When love and loss share a date

AN anniversary is supposed to be a day of celebration, right? You dress up in your finest attire, cut a cake, maybe clink a glass or two, and reminisce about how you’ve survived another year of wedded bliss (and arguments about who left the lights on). But what do you do when your marriage anniversary collides with a day of solemn remembrance?

On our wedding anniversary four years ago, my husband and I found ourselves grappling with one of life’s strangest twists — mourning the loss of my mother-in-law while marking a milestone of togetherness. Here we were, ready to celebrate another year of love and laughter, when the universe decided to throw in a curveball. It was like planning a beach vacation and finding out there’s a hurricane warning.

Tradition emphasises honouring the departed, and my mother-in-law’s memory is deeply cherished. She was a woman of immense strength and sharp wit. She had an opinion on everything, and she never hesitated to share it.

I can’t help thinking that she might find humour in the irony of choosing our wedding anniversary as the day to take her final bow. It feels like a cosmic wink from her, a reminder of her knack for making her presence felt even in her absence. It’s as if she left us with a life lesson in her own style: life, in all its complexity, weaves joy and sorrow into the same fabric and shows how it can be both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Now, every year, we face the same question: do we celebrate, mourn or attempt some hybrid of both? As with most things in a long marriage, the solution is compromise. We try to blend the two occasions: a moment of silence before a quiet dinner, followed by a toast to both her memory and our enduring partnership. Sometimes, we split the day in two — spending the morning in quiet reflection, honouring the solemn occasion, and dedicating the latter half to celebrating the fact that we’ve managed to keep the spark alive despite the odds (and the snoring). Other times, like the year she passed, we remind ourselves that anniversaries come around every year, just as solemn remembrances do. Balancing both is never easy, but it’s our way of cherishing the past while embracing the present.

It’s not the kind of anniversary most couples envision, but it’s ours — a blend of life’s contradictions, where joy and grief walk hand in hand. In a way, it’s a reminder of marriage itself: a journey that’s equal parts love, loss and laughter, punctuated by the occasional bittersweet twist. So, while our anniversary will forever share its date with her passing, we’ve come to see it not as a clash, but as a coexistence of memories, a testament to the life she lived and the life we continue to build.

And somewhere, I hope my mother-in-law is smiling down on us, probably rolling her eyes and saying, “Well, at least you didn’t forget the date. Now you’ll never forget me!”— and honestly, she’d be absolutely right.