April is the missing month.

My calendar remains turned to March until May rolls around. Appointments, meetings and things that need to be done are written on post it notes and stuck next to the calendar.

We don’t speak of it.

It isn’t questioned.

And no one dares turn the page early .

But as much as I try to avoid it, skip over it, pretend it isn’t lurking just under the surface of March, April always manages to find me. It finds me missing my stepfather who passed away on this day (the 6th) three years ago and my mother whose birthday would have been the 25th.

I avoid the calendar.

Step to the other side of the room.

Avert my eyes, quicken my pace.

Can’t bear to see the empty squares where birthday plans should be written in cheerful pink. Don’t want to see the days we spent holding vigil around a hospital bed, pacing hallways, sleeping in chairs, meeting with doctors, crying in bathrooms and parked cars, drinking stale coffee, hearing the “baby” chime go off every time a newborn got to leave the hospital, knowing my stepfather would not be making that transition, knowing he would be journeying someplace very different.

The body remembers, the heart and mind keep the score. I will never forget, yet I can not have those sacred days staring at me for an entire month while I make tea or wash dishes. Can’t bear the weight of them empty and can’t bear to see them share space with mundane activities like “hair cut” or “dental appointment.”

So I deny April even as I feel it all around me, a cloak with an ermine face whose fabric causes blisters on the skin.

I deny it like the monster under the bed or the boogey man in the closet. Tell my pounding heart not doesn’t exist even as I hear it breathing softly on my ear and gnashing its teeth.

Like a child waiting for daybreak with the covers over her head, I take a deep breath, close my eyes and wait for May.