789,840 Minutes

Why do we mark time as we do? What's special about a month? Who decided we need a cake once every 525,600 minutes? How did 18 months become the milestone that it feels like, to me, today?

The reality of grief that we all know is that there are no gates to pass through, no finish line, not even clear lines with which to measure progress. It's recursive, it's forever, and it sometimes attacks right when you thought you were having a good day. It's a spiral in the middle of an Escher painting, so that when viewed one way it seems like you're going up, until you look back and find out you were really going down.

What to do with 18 months, with this non-milestone? My answer was going to be "nothing," and then I heard of With This Ring. After thinking over donating our rings, and when would be a good time for that, I finally settled on today: 18 months since Chadwick passed, 789,840 minutes of life without him (it's a leap year), and with the bonus that I've had a lot of time to consider and re-consider since I first started thinking about it.

The website says sweet things about life-changing generosity, but I already have all the life change I can possibly handle for one decade. We were planning to upgrade our rings anyway, and were still searching for the perfect ones to replace what we had. I put his ring on a necklace and wore it to his funeral while wearing my own, then put both of them away and haven't looked at them since. It's time, and if the little trinkets that two broke 20-somethings managed to get their hands on can provide someone else with clean water, I'm not about to withhold them. It's exactly what Chadwick would have wanted.

The rings are packaged and waiting. I'm taking them to the post office as soon as it opens this morning. You're all the first to know.

And with or without this ring, I will carry on through all the milestones waiting in the next 788,400 minutes.