The ground is becoming littered with crisp leaves – little dried remains of what used to be green and full of life, swaying in the sunshine and generating energy for the tree it belongs to. The nights are cooling down, the sun coming up later and setting earlier. This time of year has always felt to me like we are looking through a strange filter, everything’s a little off, a little different.
Some traditions believe that the time around the mid-way point between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice is when the veil between our world and the world of those who have died is thinnest. This seems to be a pretty common idea across various traditions – Halloween is Oct 31st, Samhain is the night of October 31st into the day of November 1st, All Saint’s Day is November 1st, All Soul’s Day November 2nd. The Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) spans Oct 31s through Nov 2nd. (I’m sure there are others from other cultures, too.)
Sara was slipping from this life during these days last year. By October 31st she had lost her normal awareness/consciousness. She would mumble a little or make some noise expressing pain, but the Sara I knew was already leaving. The morning of November 1st we agreed it was time for Sara to transition to hospice – she was in the ICU and it ended up taking until that afternoon to get her transferred back into her room up on the floor we were used to. There was something new on her door – a paper with a butterfly symbol, telling others that Sara was transitioning out of this life. Then in the early morning of November 2nd, my love let go of the strings that had kept her barely tethered to us the 24 hours before.
This year as I feel the energy changing and the stirrings of whatever it is that makes this time of year feel different, I am also awash in the memories and the feelings from last year. The feelings from seeing my love slip away, the energy spent trying to communicate with everyone about what was going on, the grief of accepting that we were losing her… With each passing day that goes by it’s easier and easier to connect with that raw emotion. The combination of it all feels like the strange world of grief that I normally live in is even more upside down than usual.
People keep asking if I’m doing anything for the anniversary of Sara’s death, but I just – I don’t know. It all feels so overwhelming. I love her and miss her and she feels both so close and so far away at the same time. It is as if there’s a hurricane just offshore that’s making it’s way here – the wind is whipping up and storm clouds are swirling… and I feel like all I can do is board up the house, find a safe room with no windows and hope that I can ride out the storm.