Split Anniversary

Split Anniversary – by Liam Sweeny.

Sometimes, I run across stories that, in and of themselves don’t amount to much, but they raise questions about the bigger things. I think the story I have today falls under that category.

Are anniversaries somehow “sacred?” Should we honor the big events in our lives year after year or does the date just lose its meaning after a while? I guess it depends on the event, right?

So the story is about a woman who lost her mother, her brother, and her nephew in a car accident. Two years later, her daughter was getting married and she set the date as… you guessed it, the anniversary of the car accident. Turned out it was also the anniversary of the first time she and her fiance met.

Mom tried to talk her out of it. She went through with it anyway. Her family didn’t show up at the wedding, of course, and afterward she was furious. Of course.

It brings up a question about events. Was the bride alltogether wrong? It was a good anniversary for her; she’d first met the man who was going to become her husband. Maybe she was trying to turn something bad into something good.

But even then, the family won’t know how to feel on that day when the dust settles. It could just be an uncomfortable day, or it could grow into just an important day for the family.

I gotta tell ya, this story is a quandary for me. I have good anniversaries and bad, but I usually celebrate both by ordering a hoagie and watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone.

What do you think? Wherever you see this, comment. How do you think you’d handle that, either as the bride, or the bride’s mother? This could be as big as ‘free will vs. determinism’ and ‘tastes great – less filling.”

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