Wake Me Up When September Ends
TW: Suicide; Suicide Loss
It’s early September and for the past few years, this time of year has been filled with extreme heat waves and wildfires in California — the state my family has called home for generations. For my family, these natural disasters have served as the backdrop for our most personal and unnatural disasters.
Two years ago, on Monday, September 14th, 2020, we were in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, unvaccinated and with no end in sight. We were nearing a pivotal presidential election in the United States. The headlines on the front page of the Los Angeles Times that day read: “Extreme weather stoked wildfires,” “Attack adds fuel to a tense moment,” and “LA becomes one of the world’s most polluted big cities.” That morning, my dad went outside to get the newspaper, presumably glanced at it before he set it down on the coffee table, and then went outside to the garage to end his own life.
The calendar tells me it’s been two years since my dad died, since his heart stopped beating, since he took his last breath, since his body left my childhood home and my life forever. But I don’t need a calendar to know this. To quote Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, my body keeps the score. September comes along and I get irritable. Lethargic. Especially sensitive. I feel a distinct weightiness. My body aches.
In actuality, my dad’s soul departed somewhere in the Fall of 2019, a year prior to his body’s expiration date. But to talk about my dad’s suicide I have to also talk about my mom’s, which took place 5 months after my dad’s in February 2021. And my mom’s psychiatric hospitalization for suicidality in September of 2019 after nearly lifelong chronic depression — a tipping point representing the fatal crash of both my parents’ spirits and the world as I understood it. My parents, their mental illness, and their suicides are so intrinsically tied and cosmically linked.
This year, as August heated up and September reared its ugly, hot, sticky, sweaty, messy head, I realized I was not only feeling the anniversary of my dad’s suicide. That is not the only event my body has been tracking. It’s also the anniversary of some of the hardest of hard conversations, like the one I had with my parents hours before my mom would end up calling her doctor and panically expressing her wishes to die. And the one I had with them a year later, ten days before my dad died, when I asked him if he was safe. And it marks the anniversary of visiting my mom in the hospital, where her windows were barred and her shoelaces were taken away. And the anniversary of cleaning out her medicine cabinet at home and of buying a pill lockbox so my dad and I could manage her meds for her. It’s the anniversary of when I started living my mom’s life for her too, hoping desperately that in doing so I could make it last longer. This time of year even marks the anniversary of selling and emptying my family home of 30 years, the house I was brought home from the hospital to and the house where each of my parents’ suicides took place.
All of this is to say, this time of year marks the death of my life as I knew it. It marks the ultimate role reversal. It marks a coming of age I did not want and was not prepared for. So much of the weight I have been feeling during this time of year is the grief of my old life. Lately I’ve found myself mourning my past as another character in this story — my past self and my past life. I love my new life, and it’s full of so much more meaning than the one I lived before, but I still hopelessly miss my old one. Not every part of it. But I miss my naivete and I miss my ignorance. I miss the privilege I had of not knowing death and grief so intimately. I miss not feeling an overwhelming sense of unfairness. I miss not thinking about the concept of suicide every single day and I miss not being so desensitized to it. I miss meeting someone new and not having an internal monologue wondering when and how I’ll tell them about my dead parents and their suicides and what the response will be. I miss feeling the safety net of my parents. I miss meeting them for a fancy dinner on a weeknight just the three of us and just because. I miss how the puzzle pieces of my family just seemed to fit together. I miss how much easier and clearer and lighter it all felt before it all so epically exploded.
When we talk about the death of a loved one, we often say “when they died, it’s like a part of me died” but I never really considered what that actually meant or how it’s true. Now, with a small bit of distance and little different vantage point, I am starting to understand that when they died, it’s really like a version of me died, and all the memories of me that my parents held themselves died with them.
And of course I miss my parents, not only on anniversaries and milestones, but at all times of all days. I not only loved them, I liked them, and they were a huge part of my life. I really wanted us all to keep being alive together. And I’m angry and sad that we aren’t.
As my traditionally conceived grief turns two, I’ve been thinking a lot about how differently my dad’s death anniversary feels from my mom’s, especially when my actual grief for my mom feels so much more complex. I’ve come to realize it’s because this time of year represents the strike of the match, the beginning of the biggest and wildest fire of my life. On the day my dad died, I felt tasked with this huge challenge and responsibility to keep my mom alive. The “in between” — the five months in between my parents’ suicides — were the hardest days of my life, the flames blazed. When my mom killed herself, it’s like the rains came down and offered some relief. Sure, they may have also caused some leaks and even mudslides, but at least the fire was out.
A year after my my mom’s suicide, I bought a house to make a home for myself, and a friend asked me recently if I felt like a grownup living in it. In reality, the life I’ve lived these past few years is what‘s made me feel like a grownup. And also, I still don’t totally feel like one, because I want so badly to still be a kid. These are the cards I’ve been dealt, I’m playing them as best I possibly can, and I’m mostly proud of how I’ve played them. But they certainly aren’t the ones I would have chosen for myself.
One of my favorite things to do in my old life was go to yoga classes. Saturday morning and often weeknight classes were a ritual that my mom and I shared, but also one of my biggest acts of self care. The pandemic forced my yoga practice to move inside my own four walls and sometimes lapse entirely, and even when many others returned to their regular studio practices I remained home. In the past few weeks I’ve started going back to in-person classes again. It’s not totally the same as it used to be, because I am not the same as I used to be and neither is the world. The classes aren’t as full as they once were. My mom is not on the mat next to mine. But for that little slice of time I get to touch the old me, even if it’s just for a brief moment, even if it’s just for a breath.
Notes:
- When my dad died, my friend Robyn made me a grief playlist and put Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day on it. Most of the playlist is cool indie eclectic feelings music and then this song comes on and makes me cry laugh. It’s perfect. And it’s like it was written for me. Seriously, read the lyrics.
- Suicide Prevention Awareness Month and National Suicide Prevention Week also take place in September. This also makes me laugh.
