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Her Leap Year Death Left a Hole in My Heart and Calendar
That I stuff with mint chip ice cream, Star Trek, and Outlander
It’s been 5 years since she passed away. I’m not as numb when I think about her. It doesn’t hurt as much. The tears don’t come right away. My daughter has stopped crying every night or needing to sing one of her grandmother’s favorite songs, “Hail Mary, Gentle Woman.”
But this morning took me by surprise when I realized it was already February 28th. The anniversary of her death has been in the back of my mind all month. But today still snuck up on me. Maybe it’s because her death date is really February 29th.
What do you do when you can’t observe the actual day of her death except on a leap year? It’s weird. It feels incomplete. It feels like there’s a hole where she should be. And not having a day that we claim for her makes it hard as if her memory is unattainable; as if she is just a shadow on the edges.
But she wasn’t. She was never on the edges. She was my mother-in-law, but she treated me as a daughter. She shared her love for Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series with me. She was the first one to come to the hospital when one of her grandchildren were born. Before she died, she met 22 of her 23 grandchildren (not all mine, I gave birth to only four of them). She…
