But the days grow short, when we reach September

September 1968. My mother hasn’t been well all summer. She’s been tired. Even while on holiday and visiting friends she’s excused herself midday to have a nap. I hear whispers from the adults that she’s drinking too much. My father has taken to measuring the bottles of sherry and port wine in our liquor cabinet. 

Worry over my mother’s health in those September days was an escalation of the fear I’d felt since I was 13, three years previously. When she came home from the doctor’s and she and my father sat me down and explained she’d been diagnosed with a heart condition. That she could die if she overexerted herself. I immediately volunteered to take over the vacuuming and the ironing. Anything. Anything so she wouldn’t die. 

I knew though in my teenaged heart that mothers die. It was a theme that ran through my books: fairytales, even young adult series. Disney movies. I didn’t want MY mother to die at the same time as I grappled with fear that she would. 

So for three years I held a kind of death watch. Anytime she was late home from one of her outings. Anytime I didn’t hear her singing as I opened the front door on my return from school. 

But then came that September and, close to the end of the month, her announcement, as I returned home from school, that she was waiting for my father to take her to the doctor. The sore throat she’d had for the past few weeks was becoming unbearable. She was having trouble breathing. And she said something to me that I didn’t realize meant that she knew she wasn’t coming back: “You’ll need to make your own dentist appointment tomorrow, dear. In fact, you should be making your own appointments now that you’re 16.”

My mother never came back from that doctor’s appointment. The doctor looked at her and immediately said she needed to go into hospital. From there, she underwent an immediate operation where, I was told, her “voice box” was removed. The so-called “goiter” that the doctor had diagnosed for the past three years had been thyroid cancer. 

My father, my sister, who had driven up from where she lived in New York State, and I were all in the hospital waiting room during the operation. My father, ultimate stoic that he himself was, had suggested I go to school per normal. I told him I couldn’t. Not while there was a chance my mother would die on the operating table. 

So we were all there when the doctor emerged and said that they’d relieved the immediate pressure on her breathing but that the cancer was too advanced for any chance of a cure. “Six months to a year,” was his prognosis. 

We entered her hospital room when she was conscious. She had no voice anymore. Her beautiful voice was gone. The ever-cheerful look was replaced by one of exhaustion, of resignation. I was trying to hold back my tears, but my mother mouthed “Go ahead, cry. It’s alright, cry.” 

It wasn’t six months; it wasn’t a year. My mother lived for two weeks after the operation. During that time I was allowed to visit her a couple of times. Back then, young people weren’t encouraged to visit relatives in the hospital; or maybe it’s more that in my family we didn’t visit relatives in the hospital. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had died just a few months earlier after an operation went wrong at that same hospital. I don’t think I’d visited her at all.

But I did visit my mother. I would take three city buses after school to St. Mary’s Hospital. Wearing my school uniform, carrying my bag of homework and books. Walk the sterile corridors that just a year before we had so excitedly walked as a family after my sister had had her first healthy baby.

I would peek around the door to the hospital room to see if my mother was awake. She smiled at me and motioned me in. She would write her questions and answers on a white board. But, at our last visit together, she wrote that she was too tired to even write and I should just talk. She would listen. 

I was able to show her the professional high school graduation photos that I’d just received; she picked the one she liked the best. I told her I was thinking of applying to university, a change from the year before when we’d thought that secretarial school would be best after I graduated from high school. She wrote down, “If you want to go, I’ll tell your father.” 

That’s how it had always been, my mother acting as go-between me and my father. That was coming to an end as well.

The call from the hospital came in the middle of the night. The phone rang in the hallway, and I jerked awake. I heard my father say: “Yes, I’ll come as soon as I can.” I scrambled out of bed, “What is it?” My father said, “Your mother’s taken a turn for the worse, she may be dying.” Just the evening before, he’d returned from the hospital saying that my mother was cheery, asking for a six-pack of her favorite beer. 

“I’m coming,” I said, as I pulled clothes on. “No, you go to school,” he said. “Are you JOKING?” I replied angrily, the first time I’d ever spoken to my father in anger. “My mother’s dying and I’m going to school??” He said, “Yes of course, I’m just not thinking straight.” The first time he’d ever admitted that as well. 

As we were about to leave, the hospital rang again. No rush, my mother was dead.

Autumn used to be my favorite time of the year. Well, when I am feeling well, it still is. In Montreal, in Quebec, it’s a time where the stifling humidity of summer is over but the biting cold of winter hasn’t yet arrived. Where the trees shimmer with reds and yellows and light browns. Where the pathways on Mount Royal are carpeted with those same colors and your steps crunch as you walk. Where a new school year promises new beginnings as well. New things to learn, new privileges now that you’re growing up be it permission to go to school dances or the freedom to go downtown with friends on the weekends.

It was all that. But over the years since my mother’s death, Autumn also heralded the return of a kind of depression that would settle on me. I didn’t recognize it for years. It was just a feeling. How ironic that my daughter was born on October 5th, that for the month leading up to her birth I had felt that depression, that sadness but, at her birth it completely lifted. The very opposite of post-partum baby blues, I joked that I’d had my baby blues beforehand. 

But it hadn’t been “just” baby blues and the years wore on, always forcing myself to be excited and happy for my daughter’s birthday while I also had this odd feeling of sadness.

It wasn’t until many years later, as I was struggling with a serious case of depression, that an insightful GP asked me, “Tell me about your life.” And I told her the story that I have just written above. She asked, “How old is your daughter?” “Thirteen,” I said. “And you said you were how old when your mother first became ill?” “Thirteen,” I replied, a little uncertainly. “And it’s what month now?” “October.” 

I think that you can connect the dots, just as I did. That’s what our brains do, we connect dots. With or without facts. Thinking this way has helped me, in this latest iteration of my annual depression, to understand that all of this, the memories, the fears, the tears that still come 56 years later, are a kind of play that is unfolding inside my brain. Still, 56 years! That’s how old my mother was when she died!  

Anyway, the cerebellum part of our brains, remembers things, helped by the hippocampus which is the filing cabinet in our brains. The prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, the action parts, aren’t even aware of all that going on. They just know something feels wrong thanks to the amygdala part of our brain which controls our emotions. But without the cerebellum taking that information and forming a healthy response, we can’t “figure out” why we’re feeling the way we do. So, unless we make a concerted effort to make those parts work together by using all the parts of our brain to move our way through the pain and the memories toward an acceptance and a learning from, we’re stuck in what literally IS a “brain freeze.” 

That’s what I call my depression now; a “brain freeze.” It’s something that will pass, by acknowledging it and moving on from it. Using the tools I’ve gathered through years of “moving on.” It takes time and yes, it’s very frustrating that this can’t be “fixed” once and for all. But life’s like that, there’s not usually a once and for all as long as we are drawing breath. Two excerpts from songs that sum it up for me:

And when this winter turns to spring

I could be everything

And when your summer starts to fall

I could be all your autumn leaves and birds that sing

When winter turns to spring

Afternoon, let's take a walk

And examine what you thought

Ever after was really supposed to be

And all the fears you hold inside

We'll release them, watch them fly

Let your laughter remind you what you need

Credit: When Winter Turns to Spring, Kimo Pokini

Everything must change

The young become the old

And mysteries do unfold

Cause that's the way of time

Nothing and no one goes unchanged

There are not many things in life

You can be sure of

Except rain comes from the clouds

Sun lights up the sky

And butterflies do fly

Rain comes from the clouds

Sun lights up the sky

And music

And music

Makes me cry

Credit: Everything Must Change, Quincy Jones