Sometimes when it feels like fall

It feels like fall today.  The fog unfurls along the ground and the wind has a spooky chill.  It smells like the earth when you breathe, damp soil and wet leaves.  It seems like Halloween could be tomorrow, like I can feel this veneration of the dead.   

I like the fall.  It always makes me sad.  The things I like most about the fall are also the ones that hurt.   Summer is over.  The daylight is waning, which makes it safer for me to be outside.  It’s cooler, so I’m less reactive.  The nights are longer, better for thinking and writing in the dark.  Sometimes it feels like there is so much night you could get lost in it forever. 

I like the crunchy leaves on the ground, the tree skeletal against the orange sky.  I like what fall represents.  I like that everything dies, and I don’t always like that I like it.  But if nothing ever died, there could be no urgency in life; and without urgency, without the knowledge that everything exists on a finite scale, nothing would ever matter.  If the flowers bloomed every day, they would be less beautiful.  If you had forever to rectify a misunderstanding with someone you love, it wouldn’t matter if you hurt them.  If no one ever died, their lives could never be meaningful. 

Fall is hard in some ways.  It’s impossible not to feel like you’re part of something larger when you’re watching the cycle of life end.  It’s impossible not to think of all the ways this cycle has impacted your life.  Fall is beautiful, especially in New England, and I love the colors and traditions it brings.  But really, I like fall because it is about death. 

I have had a lot of death in my life.  One of my earliest memories is of going to my great-grandmother’s wake and watching her lay motionless while people cried around her.  It felt sacred, even at that young age.  It felt like I was doing something important by witnessing these rituals.

Many of my relatives have died young.  My grandfather was 57; my grandmother 49.  My cousin hanged himself in 2011 at 29, younger than I am now.  I have watched friends be lowered into the ground, more than feels possible.  Some died from illness; some from despair.  Every time a life ends, I feel my soul cracking at the edges, brittle from the loss.  These absences hurt acutely, long after they are gone.  Sometimes this makes me feel closer to them, that their deaths are still painful after so long.  That comforts me in the hard moments. 

I have never been repulsed by death.  It has always fascinated me.  The physiology, psychology, sociology of it.  What the body does when it knows.  What the mind does to protect itself.  The impact of a life on those who know them.  The journey the soul begins to take while the body is still alive.  All of these things are beautiful to me, like a church built from polished bones. 

I think sometimes about what would happen if I died.  If I’m honest, I think about it a lot lately.  When you’re anaphylaxing and your blood pressure is 70/37, it doesn’t seem so unlikely.  We are all so mortal.  I don’t think I will die young.  I don’t think I will die from mast cell disease.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t.  And that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it.

Death is something you share with the people you love, whether you want to or not.  It is a journey you all must take together, even if only one of you is leaving.  I worry a lot about the impact I have on the people I love, that my illness and instability will damage them irreparably.  I worry that their lives are worse for knowing me.  I worry that they will never recover if I die young.  And sometimes when it’s foggy and cool in the spring, I can smell the earth and wonder what it will feel like to be interred inside it.

I know some people who are dying right now.  Some are young, very young.  Some of them are concerned with what their lives mean, what people will say about them 20 years from now.  Some of them are worried they will be forgotten and that their lives don’t matter. 

But they do matter, of course.  And they don’t matter because of the important things you do.  They matter because people love you, and the loss of you leaves a void in their lives.  They will remember you when they see things that remind them of you, when they wish they could tell you things.  Your memory will occupy an aching wound in their heart that never quite heals, but bleeds less as time goes on. 

If I died tomorrow, I would have had a good life.  I have no real regrets.  I know that in time, no one would miss me because I made diagnostics to diagnose blood stream infections and that might save people.  They would miss me because they loved me, and our relationship would continue because of this, long after I was gone.   

Sometimes when it smells like fall, these are the thoughts that comfort me.