Season of the dead

Griefs come again but I am ready

Why is November?

Eight years, now, and time repeats. The day dawns, I wake from restless sleep, and the national nightmare has begun again, like it never stopped. This time I weep in my bed in Canada, at a distance but not fully gone. Something in me breaks at the sense of a loss I thought I’d long ago processed: any illusions I had left about the country that raised me.

(It’s one thing to know it’s always been this way. It’s another to be shown the body.)

November is tough. Halloween ends, election day rolls up with its greater or lesser threats. The time changes and it starts getting so dark, so soon. Then it’s my birthday. Then, it’s the anniversary of my dad’s death. At that point, the month’s only half over.

Under a lead-grey sky, November drags dreams under the lead-grey water. Most undramatically, a single ripple rises and sighs at the surface. The sigh smells like blown-out candles and sugar.

It’s November of 2016.

I travel to New Jersey, a place I try to avoid for the most part in spite of it being my birthplace, or perhaps because of that. My partner at the time is a games designer, and is attending a games conference called Metatopia, to have his new board game playtested and reviewed by other games professionals. Neat stuff. (I love their website, too, which is to this day extremely Web 1.0, complete with black background and Arial font in Rasta colors.) I haven’t been near Morristown since the death of my beloved college voice teacher and choral conductor two years prior, March of the year after my husband left.

I learn about Christopher Alexander and pattern languages, and how to apply them to larp. I attend another talk or two. I work on a video for my partner’s game. Halfway through, I take off south to visit my dad, who I know has been having a hard time lately, health-wise. It works out well that this trip to NJ was planned for other reasons; I can check on him in person, after phone calls from his social workers telling me about how he’s been passing out on social excursions, how he’s lost so much weight, how he keeps getting dehydrated, how they’re worried.

My partner considers coming down with me but ends up not doing so, the responsibilities he’s taken on at the conference proving too great. So it is that he never gets to meet my father.

My dad lives in Red Bank at the time, in a little group home close to a Welsh Farms, which sounds like a nice bucolic spot but is just a New Jersey convenience store chain. This particular one is run by a sweet Indian guy who calls my dad Big John, the way everyone who knew him casually did. My dad was six foot eight, redheaded, blue-eyed and bald, and cultivated a gentle giant persona to dispel how naturally terrifying a dude that big could be. I remembered a story from when I was a kid, when he worked nights at a parking garage in Atlantic City. Three guys tried to rob the place at knifepoint, and my dad, always a chill and slow-moving man, pulled a fast one by simply standing up, at which point the guys took off.

Sanjay at the Welsh Farms clearly had a lot of affection for Big John, and sent me to him with some Ensure that he had, not for sale, but for personal use behind the counter. I bought something too, I think, feeling awkward and out of my element, then stopped by a bakery to get some pastries, something easy for my dad to eat.

I left that day unsure whether I would see my father again, and then, I didn’t.

In between, Trump was elected for the first time. Then I had a birthday, my 42nd. Then, the phone call, the feeling like being punched in the chest. The long wait til the following summer to memorialize him. The slow descent into dissociation, the numb terror that underlay that whole four-year period for me.

Wishing, so desperately, that the onslaught weren’t burying me so deep in my own trauma that I felt helpless to act in more than the most intermittent and flailing ways.

It’s November of 2020.

I’m sitting at my birthday dinner, on the ad hoc sidewalk patio of a restaurant down the street from me. It’s cold, but there are heat lamps, and there’s still something novel about only going to a restaurant when it can be outdoors.

That morning, the election had been called for Biden. So everything feels more joyous, more real, than it has in a long long time. As we sit choosing entrees just after sunset, fireworks start going up, bursting with color between the nearby buildings. It feels both as if it’s for the whole world, and just for me.

I wrote, then, about feeling like someone had opened the door to my darkened room a crack and stuck their candle through. I got a little unfrozen, a little awakened. I redoubled my efforts with the mutual aid group I’d helped to start. I thought maybe, just maybe, something was possible again.

I met my current partner early the next year. I changed my life. I changed my work, I changed my relationships. I moved to Canada.

It’s November of 2024.

It’s the day of my dad’s death, eight years ago. I just wrapped up my birthday weekend, my 50th. Friends and family came from the States, still reeling from last week’s horror. New friends came to our house, warming it and warming me with their presence. There was cake and dancing and good food and laughter, and people wrote and drew things in a little book my cousin brought up for me. My partner and other loved ones did their utmost to make it special for me, to make it bright. And for a little while, everything seemed all right.

In many ways, it isn’t. In fact it’s so much worse, now, than it was eight years ago. Things are not going to be okay, not at all.

But I’m at a distance, now. I have hope of being able to stay at this distance. And that helps me in more ways than just the obvious one. I’m feeling, in many ways, how I’m ready this time. How I have it in me to help. How if I keep myself out of the mire of news, out of the horrifying details and the social media meltdowns and the constant virtual conflict, I can perhaps actually make a difference to some people. Insulated by the distance from that which overwhelms and numbs me, I can actually move.

“Dad,” I told him during our last conversation. “Some people who love you are worried. They think maybe you don’t want to be alive anymore.”

With how sick he was, it was hard to tell how much of the long pause was the depression and how much prevarication. “That’s not true,” he said at last, quietly. “Don’t you worry about me.”

Dad, I’m not gonna let it get me this time. I’m not gonna let it get me like it got you, the loneliness, the loss of hope. I want to be alive. And as many as I can get out alive with me, I will.

Even if it is November.