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I have an appointment to get my teeth cleaned at 9 a.m. tomorrow, January 3. I get my teeth deep cleaned regularly by a periodontal dental hygienist because there's a pocket in one of my gums. It hurts to have your teeth deep cleaned by a periodontal hygienist. They dig and gouge, scrape, and spray, and my first thought when I saw the email reminding me of the appointment was how appropriate it was.
January 3 is the thirty-third anniversary of the suicide of someone I loved deeply, a person I was in love with and engaged to marry. His suicide was by far the most difficult thing I've ever been through. I can honestly say it shattered me into a million pieces, every tiny crack and crevice in my psychic being reamed out with the hardest, sharpest dental pick in the universe.
It took me years to recover, a process I think of as putting myself back together, one tiny fragment at a time. But I did recover. The endless sorrow, the anger, the grief, the missing, missing, missing the person who left a terrible gaping hole in my life when he pulled that trigger on January 3, 1991—all of that dissipated over many years, and now what I have left is mostly relief that I don't have those feelings anymore.
For a long time, I used to keep track of the time on the anniversary, telling myself that he was still alive in the hours before I knew the suicide happened, at 1:30 p.m., then telling myself that he was dead in the hours afterward. I don't do that anymore, but I pay extra attention to anything that happens that day.
Once, unbelievably, I arrived at the Grand Canyon on the date and at the exact time, even with the time change, when my fiancé was shooting himself nine years earlier. It was January 3, 2000, and I'd driven out to Joshua Tree National Park with a friend who wanted to ring in the new year and the new millennium with his brother, who was celebrating with friends there.
My friend and I drove out there in a Hertz rental car, stayed overnight in the park, and headed back. We were waylaid by black ice on the highway in Arizona and had to stay overnight in a hotel, and the next morning, we drove on an icy, snowy, windy road to get to the canyon. When we arrived at the south rim, got out of the car, walked up to the railing at the edge of the parking lot, and looked out at the vast, astonishing, multilayered, multicolored Grand Canyon, which I had never seen before, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was 12:30.
Until then, I'd been too busy paying attention to the icy road to the canyon to think much about the time on that January 3rd anniversary. But at that moment, I realized that I had somehow miraculously arrived at the Grand Canyon at the exact moment, considering the time change—we were in mountain time, an hour earlier than the time back home in Iowa—when my fiancé's life was ending. My life was shattering nine years earlier.
And I was, what I can only call, blown away. I was blown away by the view, too, but mostly, I was stunned by the date and time coincidence. I felt as if life was talking to me, like it couldn't have been just an accident that I arrived there then.
I'm pretty sure I still believe that, although I've never figured out what, if life really was talking to me, it could have been saying: Maybe something about hope, about wide vistas full of light and color opening up when you least expect it, after you've been traveling for a long time on an icy road in a dark place.
It's true what someone—a lovely Cuban woman whose husband had killed himself twelve years earlier—said to me once in an online suicide survivors' chat room: Time does heal all things. I didn't believe it back then, but I believe it now.
On January 3, 1991, and during many of the long hours, days, weeks, months, and years after that, I never would have believed that a time would come when I would have normal, happy feelings on the anniversary of that date, doing ordinary things like having my teeth cleaned—if I had known that it would have seemed like a miracle.
