The dread has been building inside me for weeks, since I first thought about this fifth deathiversary months ago. Tonight, on the eve of his death date, my grief was chiggers under my skin, itching, hatching, looking for a way out of its incubating chamber.

I got in bed early, hoping to sleep my way into the actual day, and spend as much of it unconscious as my responsibilities will allow. But the body keeps the fucking score and will remember in whatever way it sees fit. Of course I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even lie still in hopes of sleep. What I need, I said to myself, is someone to just hold me through this discomfort, and with that thought the tears came, because of course there is no one to hold me now. Or no one right now.

I am still so sad that things turned out the way they did, with his relapse into drinking, with his secret-keeping so that I didn’t know the help that could’ve saved him until it was too late. I am still so angry to be left holding all the weight of a life planned around two adults sharing decisions, bearing the load of parenting and housework and making ends meet together. The load is the same, but with only me to carry it, it seems heavier than I could’ve imagined. And thankfully, I never did imagine or I would’ve chosen differently.

I’m glad I didn’t know when we got married, when we bought our big property in the woods, when we created Ceci, how it would all turn out. I would never have had the courage to do all that if I’d known how radically different than my dream it would end up. I’m glad I only knew what I knew, and there are so many things I wish I had never found out.

Like how much is possible when you have to wake up every morning and do the things because your kids need their only remaining parent to be okay. Like how much you can both love and hate a person at the same time. Like how you can make peace with a life you didn’t want. Like how there actually is post-traumatic growth that ALMOST makes the trauma worth living through.

He’s been dead now longer than we were married, twice as long as Ceci had him in her life alive. We have well and truly moved forward and created a life that doesn’t require his presence even though we still feel his absence. I know there are forms of grief yet to be revealed, especially as Ceci begins to grow into the awareness of what it is to have a dead dad. And I know we can handle it, will handle it, because what other choice is there really?

Parts of me still wait for the year that I won’t dread this day, while other parts caution it will likely always be loaded. I think I have reached all the resolution I’m going to for his death, and I have stopped waiting for it to make sense or have meaning or be part of some great unknown plan. It just is: persistent, painful and manageable. Except when it’s not.