SwanShadow Thinks Out Loud

Today would have been KJ’s half-birthday.

The custom of half-birthdays — and ultimately, half-anniversaries — was one that I brought into our relationship from my childhood. Because my birthday is only six days before Christmas, my major gift-receiving opportunities were bunched together into a single week of the calendar year. It became my habit, therefore, to observe my own half-birthday — the date exactly six months from my actual birthday — by doing a little something nice for myself on that day.

When KJ and I became a couple, we continued to acknowledge half-holidays. We never really exchanged gifts on those days, but we always made note of the date with a card or something.

Today seemed like a good day for roses.

This being a special occasion, the roses are real. A chain grocery store near the cemetery sells a dozen pink roses quite inexpensively — I’ve purchased them there a couple of times previously. My plan is to find a set of silk ones that can remain on the crypt at all times without maintenance, except for occasions like this when I’ll swap the artificial ones for fresh.

In case you’re wondering, KJ’s crypt is unmarked in this photo only because her marker hasn’t yet arrived. It should be ready for installation in about a month. The mausoleum requires that all of the markers follow an identical pattern, so they acquire them from the same source. KJ’s will consist of her name, birth year, and death year stamped from steel in a sleek sans-serif font.

And yes… it still feels a little bit peculiar to be writing about this.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2010 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Breast Cancer Awareness, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, Hero of the Day, My Home Town, Reminiscing, SwanStuff. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.