Nancy Burner: Today Is My 46th Wedding Anniversary

Today would have been my 46th wedding anniversary.

Correction: today is my 46th wedding anniversary.

My husband Michael is not here, but forty-six years ago today we were married and began a life together. That life happened. That love happened. It was not always easy. We had our ebbs and flows. We weathered storms, celebrated victories and made our way through all the messiness that life handed us. Along the way, we learned to give each other grace, and I am deeply grateful for that. His death does not erase any of that.

Recently, I attended a reading of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, performed by Edie Falco. I had read the book both before and after Michael died. This was my third reading, and I understood something in Didion’s words that I had not fully understood before.

Before loss, you can understand grief intellectually. After loss, the same words land differently.

Didion writes about the first year after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the way she kept measuring time against the year before. I did exactly the same thing after Michael died. A date would come, and I would immediately think, “What were we doing a year ago today? Where were we? What were we doing?” I would reconstruct even the ordinary details.

Reading Didion again, I finally understood what I had been doing. I was keeping him alive.

As long as I could go back twelve months and find Michael there, the calendar gave me a way back to the life we had shared. Then that ends.

At some point, “a year ago today” is already a day after the person died. There is no longer another version of that day in which they were still here. That is one of the harder parts of grief. Time keeps moving, and the person you lost seems to move farther away with it.

The memories soften. The voice becomes less immediate. New experiences begin to pile up that they were not here to share. And that can feel like betrayal.

Didion understood that too.

She came to see that if she was going to live, she had to stop trying to hold John exactly where he had been. She had to let him go.

I have never liked the phrase “move on.” I do not think we move on from the people who shaped us. We carry them differently.

As an attorney, I have spent most of my career helping families prepare for death. We draft wills and trusts. We plan for who will make decisions, who will inherit, how assets should be protected, and how to make things easier for the people left behind.

Those documents matter.

But they do not contain a life.

What we really inherit is often much less formal. It is the advice someone gave us. The expressions we still hear in their voice. The way they handled hard things. The traditions they created. The stories the family keeps telling.

At the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion remembers being in the water with John. She was always worried about missing the swell, waiting too long, or getting the timing wrong. John was not. He understood that you had to feel the swell change and move with it.

That stayed with me.

You cannot stop the water from changing.

You cannot go back to the life before the loss.

You can only learn how to live in the changed current.

That does not mean leaving someone behind.

It means continuing to live.

Michael is not less a part of my life because I am still living it. The years we had together are part of who I am. His influence did not end when his life did.

So today is not the anniversary that would have been.

It is my 46th wedding anniversary.

Michael is not here to celebrate it with me. I feel that absence. But I also feel the life we had, the years we shared, and everything he left in me. The current changes.

We do not get to choose that.

But we are still here.

And we have to live this life.

Nancy Burner, Esq., Founding Partner, Burner Prudenti