Behind the Puddle

A personal reflection on remembrance, belonging, and the histories we carry

October 15, 1977.

That is the day my dad died. I was seven years old, my sister Barb was ten, almost eleven, and my mom hadn’t even turned thirty-two. My dad was forty-three.

This year will mark forty-nine years since his death, and I have been thinking about what that date means to me now. Not necessarily because I am missing him more than I did last year, or because some new wave of grief has arrived. It is more that I have begun to recognize how much of my relationship with that date may have very little to do with death itself.

For the past five years, working in end-of-life education and community engagement, I have spent considerable time listening to how people experience the anniversaries of their loved ones’ deaths. Some gather family and friends every year, prepare favorite meals, visit cemeteries, release balloons, or create elaborate celebrations of remembrance. Some mark the day with enormous emotion, while others acknowledge it quietly, if at all. And some don’t assign any particular meaning to the date, even when the relationship they had with the person who died was deeply important.

I have never been able to identify a particular pattern that adequately explains those differences. It doesn’t necessarily seem to follow the number of years since the death, the age of the person who died, or any predictable stage of grief. It certainly doesn’t tell us how much someone loved the person they lost. The more people I listen to, the more I recognize how individual our relationships with remembrance really are.

Culture, upbringing, religious beliefs, family traditions, and our overall relationship with death certainly influence how we acknowledge these dates. The circumstances surrounding the death can also make an anniversary comforting, painful, complicated, or something we would prefer not to revisit. Sometimes the date is about the person who died, and sometimes it is about everything that changed when they died. I suspect that for many people, it is a combination of things they may never have stopped to separate.

I have always acknowledged October 15.

Every year, I reach out to my mom and Barb with a message or a phone call. Neither of them seems to have a particular annual tradition, although I know they appreciate my messages and the memories I share. I have never expected them to acknowledge the date in the same way I do, but I have also never seriously questioned why I feel compelled to make that connection.

Until now.

Before There Was an After

My mom and dad were married on July 9, 1964. Their first daughter, Tracey, was born in 1965 and lived only one day. Barb came along in 1966, and I arrived in 1970. By the time my dad died in October 1977, they had been married a little over thirteen years.

Thirteen years is not a particularly long time when measured against an entire lifetime. But it was long enough for a marriage, the birth of three daughters, the death of one, and the creation of a family with its own experiences, relationships, stories, and identity. It was the family I was born into and the only family I knew during my first seven years. It was a family that existed independently of everything that would eventually follow.

My dad’s death changed that.

I have said countless times over the years that if my dad hadn’t died, our lives would have been different. I don’t know whether they would have been better or worse, and I have never felt comfortable pretending to know. My parents might have remained happily married, or they might not have. We might have experienced opportunities we never had, or we might have encountered hardships I cannot begin to imagine.

But our lives would have been different.

I believe that about almost every significant decision and circumstance in life. There is the road we travel and the one we never get to know, and we often hope that the direction we took was the right one. We cannot know what would have happened had we made another choice, and we cannot fairly compare the life we lived with a life that never existed.

Of course, my dad dying wasn’t a choice any of us made.

Neither was my mother’s decision to eventually remarry something Barb or I had much control over. We were children who had experienced the death of a parent, living in small-town Iowa in the late 1970s, during a time when death, grief, widowhood, and blended families were not necessarily discussed as openly as they might be today. Life was expected to continue, and somehow, we were expected to continue with it.

On August 4, 1978, less than ten months after my dad died, my mother married Lars.

I have spent most of my life belonging, at least by family definition, to the household and extended family that came from that marriage. My brother Jon and sister Julie were born, and our family grew into something different from what it had been. There were new relationships, new experiences, new traditions, and eventually new generations. Life continued, exactly as life tends to do, whether we are prepared for its changes or not.

I love Jon and Julie. They are my siblings, and I have never considered them less deserving of belonging because they arrived after my dad’s death. Their relationships with my mother, Lars, Barb, and each other are theirs to create and experience. Their existence doesn’t diminish mine, and my earlier family history doesn’t diminish theirs.

But there is an invisible line in our family history.

There is the family that was, and there is the family that became. For a long time, I don’t think I understood how fiercely I was protecting that distinction.

The Family of Four

When I reach out to my mom and Barb on October 15, I am beginning to understand that I may not simply be remembering my dad.

I am remembering us.

There were four of us living within that original family. My dad, my mom, Barb, and me. We had a shared history that existed before anyone else became part of the family we know today. My dad’s death brought that particular chapter of our lives to an end, but it didn’t make the years before it disappear.

The three of us who remained experienced something together that nobody else can fully experience in the same way. We lost the same person, but our individual losses were very different. My mom lost her husband and the future she might have expected with him. Barb lost her father at an age when she had already developed memories and an understanding of him that were different from mine.

I lost my dad when I was seven.

I have memories of him, but there are also enormous parts of his life that I will never know through my own experiences. I enjoy hearing stories from people who knew him before I was born, or who knew parts of him that a little girl would never have understood. Their memories allow me to continue learning about the person he was, rather than knowing him only as the father who died when I was young.

I don’t think about him every day. I could, especially given the work I do, but I don’t feel a need to make his absence a daily part of my life. I don’t consider myself to be standing still in the grief of losing him. I have lived an entire lifetime of experiences, relationships, mistakes, accomplishments, and ordinary days since his death.

But I remember his dates.

I remember July 7, the day he was born. I remember October 15, the day he died. I hold the stories close because they are part of my history, and because there is something meaningful about knowing that someone who has been gone for nearly five decades can still be remembered for the life he lived.

And I think I have been trying to preserve more than his memory. I have been trying to preserve the family to which I originally belonged.

The Family That Became

This is where the reflection becomes more difficult, because I don’t believe the family that followed was without love, meaningful relationships, or worthwhile experiences.

But I am beginning to question how much of my sense of belonging within that family was based on genuine acceptance and how much was based on learning to accept what was available.

Lars became my stepfather when I was seven, almost eight. For most of my life, I have considered myself fortunate that he didn’t ignore us or physically abuse us. Barb and I have said versions of that many times, as though the absence of those things established that we were lucky.

I look at that statement differently now.

That is an awfully low standard for what children should be able to expect from the adults responsible for raising them. Not being physically harmed is not the same as being emotionally secure. Not being ignored entirely is not the same as feeling wanted, accepted, protected, or loved.

I don’t know when I started recognizing that difference, although I suspect it happened gradually as I grew older and began raising my own children.

I know that Brian and I would not have remained married if he had treated Tyler and Lindsey, or allowed his parents to treat them, in ways that resembled some of the experiences Barb and I accepted growing up. I wouldn’t have considered the absence of physical abuse enough to establish that my children were being treated well. I expected them to be respected, included, protected, and recognized as children worthy of love without having to earn their place in the family.

And I find myself wondering why I was willing to accept so much less for myself.

Perhaps children don’t have the experience or perspective necessary to recognize what is missing. Perhaps we learn to describe our circumstances as fortunate because acknowledging something different would be painful or would threaten the relationships on which we depend. Perhaps we simply learn what love is supposed to look like from the people around us, even when their example leaves something to be desired.

I don’t know which explanation fits my childhood most accurately. I do know that I spent much of my life hearing that I didn’t live up to my potential.

Those words have stayed with me in ways I doubt the people who said them fully understood. I have heard them enough to know that I will never use them to describe another person’s life. There is something deeply damaging about repeatedly being measured against an imagined version of yourself, particularly when the person doing the measuring has no way of knowing what your life might have been under different circumstances.

What potential was I supposed to fulfill?

The potential of the child whose father lived? The potential of the child whose family remained intact? The potential of the person I might have become had different opportunities, relationships, expectations, or experiences shaped my life?

Nobody knows who that person would have been.

I certainly don’t.

I have made decisions I might make differently with the knowledge I have today. I have experienced things I would never have chosen and others I wouldn’t trade for anything. I have been a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend, and many other things that cannot be adequately measured against someone’s idea of what I might have accomplished.

I have lived the life that was available to me, making decisions with the knowledge, circumstances, and abilities I had at the time.

I don’t know what it means to have failed to live up to a potential that nobody could have accurately predicted in the first place.

And I wonder whether part of my desire to preserve the original family is connected to a time before I began feeling measured against those expectations.

Not because I believe my dad would have been a perfect parent. I have no reason to assume that his expectations would always have been fair, that our relationships would have remained uncomplicated, or that the family would have escaped the ordinary difficulties of life. I don’t want to rewrite him into a person without flaws simply because he died before I was old enough to know him as an adult.

But I did belong to that family.

I was Richard and Carol’s daughter, Barb’s little sister, and part of a family that existed before all the expectations and experiences that came afterward.

Nobody had to invite me into that history. I was already there.

When the Years Begin to Outnumber the Memories

I think one of my fears has been that the family that came afterward will eventually become the only family that matters in the larger family story.

My mom’s marriage to Lars has now lasted far longer than her marriage to my dad. Jon and Julie have lived their entire lives within that second family, and Barb and I have spent most of ours there as well. There have been decades of birthdays, holidays, marriages, children, grandchildren, ordinary gatherings, and shared experiences that simply could not have existed during the thirteen years of my parents’ marriage.

Time has a way of creating its own history.

And sometimes I fear that the history with the most years, the most people, and the most shared memories will eventually overshadow the one that came before.

I recognize that this may be more about my own fear than anything Jon or Julie have actually intended. They cannot remember a family they were never part of, and I have never expected them to understand experiences they didn’t have. They have every right to value the relationships and memories that shaped their lives, just as I value mine.

But I still want someone to remember that there was a family before them. Not because it was better. Not because it deserves to be placed above the family that followed. Simply because it existed.

I think that is why my relationship with Barb becomes particularly complicated in this reflection.

Barb has a close relationship with Julie, one she has tried to explain to me on several occasions. I have sometimes struggled to reconcile the words used to describe that relationship with the actions I observe, but I also recognize that their connection belongs to them. I don’t need to understand every part of it, and my understanding isn’t required for their relationship to be meaningful.

Jon has never seemed particularly interested in maintaining close relationships with everyone in the family. He lives his life, maintains his relationship with Lars and our mom in ways that seem comfortable to him, and makes contact on holidays or when circumstances call for it. I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that. Not everyone wants or needs the same level of family connection.

But there is a sadness in recognizing how differently we all experience the same family.

Barb and I are the only two children who remember belonging to that original family. Our memories aren’t identical, and neither are our feelings about the family that followed. Perhaps I have sometimes wanted our connection to that history to mean the same thing to both of us, even while knowing that it never could.

I have spent years teaching and believing that people experience grief, relationships, and remembrance differently.

It would be unfair of me to make an exception simply because the relationship happens to be my own. And yet, knowing that doesn’t make every difference easy to accept.

What Grace Does and Does Not Require

Since Lars had his stroke, some of his words, attitudes, and behavior have caused me to reconsider experiences from much earlier in our lives.

I try to give him grace. I understand that aging, illness, and changes in health can affect people in ways that aren’t always within their control. I also know that we cannot look at someone’s current behavior and automatically assume it tells us everything about their intentions or feelings decades earlier.

But some of what I have witnessed has made me question things I once accepted without much examination.

I have begun looking back at the way Barb and I were treated, the expectations placed upon us, and the ways my mother was treated as well. Certain experiences that I once considered ordinary parts of growing up in a blended family no longer seem particularly acceptable when I examine them through the perspective of the adult I have become.

Maybe some of those attitudes were always present. Maybe I simply didn’t recognize them for what they were.

I don’t know that I will ever have a complete understanding, and I am becoming less certain that I need one.

I can recognize the difficult circumstances my mother faced as a young widow with two daughters. I can understand why companionship, stability, and the possibility of another marriage might have mattered to her. I can acknowledge that she was making decisions within a particular time, place, and culture, with circumstances I cannot fully understand from the perspective of a child.

But understanding why someone made a decision is not the same as believing every consequence of that decision was acceptable.

I can appreciate what Lars may have contributed to our family without pretending that everything about our experience was good. I can recognize that my mother did the best she knew how to do in some circumstances while still acknowledging that there were times when I needed something different. I can recognize my own limitations in understanding their lives without dismissing what I remember about mine.

Perhaps that is what grace needs to mean for me now. Not excusing everything. Not assigning blame for everything. Just allowing the history to be complicated without requiring myself to make it more comfortable than it actually was.

The Difference Between Being Loved and Feeling Loved

There is another realization that has been developing over the years, and I don’t know whether it is connected to age, experience, or simply becoming more comfortable with who I am.

I no longer feel the same desire to belong to the extended family that came after my dad’s death. There is sadness in writing that.

I don’t mean that I have stopped loving the people within it, or that I wish those relationships had never existed. I don’t mean that I am angry with everyone or that I intend to make some dramatic declaration of separation. I simply recognize that I no longer want to spend my time trying to create connections that don’t seem to develop naturally or mutually.

I learned a long time ago that you cannot make someone authentically care about you.

You cannot make someone love you in the way you need to be loved. You cannot create a meaningful relationship through your efforts alone, no matter how much you might want it to exist. And sometimes people may not know how to acknowledge that they don’t feel the connection another person hopes for.

I can accept that.

What I struggle with is being told that I am loved or cared about when the actions accompanying those words consistently leave me questioning whether the relationship actually exists in the way it is being described.

I understand that people express affection differently. I know that some people struggle with emotional communication, that some relationships don’t require frequent contact, and that the absence of particular gestures does not necessarily mean the absence of love. I don’t need everyone to demonstrate affection in the same way I do.

But I do need to be able to recognize something genuine in the relationship. And I have reached a place where I am less interested in explaining to someone how they might demonstrate that they care.

I don’t want affection performed out of obligation. I don’t want someone maintaining contact because they believe the family relationship requires it.

I want relationships that exist because the people within them genuinely want to be part of one another’s lives. That may not always be possible with everyone we are related to.

And I think I am beginning to accept that without feeling I have to continue trying to change it.

The Family I Have

I have Brian.

I have my marriage and the life we have built together. I have Hollyn and Hadley, whose presence in my life has given me relationships and experiences that matter more to me than I could adequately explain. There are people within my own bloodline and within the family we have created whose connections I believe will continue to matter throughout our lives.

I don’t know what every future relationship will look like.

Children grow into adults with lives, priorities, and relationships of their own. Grandchildren grow up, and the place their grandparents occupy in their everyday lives naturally changes. Even the closest relationships require room for people to become who they are rather than who we imagined they would be.

I know all of that.

But I also know what it feels like to have relationships that are grounded in something I recognize as genuine.

I don’t need an enormous extended family to feel that my life contains meaningful connections. I don’t need everyone to call, visit, remember every important date, or include me in every gathering. I don’t need to occupy the same place in someone else’s life that they occupy in mine.

I just want the relationships I maintain to be honest about what they are. And perhaps I am beginning to recognize that what I have can be enough.

That doesn’t mean I never wish other relationships had been different. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel sadness about the family connections that never became what I hoped they would be. It simply means that I no longer want the absence of those relationships to determine how I experience the ones that are present.

I have spent enough of my life wondering whether I belonged. I would rather spend whatever time I have remaining participating in the relationships where I already know I do.

Remembering Tracey

There is another part of our family history that has become particularly meaningful as I’ve considered all of this.

Before Barb, before me, before Jon and Julie, there was Tracey.

My mother’s first daughter lived only one day. Her life was brief, but she existed, and her place within our family history matters to me. I have only a few photographs of her, taken at a time when families did not necessarily have many opportunities to preserve images of babies who died shortly after birth.

Those photographs matter because they provide something tangible. She was here. She had a name. She was someone’s daughter and someone’s sister, even though Barb and I would never have the opportunity to know her.

I recognize Tracey’s dates, too. And when I acknowledge her death anniversary, it is my mom and Barb I reach out to, not Jon and Julie. I hadn’t really considered why until this conversation about my dad’s anniversary led me to examine the connections among our family histories.

The circumstances are different, of course.

My mother experienced Tracey’s life and death firsthand, while Barb and I inherited that history through our parents. We cannot share our mother’s memories of losing her first baby. But Tracey belongs to the history of our shared parents, and perhaps that is why recognizing her feels connected to the three of us.

I don’t believe that makes Jon and Julie less related to her in any way that diminishes their place in the family.

It simply means that our connections to her life and death come from different experiences and relationships. And perhaps there is something important in that distinction.

We do not have to experience a loss firsthand for the person who died to have meaning within our lives. We can carry stories, photographs, names, and histories that existed before we did. We can recognize the importance of someone whose presence shaped the family we eventually became part of.

That is one of the things I want for my own life as well.

I don’t expect to be remembered every day after I die. I don’t expect elaborate gatherings or annual ceremonies, and I certainly don’t want anyone to feel obligated to make my death anniversary into an event. But I hope someone will remember the person I was, the things that mattered to me, and whatever part of myself I may have left behind in them.

I hope there will be stories. I hope the people who knew me will sometimes share something that makes another person laugh, wonder, understand, or remember.

I hope my life will be more than the dates that eventually appear beside my name. Maybe that is part of what I have always wanted for my dad and Tracey, too.

Not necessarily that everyone remembers the day they died, but that their lives are never reduced to the fact that they did.

What Are We Really Remembering?

The longer I consider death anniversaries, the more I wonder whether we sometimes misunderstand what people are actually acknowledging.

We assume the anniversary is about grief because it marks the day someone died. But perhaps for some people, it represents belonging, continuity, identity, gratitude, or a relationship that continues to influence their lives. For others, it may represent trauma, unfinished conversations, difficult family histories, or the life they were forced to build afterward.

And perhaps sometimes the anniversary holds a kind of grief that isn’t entirely about the person who died.

I am beginning to wonder whether October 15 has carried some grief for the family that ceased to exist as it had been.

Not simply for my dad, but for the four of us. For the childhood that changed. For the family experiences that would never happen. For the connections that existed before an entirely different family history began.

I don’t think I have spent forty-nine years actively grieving that loss. I have experienced happiness, built a marriage, raised children, enjoyed grandchildren, developed friendships, and found meaningful work. I have lived a life that contains far more than my father’s death.

But I can now recognize that the loss of a family structure may continue to hold meaning long after the immediate grief of a death has changed.

Maybe the anniversary has become a way of revisiting a particular part of my identity. A way of saying that before everything changed, we were a family.

And perhaps my calls to my mom and Barb have been an attempt to share that acknowledgment with the only two people who were there and are still living.

Not to make them grieve. Not to ask them to prove that they remember. Just to connect briefly with the family that was.

The Weight of Being the One Who Remembers

I have never really considered myself responsible for keeping our family’s memories alive.

I enjoy photographs, stories, dates, and the little pieces of history that help me understand where we came from. I have always appreciated the opportunity to learn something about someone who died, especially when the story comes from a person who knew them in a way I never could.

But I am beginning to wonder whether some of my annual rituals gradually became responsibilities without my realizing it.

I am usually the person who reaches out on October 15. I send the message, make the call, or share something in Dad’s memory. My mom and Barb acknowledge it, and I know they appreciate it, but I don’t know whether the day would otherwise be marked in the same way.

And that has never particularly bothered me. At least, I don’t think it has. Now I find myself wondering what would happen if I didn’t initiate the connection this year.

Would I feel peaceful remembering him privately? Would I feel sad because the family of four wasn’t acknowledged together? Would I wonder whether anyone else remembered the date, even though I know that private remembrance doesn’t require an outward expression?

I don’t know.

And I don’t particularly want to turn October 15 into a test of whether someone else remembers.

That would contradict so much of what I believe about grief and the different ways people carry their relationships with those who have died. My mother and Barb do not owe me a particular expression of remembrance. They are entitled to experience that day in whatever way is meaningful, comfortable, or necessary for them.

Just as I am.

Still, I have to consider whether I have continued the tradition primarily because it brings me something meaningful or because I have been afraid of what might happen to the memory of that original family if I stopped.

There is a difference. One is an expression of connection. The other can become a responsibility that feels difficult to put down. And perhaps I have been carrying a little of both.

The Right to Have Belonged

Of everything I have considered during these conversations, one realization has stayed with me more than the others. I am not necessarily protecting memories of the first seven years of my life. I am protecting my right to have belonged to that family.

I think that is the part I had never quite understood about myself.

The family that followed my dad’s death became the family in which I spent most of my childhood and much of my adult life. It was the family in which expectations were established, relationships developed, and judgments were made about who I was and who I should have become. It was also the family in which I learned that being included and feeling accepted are not necessarily the same thing.

Perhaps I have spent years protecting the original family because it represents a part of my life that cannot be rewritten by what came afterward. My dad was my dad. My mother was his wife. Barb was my sister. And I was their daughter.

We existed as a family before Lars, Jon, Julie, and the decades of relationships that followed. That history is not made less important by its shorter duration, and its place in my life cannot be measured by how often anyone else chooses to remember it.

I don’t need to make the first family more important than the second. I don’t need to insist that Barb experience her connection to our dad or our earlier family in the same way I do.

I don’t need Jon and Julie to understand experiences they weren’t part of, or my mother to remember her first marriage in the same way her daughters remember their father.

And perhaps most importantly, I don’t need anyone to confirm that I belonged.

I did.

There is something both comforting and terribly sad about realizing how much importance I have placed on preserving something that was never actually in question as a matter of history.

Maybe the question was never whether I belonged to that family. Maybe it was whether that belonging would continue to matter once the family was gone.

The Sadness of Letting Relationships Be What They Are

There is another loss quietly taking shape alongside these reflections. I think I am beginning to accept that I may never experience the larger extended family relationships in the way I once hoped I would.

That is not something I say with anger. It is simply a recognition that people cannot be made to feel a connection they do not feel, and relationships cannot be sustained indefinitely by one person trying to bridge the distance. I can continue caring about people without expecting them to build the same kind of relationship with me. I can wish them well without requiring a greater place in their lives.

But I would be dishonest if I pretended there wasn’t sadness in that acceptance.

There is grief in realizing that some relationships will probably never become what we hoped they might be. There is grief in reconsidering childhood experiences and recognizing how little we understood about what we needed. There is grief in acknowledging that people can share a family name, a household, or decades of history without necessarily sharing the same sense of connection.

And there may be grief in finally deciding that I no longer want to keep trying to make those connections happen. Perhaps that is part of growing older. Not becoming less interested in people, but becoming more aware of the limits of what we can create through our own efforts.

I can offer honesty, care, conversation, and opportunities for connection. I can listen, recognize another person’s experience, and allow room for relationships to develop differently from what I might have imagined. But I cannot be responsible for both sides of a relationship.

I have spent much of my work encouraging people to recognize their values, their needs, and the things that give their lives meaning.

I suppose I should allow myself the same consideration. I value authenticity. I value relationships in which words and actions have some recognizable connection. I value belonging that doesn’t require a person to continually demonstrate why they deserve to be included.

And I value the freedom to acknowledge that sometimes the relationships we have are not the relationships we once hoped for.

That doesn’t require resentment. It does require a certain willingness to stop trying to make every relationship into something it isn’t.

The Life That Wasn’t Lived

I keep returning to my familiar thought that our lives would have been different if my dad hadn’t died. I know they would have been different, but I cannot know what that difference would have meant.

For years, that thought has helped me avoid romanticizing the path we never traveled. I have never wanted to assume that my father living would have guaranteed a happier childhood, a better marriage for my parents, or an easier life for Barb and me.

But I am beginning to see that the same principle applies to the expectations people placed on my life.

They cannot know who I would have become under different circumstances.

They cannot know whether I would have made different decisions, developed different interests, experienced different opportunities, or understood myself differently.

And neither can I.

Perhaps I would have become someone who fulfilled every expectation they imagined for me. Perhaps I would have disappointed them in entirely different ways. Perhaps I would have lived a remarkably ordinary life, filled with the same kinds of joys, disappointments, relationships, and difficulties that exist in the life I have now.

There is no way to know. And I no longer feel particularly interested in measuring myself against that imaginary person. 

I have lived fifty-six years.

I have loved people and lost people. I have experienced extraordinary pain, ordinary happiness, unexpected opportunities, difficult decisions, and moments of contentment that I never could have planned. I have made mistakes, learned from experiences, changed my opinions, and discovered things about myself that I didn’t recognize when I was younger.

I have lived enough to understand that life cannot be reduced to a list of accomplishments.

And when I think about how I hope to be remembered, I don’t want anyone measuring my life against what they believe I could have become.

I want them to remember the person who was actually here. Maybe that is what I have been trying to do for my dad all these years. And maybe it is what I am finally trying to do for myself.

This October 15

I don’t know what I will do on October 15 this year.

I may send my usual messages to my mom and Barb. I may pick up the phone, share a memory, and acknowledge another year since Dad died. There is something meaningful in that small tradition, and I don’t want to dismiss it simply because I am reconsidering what it represents.

But I may choose to remember him quietly.

I may spend the day thinking about the man who was my father, the family we were, and the ways our lives changed after his death. I may look at photographs, remember stories, or simply allow the date to exist without asking anyone else to participate.

I haven’t decided. And for perhaps the first time, I don’t feel that I need to decide immediately. What I do know is that I don’t want the choice to become a test of anyone’s love, memory, or loyalty.

If I don’t reach out, it doesn’t mean I have stopped caring about the original family. If my mom or Barb doesn’t mention the date, it doesn’t mean they have forgotten Dad or that those years didn’t matter to them. And if I choose to continue our tradition, it doesn’t mean I am still trapped in the grief of losing him.

I think I am beginning to understand that remembrance can change because we change.

The meaning of a date can evolve as we move through different seasons of our lives. What began as a child’s experience of losing her father can become an adult’s reflection on family, identity, belonging, and the many ways our histories shape us. It can also become an opportunity to reconsider the relationships we have continued to maintain and the reasons those connections matter.

Perhaps October 15 has been holding more than I realized. The memory of my dad. The memory of the family of four. The recognition of everything that changed. The longing for certain connections that never developed in the way I hoped.

And the quiet reassurance that there was a time and place in this world where I belonged to a family whose history cannot be erased by all the years that followed.

I don’t know whether I am grieving my dad, the family that was, the family relationships that became something different from what I hoped, or parts of the childhood I never had the opportunity to experience.

Maybe some of each. Maybe none of those explanations adequately describes what I am feeling. Maybe I don’t need to give it a particular name.

I have spent enough time with other people’s experiences of death and grief to know that the emotions surrounding an anniversary do not always fit neatly into the explanations we offer. Sometimes a date is meaningful for reasons that only become apparent after decades of living with it. Sometimes we discover that we have been remembering one thing while quietly holding space for something else.

And sometimes our relationship with an anniversary changes without diminishing the person whose death first gave the date its significance.

My dad died forty-nine years ago. I was seven years old. Barb was almost eleven. My mom was not yet thirty-two. We were three people left to continue a family that would never again exist in quite the same way.

Life continued. My mother remarried, our family grew, and all of us developed relationships and experiences that could never have been predicted in October 1977. We became different people, created different lives, and found our own ways of carrying the history we shared.

Some of those ways brought us closer together, and others led us in different directions. That is part of our history, too.

I cannot preserve the family that was by asking everyone to remember it as I do. I cannot recreate relationships that have changed, recover years that have passed, or know what our lives might have been had my father lived.

But I can recognize that the family existed. I can value the place I had within it. And I can allow the family that became to be exactly what it is, without needing to pretend it fulfilled every hope I had for it.

Perhaps that is where I am now. Not forgetting. Not denying the losses. Not withdrawing love from the people who remain. Just beginning to understand that I do not have to spend the rest of my life protecting my right to have belonged somewhere.

I already belonged. And I still do, to a history that remains mine regardless of how anyone else remembers it.

This October 15 may be different. Or it may look exactly like all the others.

Either way, my dad lived. Tracey lived. Our original family existed, and the family that followed became part of my life as well. All of those relationships, experiences, and histories helped shape the person I am today, even the ones I might have wished were different.

I can hold the meaningful parts close without insisting that every part was good. I can acknowledge the sadness without allowing it to define the life I have lived. And maybe, after all these years, I can let remembrance be something I choose rather than something I feel responsible for maintaining.

I don’t know yet what that will look like. But I think I am finally beginning to understand what I have been remembering.