Tomorrow will mark one year since our world turned upside down in the worst imaginable way.

Like everything else this past year, I just don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about this. It’s not something to celebrate.

Yet, it needs to be observed. It’s not a day to enjoy or be happy about, and yet, I don’t think we can possibly be any sadder than we have been since that day. At the end of the day, I will mark down another day as “survived.”

It will also mark the 366th day in a row that I have cried. After almost 19 years of rarely, if ever crying for anything other than a happy reason, it seems like I had some catching up to do. Maybe it was payback for all the times we watched Tony Stark die and Steve sat on the couch blubbering while I threw pillows at him for being such a sap.

The closer this awful date has gotten, the more I have dreaded it. In what seems like some sick twist of Groundhog Day fate, today’s schedule is exactly the same as it was last year on that horrible day. The whole family will be out the door early: E and I off to a youth swim meet, at the same venue that we were at last year, A to a home varsity meet against the exact same team they were swimming against at home last year, and G to the same wrestling tournament he was at last year.

The déjà vu is overwhelming.

The one thing I did not do, however, is sign up to make macaroni and cheese for the concession stand at the swim meet. That darn crock pot is the single reason that I am absolutely sure that I kissed him goodbye and said I love you one last time, because I had to couch another “don’t forget the mac and cheese” carefully in there somewhere. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with mac and cheese since then.

The mac and cheese also led to the first of many times I would have to accept help that I didn’t even know I needed. A friend got to my house before I did, and seeing the kitchen in shambles (getting 3 athletes and a coach out the door before 7 a.m. on a Saturday doesn’t lend itself to cleaning up the mess until you get home), thought that I didn’t need to deal with that on top of everything else and cleaned it up for me.

That mortification didn’t set in until days later, but since we’re still friends, and even occasionally share a meal I prepare in my kitchen, I guess that part of the day wasn’t too traumatizing.

But it was an important realization early on. People were going to see some pretty messy things about our lives and at the end of the day, accepting help and trusting that friendship could overcome the ugly stuff like burned cheese sauce baked on the stove top were just going to have to be things that I did now.

One of the lines that’s been coming up recently is that I have to know how proud Steve would be of how we’re carrying on without him, or something similar. I’ve added that to the list of things that I know people say to mean well and be helpful, but it just doesn’t sit right with me.

I’ve had to seriously examine my thoughts on “what comes next” this last year, and if there is one thing I know to be true, it’s that if there was any semblance of Steve left in any corner of the universe, he would find a way to let us know.

Everyone tells me to look for the signs. Steve wasn’t a small gesture kind of person. Subtlety was never his strong suit. He wouldn’t be the type to leave a penny on the sidewalk, or be a cardinal sitting on a gate, or even a rainbow in the sky. If a tornado were to blow through my backyard, or a flock of dodo birds took up residence next door, those sorts of things, I could say yes, that’s Steve, for sure. The other thing I know is that if Steve is out there somehow, he is simply angry that he has been robbed of the life we built together, the goals we were so close to achieving.

I had forgotten a conversation we’d had on our very first date. We were discussing where to go for dinner, and I suggested a popular sports bar. It was a Sunday evening, and I figured that even if our conversation lagged, we could at least watch some kind of game. Steve laughed at my suggestion. “I’m not really into spectator sports,” he said. The silly thing is that I already knew that about him, and I also really wasn’t worried about us not having anything to talk about.

Now, to think about him somehow having to sit and watch this life go on without him seems like the cruelest of ironies and I hate to think about that.

Many of my friends who have survived their own similar stories have told me that after a year, it gets different. Not necessarily better, but different. I guess we’ll see if that holds true.

From the moment the rug was pulled out from under us, I have been measuring time, just getting through the next hour, then the next day, then the next week, month, and now finally year.

A friend recently asked me about the future, what it held for me, and I honestly couldn’t begin to imagine beyond the next few years of getting the kids through high school and college.

Much like we got through one marking period, then one semester, then the start of another school year, I have started to chunk up the next six or so years in a similar manner, but beyond that, I can’t envision anything beyond what we had planned to share.

So, for now, I will start counting a year and a day, a year and a week, a year and a month, surviving.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News.