What Do You Do About Unhappiversaries?

My wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on the day before Thanksgiving in 2018. It made for a somber meal the next day. In the two years since then, my stomach has tightened just before Thanksgiving. I call occasions like this unhappiversaries. Anniversaries of trauma. Maybe it’s the death of a parent. Or the motorcycle accident. Or the day the divorce became final.

We all have unhappiversaries. My question is: what do you do about them?

One answer might be to ignore them. If you can forget them entirely, my hat is off to you. But that’s generally not an option. The memory will push its way in, so the options become to either reject or acknowledge.

I once knew a woman who, along with a friend, was in a terrible motorcycle accident. She spent months in and out of hospitals, her face held in place with pins and plates of steel. We spoke after the anniversary of the crash. I asked her, had she wanted to revisit the site? There was no question. Yes. Something drew her back. She and her friend went to the spot where it happened, were there at the very moment that it happened. And they sat on the side of the road, and they just looked at it. After some time had passed, and without exchanging a word, they drove away. She couldn’t explain why it made sense to go there or why it helped. It hadn’t removed the pain, but it helped to see, to contemplate this spot in her personal geography, this mighty bend in the river of her life.

You might be tempted, instead, to spend the day thinking about anything else, crowding out the memory with noisy distractions. But I’m on the side of acknowledging the darkness. It won’t be ignored. I sometimes personify it with a question: Have I learned what you would teach me? Nothing teaches sympathy like suffering. But you have to listen.

Tragedy shapes us more than joy. Our scars are what distinguish us, after all. My father, a psychiatrist, once put it like this: we are the sum of our imperfections. If you are to be a compassionate friend to your own lonely self, then you must appreciate the landscape after the storm has passed. It tells the story of the storm. It tells the story of you.

How do you observe your unhappiversaries?