Christine Schoefer shares how she plans to spend the next year.
As part of my end of year routine, I buy a calendar at the local stationary store. There are many to choose from but I always pick the same hard-cover datebook. Leafing through its blank pages, I relish the potential of unscheduled days and weeks. There’s March, August, November. What will I be doing then? What will be happening in the world?
My place in the calendar will measure time’s passage – is the year fresh? Halfway done? Is it ending, already? My father was frail with age and sickness when he gave me a calendar for Christmas. Two months after he died, it was my birthday.
There was a penciled note in his small handwriting: May you have another wonder-filled year. Anticipating his passing, my father had used the datebook to reach beyond the grave, into the future that had become my present moment.
When my friend had terminal cancer, the idea of future time terrified her because she knew she wouldn’t be in it. She threw her datebook away and asked her daughter to keep track of appointments. Her end-of-life grief made me think: I’d been buying calendars assuming I would be alive for the year to come.