I think I understand at least part of the struggle about the anniversary:

I looked at my calendar and was flipping through the months. I realized that October is not that far away. It's been almost a year already. How could it be the better part of a year?!? I feel like I just grasped the concept that it was 6 months ago. How can it be that so much time has passed? We haven't seen her for almost a year? How could we have lived our lives for a full year without her?! It seems impossibly strange. I guess life is what happens in the meantime, like John Lennon's quote