dispatches from the pandemic: The month I disappear

Every year, there is a stretch of time when I become harder to reach.

Not impossible. Not gone exactly. Just dimmed.

It starts in mid-August and usually lasts until mid-September. If grief had a climate, that would be monsoon season.

My mother died on August 17, 2010. My brother Jeremy was killed in Iraq on September 6, 2006. He was eighteen.

Those dates sit close enough together on the calendar that my body seems to notice before I do. I can be having a normal day, walking the dog, making dinner, answering emails, thinking I am fine, and then some small thing will open the floor.

A playground.

That happened recently. I was walking with my wife and our dog, two of the brightest lights in my life, and we passed an elementary school. It reminded me of visiting my grandparents in Illinois as a kid. My brothers and I would go to nearby school playgrounds. We would play baseball on the fields. We would run around in the kind of summer air that feels endless when you are young enough to believe time is an unlimited resource.

It was a good memory.

Then it hurt.

That is one of the crueler tricks of grief. It does not only live in the terrible images. It lives in the good ones too. Sometimes especially there. A memory can begin as warmth and become evidence. Evidence of who is gone. Evidence of what cannot be revisited. Evidence that the past is still intact somewhere, just not anywhere you can reach.

I think about my mother and my brother a lot.

I dream about them constantly.

In the dreams, they are often alive and I am trying to explain everything. Where they have been. What they missed. Who I became. What happened to the world. I try to catch them up, as if the right words could fold time back into place.

Then I wake up and have to remember again.

Most of the year, I can carry it.

For about 330 days, I am relatively steady. I can talk about it. I can make jokes. I can function. I can be present, or at least present enough.

But for those other thirty-something days, I become a worse version of myself.

I get sad for what seems, from the outside, like no reason. I become hard to talk to. Small debates feel enormous. I pick fights. I turn fear into irritability because anger gives the illusion of control. I take ordinary frustrations and load them with old ammunition.

If you are close to me and have been in the blast radius during that time, I am sorry.

That does not excuse it.

It does explain some of it.

A couple weeks ago, it got heavy enough that I barely left the bedroom for four days. I tried to write something hopeful in the hopes that writing it would make me feel it. Sometimes that works. This time, it did not.

This is another thing about grief people do not always say: insight does not cure it.

You can know exactly why something is happening. You can name the pattern. You can see the dates coming. You can understand the triggers. You can have the language. You can have the supportive spouse, the beloved dog, the coping mechanisms, the walks, the work, the creative outlets.

And still, the wave comes.

Knowledge is not a seawall.

At best, it is a weather report.

This year, the grief attached itself to work. Or the absence of it. Or the fear of failing at it. I got a gig and nearly backed out because I was afraid I would not be good enough. I threw away pages because I convinced myself they were no good. I mistook the seasonal voice in my head for the voice of truth.

It was not truth.

It was August.

It was September.

It was the old machinery starting up again.

The best I can do is try to recognize it sooner.

To say, “This is the month.”

To give myself less rope to hang myself with and more rope to hold onto.

To warn the people I love that I may be a little less reachable, a little more tender, a little quicker to misread the room.

To keep moving gently.

Walk the dog. Eat something with nutritional value. Write the bad pages. Do not make permanent decisions based on temporary weather. Do not confuse a grief flare with a life verdict.

And when the good memory turns painful, try not to treat that as a betrayal.

The pain is there because love was there first.

That does not make it easier.

But it does make it true.