Fifteen

 There's a big dropping off point after this anniversary. For the first fifteen years of a marriage there are clearly marked anniversaries. The first is your "paper anniversary", the second "cotton", the third "leather", because the marriage needs a bit of spicing up by the third year. These named anniversaries continue until the fifteenth, which is "crystal". After that there's nothing until your "porcelain" twentieth, at which point tradition dictates you fit a new bathroom suite. Hallmark have a list of extra named anniversaries - the sixteenth is, according to them, "wax" - but whether that's because they have a job-lot of Yankee Candles they can't shift or they're concerned about my bikini line, I'm not sure. It seems unofficial anyway. Officially, there's nothing. It all falls away after crystal. 

Crystal is a pretty broad topic as well. I think of New Age grifters on QVC, home-made radio sets. Clarity and meth. The 90's song, "Gypsy Woman" or the palace in south London. J.G.Ballard had a "Crystal World", The Doors a "Crystal Ship". New Order just had a "Crystal" that "broke easy". None of this has any bearing on the fact that it's fifteen years since I married Kelly Mullan. A decade and a half ago now, three times as long as I ever knew her. 

I'll be visiting your grave tomorrow. I'll be dropping off the now traditional bunch of lilies and hating that its been so long since you died that traditions have had time to creep up on me. I don't like traditions. I still live in Northern Ireland - where you brought me, where you left me - and I've seen how poisonous and meaningless rote-learned traditions can become. When something becomes ritualised, it becomes abstracted, it becomes the act of just doing something, but disconnected to the thing itself. It's a placeholder for feeling, and I don't want to stop feeling. 

When I stand in front of your grave tomorrow and talk to you like I do every time I stand in front of your grave - the birthday, the death day, the anniversary - I'll be talking to you as if you're listening. Though you won't be able to get a word in edgewise, which will be very different from when you were alive. 

I can't even remember whether you liked lilies. But they're pale, they're elegant, and they need no gilding, and that's very you. My mother always associated them with death, so that might be something I've latched onto subconsciously. But then, my mother thought that giving someone gloves for Christmas was a sign of impending doom, so I haven't taken on all of her superstitions.