Anniversaries.
Anniversaries are weird. As a kid, an anniversary was that one meal/night/weekend your parents never allowed you to spend with them, and that made sense. Like a birthday, you had one of these a year marking a specific event. Then you got older. Friends in high school talked about the "one-month anniversary" of their first date/kiss/whatever, and ushered in the era of those other date remembrances. It seemed like everyone was having an anniversary of something every other day. I'm sure I jumped on that bandwagon, too, I just don't remember any of those dates anymore! Then comes the first "bad" anniversary -- the breakup, the divorce, and eventually, the anniversary of a death. It's hard to use a word associated with celebrations with those sorts of events. The point is to mark them, I suppose, more than celebrate -- maybe to remember happy times, or how things have changed. And somewhere in your mind is the question, "Does this ever get easier?...