Sunday 7 February 2010

Anniversary


………well I am going to complete the speech I promise my love but while I work on that I just wanted to mark the fact that yesterday was our anniversary. It would have been fourteen years.

I can remember the first one we celebrated in India. We sat drinking and watching the sun set on ‘Lighthouse’ beach in Kovalam. We watched the sea crash under strings of twinkling, glowing, golden beads. I made you a card and we ate seafood.

There were others I can remember and many I can’t – but that’s a good thing! More than one was spent drunkenly going through old records, a few spent eating expensive food, one of them may have been responsible for Cassidy and one I was pregnant during but still managed to sip champagne. Last year I cooked you a Thai feast and you drank some red wine and more than one Jack Daniels and Coke. I wrote you another card. This one said something like ‘ 13 years – unlucky for some but not for us because we nearly lost each other and here I am writing you another love letter – I will not let you go again’. Well how wrong I was because when the time came I had to let you go.

13. A number tainted with negativity and touched with superstition and doubt. Surely we should have known it was destined to be an unhappy year. We started it on a back pedal – how could it have ever moved forward under that kind of dark, miserable cloud.

And it has been a terrible year, one of death and sadness. The sum of its parts has been unlucky but it has also been a year of celebration. It has hosted some of the most uplifting and positive moments of my life. It has been a year where I have learnt more about love friendship and their infinite capacity. A year where we have known the inner strength we possess and the wonder of ourselves and our children. It was an extra year granted to us, not but a higher order, but by you Paul. When the doctors said you would die in the ITU of Whipps crosss you didn’t, when they said the cancer would take you so many times you defied it and you gave us a summer of laughter and hope. So I would say that, depending on how you look at it, the number 13 has been very, very lucky for us.

So Happy anniversary my love.