This Day Last Year

How do you move forward when all you want is to go back.

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I woke before the sun this morning.

Outside my window the mountain was still dark, the ridge not yet touched by anything. I pulled on a sweatshirt and stepped out onto the deck into the cold. Not the cold of a city morning. The cold of altitude and pine and dirt and rock, the kind that enters the body immediately and reminds it what it is.

I put the feeders out. I do this every morning. It is one of the small rituals this life has given me, this life that looks nothing like the one I was living a year ago.

The squirrel came down the tree almost immediately. It knows me now. It knows I have peanuts. There is something about being known by a wild thing that I have not yet found the words for.

The birds followed. One chirp somewhere in the trees. Another farther off. A flutter of wings overhead. And then more, and more, layer upon layer of sound beginning to build as the light started its slow climb over the ridge. Dawn here does not arrive all at once. It unfolds slowly, edges first, touching the tops of things before it reaches the ground. The wildflowers. The pinecones scattered across the dirt. The cold pure air beginning to shift.

By the time the hummingbirds started, the robins were already answering one another across the yard. The whole mountain was waking up and I was standing inside it, part of it, my body responding to it the way a body does when it is outside and alive and the world is opening around it.

And underneath all of that was the grief. It moves through me this way now. I know its weight. I know how it travels. I am no longer surprised by when it arrives, only sometimes by how much of the morning it can hold without breaking the morning apart.

I am one instrument in this symphony and the sound I am making today is not birdsong.

I went back inside for my coffee and felt the difference immediately. The house too still. The quiet inside no longer peaceful but separate, like standing outside a conversation you desperately wanted back into. So I grabbed the blanket and went back out.

Teddy was at the chair. Our chair. He was watching me from beside it, running whatever calculation dogs run when the routine shifts. Is this okay? Is the peace still intact. He stood there a moment longer than usual before he joined me outside. He decided we were okay.

I had a good week this week.

I want to say that clearly because it is true and because it matters and because grief does something to good weeks that makes them complicated in ways that are hard to explain. You stop trusting stability. You become suspicious of relief. Somewhere underneath the okayness you are already bracing, already waiting for the floor to come back up to meet you.

The good week is behind me now.

It’s Monday morning. Memorial Day. And the grief is back, fully, the way it arrives on days it has claimed for its own.

Today is May 25th.

The last day I have photographs of Patrick alive in my phone.

I still cannot comprehend that sentence no matter how many times I say it.

We were supposed to grow old together. I do not mean that poetically. I mean literally. Arguments about whether to repaint the bedroom, again. Coffee on decks on mornings exactly like this one. Gray hair and whether to cover it. Routines and grocery lists. The quiet intimacy of a shared life that had stretched long enough to become ordinary.

I wanted much more life than this.

People still get to call their husbands from the grocery store. Still get irritated by them. Still hear them moving around in the kitchen at night. Still get to wash their clothes and complain about the pile left beside the bed.

That is the part that undoes me. Not just his absence. The fact that the world still speaks a language I have no reason to speak.

This entire year has been measured in: this day last year.

This day last year you were alive. This day last year we did this. This day last year I still belonged to the version of myself who had not yet watched her life split apart.

Last Memorial Day we did Murph together.

Murph is a hero workout. A mile run, a hundred pullups, two hundred pushups, three hundred squats, another mile. You do it every Memorial Day to honor the fallen. We had done it together every year for thirteen years.

Something was bothering him physically that morning. A hamstring maybe. Achilles maybe. I hate that I cannot remember clearly anymore. That is its own kind of grief, the forgetting. The way memory does not hold everything. The way it releases details without asking permission, quietly, one at a time, until you reach for something specific and find only the shape of where it used to be.

We had talked about biking instead, but at the last minute he decided to run. I told him exactly why that was a bad idea, professionally and personally. He looked at me calmly and said, trust me, it's fine.

So I did. We ran.

And during the last mile, in the final hundred meters, we turned the corner into the homestretch back toward the gym. The garage door was open. You could hear it from down the block, the noise from inside spilling out into the morning, the movement and life of it.

He reached over without saying anything and took my hand.

We ran the rest hand in hand.

I can still feel the weight of it. His hand finding mine mid-stride, without a word, without breaking pace. Just there suddenly. The way you reach for something you are not ready to stop touching.

We ran back into the space we built. Back into the community we created together. Back into the world we thought we still had time inside of.

How do you move forward when all you want is to go back.

This past Saturday I was supposed to run Murph. I didn’t. We biked instead, my friend and I, and I was glad to be moving, glad to be doing something with my body on this day that has always meant something. But I was so glad to have it be different. I couldn’t have it be the same. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the same way. There are rituals that belong to a life I no longer have and I am still figuring out which ones I can carry forward and which ones I have to set down and which ones I need to reshape into something I can actually survive.

Teddy is asleep by my side. The coffee has gone cold. The mountain is fully lit.

In a week and a half it will have been a year.

And I am scared that soon I will no longer be able to say: this day last year, we.

That circle is closing now.

Time keeps moving forward while part of me remains standing there in that final stretch with your hand in mine.

Yet another part of me wonders whether every breath I take is carrying me closer to you too. Closer to wherever you went. Closer to the possibility that someday remembering you will feel less like being torn open.

Because today it still feels physical.

A rupture moving straight through the center of my body.

And I wonder if there will ever come a Memorial Day where I can think about that run, about your hand reaching for mine, and smile before the grief arrives.

Patrick. May 25, 2025. Tom Selleck Mustache Era.

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