Last Month

Today is the last of the monthly anniversaries. I'm sure that the 11th of every month will continue to pierce my heart with agony and loss, but from here on out the passage of time will be marked with years instead of months.

How bizarre that he has been gone this long.

This morning as I was driving to the gym, I looked at the clock and it was 3 minutes past 9 am. With startling clarity, I remembered where I was at 9:03 on that fateful morning. I was at the same YMCA, meeting with my fitness instructor and learning how to use the weight machines in the cardio room. I completed the whole circuit, and it was a workout that left my muscles sore. In fact, in the days after his death I was incredibly sore in my neck and arms, specifically my throat. It hurt to speak or raise my voice at all, and I wondered absently if my sore neck and throat muscles were a result of my exercise on the day Ammon died, or my prolonged and grief-filled scream upon hearing the noise. Likely, a combination of the two.

When I reached the YMCA this morning, the familiar sights and sounds were not comforting. I sat down on the floor in the gym, laced up my sneakers, and waited for the class to start. The instructor, and my new personal trainer, noticed that I wasn't my normal self, and knowingly asked if I was having a bad day.

I shrugged my shoulders, fighting tears. "No, it's just the 11th", I replied

"Well, get out there, then", she said, pointing over her shoulder to the gym floor.

I walked toward my friend Joanna, still fighting back tears. As I approached, she also asked what was wrong.

"I just need a hug", I replied weakly, falling into her embrace. "It's the 11th again".

She gently rubbed my back, and was sympathetic to my pain. I began to cry in earnest, and had to excuse myself to the ladies room. Once there, I quickly locked myself into a stall and fought off the hysterics that were threatening to overtake me. I briefly considered leaving the YMCA. I thought about the consequences of skipping my regular Zumba class, and how it would make me feel. In the end, I took my swollen, red eyes into the gym and stood in my usual place in the front row.

At the end of an hour, I felt much better. The endorphins finally kicked in, and while I'm still reeling that today is yet another 11th on this horrible journey, I'm not as dangerously unstable as I was this morning.

I'm grateful for good friends, for hugs, but most of all today, I'm grateful for mindless exertion and profuse sweat. I needed that today.