The clocks have turned back. The Halloween candy has been given out. The ballots have been counted, and night is gobbling up more minutes of sunlight with each passing grey day.
Where I live, autumn means watching nearly golden gingko leaves falling and extra-golden sunsets illuminating brownstones against a darkening Manhattan sky. But whether the encroaching long nights frame reddening maple leaves or unchangingly green pine needles, the message from nature is the same: the year is coming to an end. And the weeks before the year’s darkest day are also the best season to embrace loss – of love or even, as Brittany Maynard enlightened us, of life itself.
Autumn facilitates solitude, because the weather lends itself to introspection, contemplation and long walks unencumbered by the presence of another human being. As the dwindling light and rustling leaves make the completion of another trip around the sun so obvious, the process of letting go can be bitterly undertaken with great resentment, or embraced on its own terms and for its own merits.
This is the best season to let go of lost love. I’ve been dumped by men every season of the year, but this one can be the worst because that empty, cold winter bed is looming. I usually have to fight a self-indulgent desire to treat the absence of love like that scarf in the bottom drawer I’ve been waiting for the right time to pull out – there’s nothing like wrapping oneself up in the gentle warmth of self-pity as the sun rises later on an inevitably empty bed. But maybe a cool night really does somehow reflect the emotional temperature you need to let go of past relationships. Maybe you do need a cold wind to embrace being alone.
As one of the men I most loved said to me from a distance after his visa expired – because the lack of marriage equality made it impossible for us to stay together in the United States – “Sometimes I can’t help thinking the letting-go is the act of loving.” Indeed: accepting that you will not hold on to love when it’s over can be an act of love itself.
The end of life is no less valid than the beginning
The loss of leaves from the trees are proof that winter – the death of things – is coming, and that we have only a limited time to prepare ourselves. Take the brave example of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old woman who utilized Oregon’s moral and ethical lawto obtain a compassionate, medically-aided end to her life. When she explained in October why she would end her life on 1 November, Maynard said she chose it to be able to spend her husband’s birthday together. But, she knew as long ago as April that she was dying and prepared for her decline – for her own autumn – in advance of her end.
I have lost beloved family in the summer (my father), the spring (my mother) and the winter (my stepmother); this year, with my sister in home hospice care, it seems that I may now lose someone I love very much in the autumn for the first time. It isn’t any easier, that’s for sure. But the liminal space between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter seems somehow a more appropriate time to bear witness to the liminal nature of life and death. And as heartbreaking and painful as it is watching my sister prepare to transition from this planet, I am grateful that her cancer is giving me a long season to say goodbye to her before her release.
“A few times a year”, Cord Jefferson wrote in an essay about his mother and cancer, “I’ll find myself gripped by the feeling that the spaces in which I live are inadequate arenas for the occasions when I feel most alive.” The beautiful thing about autumn – about this autumn especially – is that it feels like exactly the right arena in which to sit with loss, to wander through nature and contemplate how embracing that loss validates living.
Something about the loss of light, the whip of the wind, the smell of the leaves and the palpable change in the air makes my own interior and exterior pressure feel equalized, and the grey days match my mood all the better. The season makes it feel just a little more possible for me to accept that the end of life is no less valid than the beginning. I feel a bit less like raging against nature and the cycle of things. I feel a little more able to understand that when and if spring makes new beginnings inevitable, autumn makes perpetual endings just as natural, and as worthy, of embrace.
The clocks have turned back. The Halloween candy has been given out. The ballots have been counted, and night is gobbling up more minutes of sunlight with each passing grey day.
Where I live, autumn means watching nearly golden gingko leaves falling and extra-golden sunsets illuminating brownstones against a darkening Manhattan sky. But whether the encroaching long nights frame reddening maple leaves or unchangingly green pine needles, the message from nature is the same: the year is coming to an end. And the weeks before the year’s darkest day are also the best season to embrace loss – of love or even, as Brittany Maynard enlightened us, of life itself.
Autumn facilitates solitude, because the weather lends itself to introspection, contemplation and long walks unencumbered by the presence of another human being. As the dwindling light and rustling leaves make the completion of another trip around the sun so obvious, the process of letting go can be bitterly undertaken with great resentment, or embraced on its own terms and for its own merits.
This is the best season to let go of lost love. I’ve been dumped by men every season of the year, but this one can be the worst because that empty, cold winter bed is looming. I usually have to fight a self-indulgent desire to treat the absence of love like that scarf in the bottom drawer I’ve been waiting for the right time to pull out – there’s nothing like wrapping oneself up in the gentle warmth of self-pity as the sun rises later on an inevitably empty bed. But maybe a cool night really does somehow reflect the emotional temperature you need to let go of past relationships. Maybe you do need a cold wind to embrace being alone.
As one of the men I most loved said to me from a distance after his visa expired – because the lack of marriage equality made it impossible for us to stay together in the United States – “Sometimes I can’t help thinking the letting-go is the act of loving.” Indeed: accepting that you will not hold on to love when it’s over can be an act of love itself.
The loss of leaves from the trees are proof that winter – the death of things – is coming, and that we have only a limited time to prepare ourselves. Take the brave example of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old woman who utilized Oregon’s moral and ethical lawto obtain a compassionate, medically-aided end to her life. When she explained in October why she would end her life on 1 November, Maynard said she chose it to be able to spend her husband’s birthday together. But, she knew as long ago as April that she was dying and prepared for her decline – for her own autumn – in advance of her end.
I have lost beloved family in the summer (my father), the spring (my mother) and the winter (my stepmother); this year, with my sister in home hospice care, it seems that I may now lose someone I love very much in the autumn for the first time. It isn’t any easier, that’s for sure. But the liminal space between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter seems somehow a more appropriate time to bear witness to the liminal nature of life and death. And as heartbreaking and painful as it is watching my sister prepare to transition from this planet, I am grateful that her cancer is giving me a long season to say goodbye to her before her release.
“A few times a year”, Cord Jefferson wrote in an essay about his mother and cancer, “I’ll find myself gripped by the feeling that the spaces in which I live are inadequate arenas for the occasions when I feel most alive.” The beautiful thing about autumn – about this autumn especially – is that it feels like exactly the right arena in which to sit with loss, to wander through nature and contemplate how embracing that loss validates living.
Something about the loss of light, the whip of the wind, the smell of the leaves and the palpable change in the air makes my own interior and exterior pressure feel equalized, and the grey days match my mood all the better. The season makes it feel just a little more possible for me to accept that the end of life is no less valid than the beginning. I feel a bit less like raging against nature and the cycle of things. I feel a little more able to understand that when and if spring makes new beginnings inevitable, autumn makes perpetual endings just as natural, and as worthy, of embrace.
original publication:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/07/the-season-to-embrace-being-alone