415 days

One of the remarkable things about my relationship with Karen is that I can quantify to the day, if not to within an hour, the amount of time we had together. This is, as with so many other aspects of our relationship, both remarkable and painful.

After more than eighteen years since we graduated from Packer, we met again - and, in many ways, for the first time - on September 27, 2008. It was 415 days later, on November 16, 2008, that our time together came to a sudden and tragic conclusion. It was only 415 days, or one year, one month, and nineteen days, that we had with each other. (Because I remember the approximate time that we met, 8:30 PM, and that she collapsed, 3:30 PM, it is possible to estimate that we were together for 9979 hours.) This is a stunningly brief time to have been together, especially when one considers how much we did in that time. It would not be hyperbole to say that we lived a lifetime in those 415 days.

The reason I am mentioning this now is that today represents a strange milestone: today, January 5, 2010, marks 415 days since Karen died. What this means is that I have now been without Karen for longer than the time we had together and every day hence will tilt the scale of time further. How can this be? Could our time together truly have been so short that, in what feels like a blink of the eyes, I am now beyond the time we were a couple? It is difficult to contemplate and wrap my head around this.

Time is indeed an odd thing. On the one hand the past 415 days seem to have flown by in the blink of an eye. When I think about that tragic and horrible moment, as I invariably do so many times a day, I feel like it just happened. That the details and my feelings are as clear as the computer screen I'm looking at now. Other times, however, the time Karen and I shared together feels like a lifetime and a millions years ago. Almost imperceptible and existing as an ethereal memory which I struggle to recapture. How can it be that these seemingly conflicting realities exist contemporaneously with each other? I suppose that is just one more facet of the new world, and life, in which I exist.

The marking of this day has greater significance than others that have come recently. Unlike anniversaries or birthdays, which will repeat for years onward, this is a singular moment that I will face. This marks a boundary that I will never cross again, and of course from which I can never cross back. This does not diminish the importance of things like the first anniversary of her death or her uncelebrated birthdays, but today represents something else entirely than those dates.

In some ways, as this milestone is passed, I feel the icy grip of my grief relax slightly. Since her death, I have not shaved - the tradition in Judaism is that mourners do not shave for a specified amount, typically thirty days but it can be as long as one year depending on your beliefs - but now find myself a step closer to doing so in a way I could not even consider only a few weeks ago. Similarly, while I left so much of our apartment the way it was on the morning of November 16, 2008, I am beginning to feel the moment for me to change that may be approaching. I know it will be a difficult and long process, but whereas I couldn't even contemplate any of it before now I can.

While these are subtle shifts and I still have a long, long way to go with so many things in my life, they are things that I could not have even imagined only a few short months ago. I don't know when I will actually undertake these changes, but that I can even contemplate making them is, for me, an enormous step in my grieving process.

So now as I prepare to count day number 416, and onward, I feel myself starting to look forward a little more each day. Of course I will never, and can never, stop looking back at what was as well.