Anniversary Season

Living with the Anticipation of Loss

This is part 5 of my series on Grief:

Grief rarely arrives all at once. It has seasons, signals, and a way of moving closer as the anniversary of loss approaches. This is a reflection on what it means to live with that anticipation, and to listen for what grief asks as time passes.

Every fall, as the weather begins to change, I can feel the grief stir.

The plane crash that took my husband’s sister, brother-in-law, and our three nephews happened in winter. Each year since, the first cold day signals the beginning of the anniversary season. The grief doesn’t arrive on a single date. Instead, it seeps in slowly, weeks or even months ahead of time, inching closer to the surface. It shows up in my husband’s body, in his patience, and in the way even small emotional shifts feel heavier than they should.

Every year is different, of course, and yet there are patterns. The anticipation is almost always more difficult than the day itself. There is a familiar tightening in the weeks leading up to it. A quiet vigilance, and the uneasy question of what we will need this time.

The first year was, without question, the hardest. None of us knew what was coming. We only knew that marking a year without five people we loved would be gut-wrenching. Even a year after the loss, we were still in shock, still unable to believe what had happened, still learning how grief behaves when it arrives uninvited and refuses to leave. We all responded differently, and sometimes in ways that clashed rather than aligned.

That first anniversary was filled with soul-crushing sadness, anger, and disappointment. On the day itself, we felt disconnected, each of us facing grief in our own way. In retrospect, I think anger may have been easier than letting ourselves feel the full weight of what we had lost. Anger gave us something to push against when none of us were ready to sit with the pain.

In the years that followed, we tried different strategies to make it through the anniversary without collapsing. Some were conscious, some were not. Certain parts of the pattern became predictable, like the weeks of heaviness beforehand and the tension between wanting to acknowledge the loss and wanting, desperately, to escape it.

Some years, we tried to outrun the grief. We traveled, chasing warmth and beauty, hoping that if we could put enough distance between ourselves and the cold that marked the loss, we might also outrun the reminder of what had happened, and the grief that remained.

It never worked.

Even in the most beautiful places, grief found us. Sometimes it showed up quietly, other times it was so loud it felt deafening. It appeared in moments of stillness, in the waves lapping against the shore, even in the way our laughter hurt as much as it helped. It showed up in the ever-present awareness of who should have been there and wasn’t. Paradise didn’t cancel out grief.

What grief asks for from us has changed over time, but it has never disappeared. What has changed is our relationship to it, and how willing we are to listen.

Last year, we chose something different. We decided to spend the anniversary in the country where the crash occurred. There were six of us: my husband, his mother, and our three children, two who grieve their lost family and one who was born in the aftermath. None of us had a clear sense of how that would feel. We showed up carrying something we rarely spoke about directly, with no plan beyond being together.

On the night of the anniversary, we had a quiet dinner. There was no ceremony and no agenda. We ate, we laughed, and we reminisced. And, without forcing it, we acknowledged what had been taken from us, without trying to soften it or make it more palatable.

It was connecting in a way I hadn’t expected. Looking back, I think it was because we weren’t trying to manage the grief or outrun it. We weren’t pretending it wasn’t there, but we weren’t drowning in it either. We were allowing it to exist between us, shared instead of carried alone.

I don’t know how we will approach future anniversaries, only that it will continue to change. Some years may call for distraction, others for quiet, for closeness, or for solitude. There is no single right way to move through a grief anniversary, no formula to rely on as the years pass.

What I’ve learned is that grief doesn’t ask for the same thing every year. It asks for honesty more than strategy.

The hardest part is not the day itself, but the not knowing what the day will bring. The willingness to stay open to what this year’s version of grief might need, even when that answer is unclear.

Every year, the cold will come again, and the grief will follow close behind. What changes is not its presence, but our willingness to stay with it and to meet it where it is. Sometimes grief does not need to be managed. Sometimes it only needs to be felt, named, and shared. When it is allowed to exist between us, rather than inside each of us alone, it becomes something we can carry together.