Unniversary

Today is not the anniversary of anything major in my personal life. I know that, because sometime during my 30's I began to mentally record important dates in my life. Not birthdays and things like that-- I'm still awful at remembering those-- but "anniversary" dates. The day I found my dog Laika living on the streets of Spain, and the date she died. The days I adopted Patch and Lotus. The day I became a chiropractor. The day I first saw my lama. The day I was ordained as a nun.

And then there are the Wegener's dates. The day I had to acknowledge that something was seriously wrong-- the first CT scan. The day I was diagnosed. And a boatload of other dates that make me shudder to remember.

The Wegener's dates are not all bad. The last day I had to be on oxygen. The last painful heparin shot. The day I got off chemo and steroids. The days I met my amazing doctors at Johns Hopkins, when each of them first told me, "I believe you" and "I can help you" and "Your life can be better than this."

My personal calendar is really filling up with all this. So I'm playing with this Anniversary Date Habit thing lately. Constantly counting the days "since" keeps me engaged with them as if they were the present. The past never gets to be "passed." At some point I'll be able to take a big pink eraser to all these mental dates and forget about them once and for all. But for starters, I'm just going to let myself ignore the big June dates this time around. They can come and go and if anyone asks "Wasn't it June when you ...?" I'll just look at them and say, "I have no idea. I'm just no good with dates."