We mark special times in our lives with various kinds of anniversaries, some happy, some sad. We mark the days when people important to us were born and died; when important things have happened: weddings, graduation days, the date we first started a job, the day we started chemotherapy or stopped drinking, the end of a war.
Anniversaries can be celebrations of the sacred.
Forty-one years ago today my wife and I were married. The day doesn’t matter to anyone else but the two of us, and maybe to our children. I remember some of our previous anniversaries, like our twenty-second, partly because it marked the year when we had lived with each other longer than we had lived alone….
When I was young, I so often thought of people my grandparent’s age as so old it was amazing they could breathe. Our American, youth-focused culture is so powerful that I didn’t realize it was possible to be joyful and comfortable and sixty years old all at the same time.
Anniversaries are so powerful that their occurrence can motivate us to live longer just so we can reach one of a particular kind. Heather was seventeen years old. She was a patient at Kobacker House in Columbus, part of the hospice program at Riverside Methodist Hospital when I was president there. Heather wanted to live to her eighteenth birthday. But that was more than six months away and doctors had told her she had only a couple weeks left.
Three months later, a trio of doctors gathered at Heather’s bed to try and figure out how she was still alive. Six months later, on the eve of her birthday, Heather’s family gathered close to her. Her breath was shallow, she was wafer-thin. A moment after midnight, her mother said, "Happy Birthday, Heather." Her daughter died within moments of hearing those words. She was eighteen.
Loving caregivers never underestimate the power of the will in healing.
Sacred occasion may pass unrecognized. It is not the anniversary that creates sacred moments but the way the day is observed.
It’s a lucky thing to be married to someone for a very long time. Luckier still is to know that you love that person more with each anniversary.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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