I have a really hard time with summer ending. Until I got sober back in 2020, I didn’t realize I felt this way at the end of each August. (Though, to be fair, until I got sober, I didn’t realize a lot of things.) As with many feelings, it’s not easy to explain why or to make sense of in any logical way. This is my fourth consecutive sober-end-of-summer and it is hitting me HARD. Maybe that’s partly because I don’t feel like I got much of a summer—at least not compared to the last two summers, when I took time off to spend with the kids, and got to have lots of shapeless, aimless, whim-driven days with them. Days when boredom felt good and time passed slowly. This year, taking July and August off from work wasn’t an option, so the kids went to camp, and I worked. We had fun, but it was scheduled fun.
I woke up at the beginning of Labor Day weekend and I felt sad. Oh, I thought, here’s that feeling again. That feeling I never really know what to do with, and maybe I’m getting too old to have the same cyclical dip in my mood every damn year and shouldn’t I just get on with it? Why am I so sad when summer ends?
All of which is to say I was pleased to find an op-ed by Cody Delistraty called “How Should We Mourn the End of Summer?” in the NY Times on Sunday. Like many people, I was never shown how to grieve—big things or small—and in fact, I was often actively discouraged from grieving. This might sound ridiculous to some people, and maybe it is. I know now that the instinct to prevent another person from grieving, to tell them “not to be sad,” is often born from a place of protection, of wanting to insulate someone from an “undesired” emotion. (But it’s misguided, of course, because grief and sadness are natural, and if allowed, they’ll run their course.)
As an adult, even with broader experience and a better understanding of my needs, when grief hits me, I often don’t know what to do with it. Should I sleep? Should I cry? Should I call a friend? Should I garden? Should I…?
There’s another reason I’m sad this time of year, beyond the usual mourning of my favorite season, and that reason is a distinct muscle memory left in me from 2001. (Yes, that long ago.) (Another problem with not grieving the loss of something important is that the grief doesn’t go away, it just hangs out *somewhere?* and waits. Speaking from personal experience, when one ignores profound grief it does not get weaker, it gets stronger.) For the last three years, I’ve been working on project about the summer of 2001, and a few weeks ago, I finished a full draft.1 I think I expected to feel happy and relieved, after three years of working on it, and I do feel those things, but surprise, surprise I also feel grief. Am I done with this project? Probably not yet. But a full, finished draft is not nothing.
One of my favorite lines from Delistraty’s piece is, “The ubiquity of loss is a reason to treat others with grace and understanding. It’s also a reason to slow down and look backward from time to time.” He goes on to discuss how our culture undervalues the process of reflection. Indeed, American culture does proselytize linear, foward-moving time, often at the expense of an innate human urge: the urge to look back, the urge to remember, the urge to draw meaning and connection from memory.
My past self was very flawed. Perhaps yours was too. Perhaps that’s part of why it can be so hard to look back. Maybe we are always chasing a future in which things are better, in which we behave more nobly, in which we’re not sad and there is no reason for grief. Maybe some of us will actually get there.
But I’ve given up on believing that one of these days, perfection—on an intellectual, spiritual, emotional level—can be achieved.
We are human because we are flawed. We are human because we grieve, because we have a word for grief.
I’m still sad summer is ending. I wish I’d had more free, fun time with my kids, that my garden was better-tended, that I’d worn a bathing suit every day.
But I’m also tallying up my favorite moments of summer 2024, and they are many. Many hugs, many laughs over cups of coffee, many play-dates, many stories read, many Pokemon cards traded, many horror and romance novels devoured, many bug bites and stubbed toes, many enlightening conversations and cricket symphonies, many grilled veggie burgers and ice cream cones and local tomatoes. Heck yeah, I’m sad.
I kinda hope you are too.2
If you’d like to read a couple excerpts from this project, you can do so here: https://revolutelit.com/004-cnf-sara-rauch/ and here: https://thespectacle.wustl.edu/?p=2420
The title of this post is a quote from Jo Ann Beard’s Boys of My Youth, which I am currently reading and enjoying.
Sara: Can't figure out how to back channel you. Want to tell you you make a cameo in my next post [My Summer Vacation"]--I re-read XO over the break. The post also mentions picking up Jenny Erpenbeck's [Booker International winning] KAIROS in the Minneapolis airport--I'm only a third of the way through it, but I think you'd dig it.
I feel the same, Sara - I wrote a long, rambling letter to my closest college friend a couple of days ago in part because end-of-summer nostalgia had be me reflecting on a couple of events from our junior year in Strasbourg - 32 years ago - gah... And I loved Boys of My Youth - I still think about one or two passages in it frequently.