I knew that this week would be painful for me. Our anniversaries both Hebrew and English were only one day apart from each other. Beit Nissan and April 4, Sunday and Monday. I tried to remind myself that this is actually a time for happiness, for how many people do I know who celebrated almost 57 years of togetherness with a partner who worked each day to shower kindness on them?

I began the day by opening my Mordechai’s drawer, where I knew that he had often put various cards that we had sent to each other hidden under a pile of socks or underwear. We had a habit of recycling cards. We would cross out the year and write additional words and the proper date.

There I found a card that said, “25 years, how could that be?” Another card said, “47, wow!” I guess that this was part of the mystique of our marriage’s success. We enjoyed doing nutty things with each other.

It reminds me of a telephone call I received two months ago. It was from a man I had never met and had no idea who he was. He turned out to be one of my Mordechai’s former clients. One of the things that he asked me was if I knew how much my husband loved me. I answered in the affirmative, and he told me that he once met him in a card store in Montreal and he was buying a card for me to say how much he loved me (not for any particular occasion). My Mordechai encouraged this man to buy the same card for his wife. Apparently they were having some marital problems. He bought the card for her and couldn’t stop exclaiming about the reaction that he got from his wife when he presented her with the card.

This was all part of who my Mordechai was. He wanted others to have the same marital relationship that we did. I also found a card in his drawer that he was probably planning to give to me this year. Often we would shop in Trader Joe’s, and he loved their greeting cards for a whopping 99 cents each. As I would shop for our groceries he would stand at the cards and sneakily put them into our wagon, I guess assuming that I did not notice. Even crazier was that I paid for them at the cash register. As soon as we got home he would grab them away to his hiding place (the famous drawer).

I was not at all prepared for the surprise that our son Akiva deviously presented to me on the night that we went out to celebrate our anniversary. (Yes, there is still cause to celebrate.) After dining out, our children told me that they had a surprise for me and suddenly put on this film of our wedding.

Apparently many years ago when we were moving out of our house in Montreal, Akiva found a little yellow box and inside it was a small reel of film. He had no idea what was on it. He took it to his apartment and last week he suddenly decided to bring it to a company that could digitize it, and he was totally shocked when he was able to watch it. It was a very short film of our wedding. It is, maximum, five minutes long, and I have no idea who took it. There was my Mordechai signing the ketubah with the Bostoner Rebbe sitting next to him. Our chuppah was next, all of the “boys” dancing and singing as they led us down the aisle, and then a few brief shots of the two of us. In one I proudly showed him my wedding ring with a big smile.

Is it not strange that this appeared out of nowhere exactly a few days before our anniversary? I am convinced that it was a special message sent to me by my Mordechai to wish me a happy anniversary, which we will continue to celebrate each year. Wow, that had to have been a sign of his being with me.

Nina Glick can be reached at [email protected].