March 32nd
By Tom Blair
Original Post from Carepages, March 31, 2013
If I could, I would get rid of April 1st.
I would wipe it from my calendar.
April 1st is a day of fools, low tricks, and lame jokes. Catherine never suffered fools and detested being tricked. She wrinkled her nose in disapproval when she heard bad jokes. April 1st was not her kind of day. And yet somehow, sadly, it was the day she died. She will have this unworthy date carved into her tombstone.
This fact still bothers me.
After two years, it still seems wrong. All wrong.
Catherine herself never accepted the situation. She decided to slip away silently before dawn on April 1, 2011. The day never touched her.
On April 1, 2012, John, Ellen, and I took evasive action. We Catherine by traveling to Scotland, where we saw a special sun rising from the west. We found her spirit waiting for us in the dark recesses of an ancient cathedral. She surrounded us as we climbed to the sunlit mountain overlooking Edinburgh and spoke her name to the winds. On that glorious day, we escaped April 1st entirely.
But now April 1st is coming again and there is no obvious escape. The day falls on a Monday – a work day when I will crawl out of bed at the usual hour, make my usual commute to my usual parking spot, and spend my usual day at the office. If anyone watches me, they will see no sign of anything special. There will be no sign that Catherine ever touched my life. It will be a day of unspoken sadness, and it will be a pitiful way to mark the death of our beautiful daughter.
That is how April 1st will be this year.
I have, therefore, decided to skip that day. I may not be able to wipe April 1st off the calendar, but who says I can’t start a competing day? I am calling it March 32nd.
I like this idea for several reasons. For starters, it will reclaim Catherine’s last day from the fools of April. It will make her day part of a month – March – that she thoroughly loved. Moreover, it is exactly the kind of half-baked idea that Catherine would have expected from me. She would have immediately told me it was silly, but her eyes would have been full of laughter.
That’s how I intend to spend March 32nd.
Thinking of Catherine’s pretty eyes. Remembering how good it felt when I did some small thing to make her smile. And against all logic, I will be listening – amid the usual sounds of my usual day at the office – for the magical laughter of a little girl who found me funny.
You are all cordially invited to add March 32nd to your calendars.
I guarantee that it will be a far better day than April 1st.
