromat – and we’d climb the ladder onto the roof, carrying our bowls of spaghetti, to hang out in the tent and slurp noodles.

Your hair is grey now, the way you always wanted it to be, so that you could garner the respect you always thought you deserved. 

Maybe we still live in New Jersey. Or Hong Kong. Or Berlin. Remember when you came home, bursting with excitement about some new overseas job? Every two years you changed jobs, mostly out of boredom.

We’ll talk about the kids over our noodles. Breathing sighs that we’d made it through the teenaged years. Marveling at their successes. 

Snap. This is where the two universes shift into opposing orbits.

In this universe, I am so proud of our kids, and so I don’t want to think of them as being different than they are. Would they have been better with you in their lives? I have no doubt their lives would have been fuller. They would not carry the burden of missing something they cannot name. Maybe they would have a confidence in the world and in themselves that in this universe they had to work so hard to achieve.

But this universe offered them something that set them apart. A deep knowledge about the tenacity of life that could come in no other way than the tragic way it arrived. It gave them a different sort of confidence – one bound up in the knowledge that life and joy perseveres amidst the worst it has to offer.

This universe has been a challenge for us all. 

In that other universe, I wonder who I would be? Would I have become a writer? An artist? Would I have taken that web job at Moma? Would I be happy or bored? Would we even still be together, or would we be divorced from each other? Would we have even made it to thirty years?

I am proud of who I’ve become without you and the guilt of that thought is one that I know plagues most widowed people. 

And yet, I still sometimes feel untethered in this universe without you. And so I think that other me – the one in that other universe in which you still exist – at least she has that: she feels bound to the world. She doesn’t live feeling as if she is floating attached to people and places as if by a fine threat that might snap at any moment, unsure if she is living in the dream or the reality.

And so she will remember the tiny moments that exist in both places: clams and linguini and single red roses and pride in our kids.

Happy 30th Fab, wherever we are.

The year we met (1985)