October

Once, on an early spring evening at a friend’s apartment in Bangkok, someone suggested we do something in October. October?! I exclaimed. We could all be dead by then! It was something that I didn’t intend to say, something that came out like a joke, but it is something that has always felt very true to me. If August is a waiting room and September is an eager student, October is an old man reflecting on his final days and all the days that came before. October is what first taught me that we are all on shifting ground.

It was a few days before Halloween, I was fourteen, it was so early in the morning that it felt like it was still night, and there were hushed voices outside my bedroom door. It is customary in Ethiopian culture to share news of someone’s death before the sun comes up. This practice of waking someone from their sleep to tell them that someone they love has died is called Merdo. Even the very name of it makes my skin cold. Simply translated, the word Merdo means to inform someone of terrible news but it becomes a verb when a death is involved. And that is what they were at my door to do; to tell me that Abaye, my grandpa and best friend had died all those miles and a whole ocean away. So far away that I couldn’t touch his hands while they were still warm. Just gone, through the phone in the kitchen and the startled faces of adults who didn’t really know me. I ran out the door and down the street, and I kept running in the dark until my legs decided to stop. I sat on cold concrete in front of somebody’s house and I cried bitterly for my home, my Abaye, my very own self. Eventually, I dragged myself back home, the late October sky a silver blue and I sat quietly in a room full of mourners, people I barely knew. October became something new that day.

Several years later, on a bright October day in Nashville, my phone rang while I walked to my morning class and I flipped it open to see it was an uncle who normally never calls me. I knew that something was wrong. His voice was hoarse and all he said was “something has happened. You need to come home.” I didn’t know what to do, who to call, where to go, so I went to the airport and I stood in front of the American Airlines ticketing agent and I cried when she asked how she could help me. I didn’t know what to tell her, because I didn’t know the details, but I knew my culture and I knew nobody would say those words to me if someone in my family hadn’t died. Eventually, I got on a red eye connecting through Phoenix and I made the long journey home, mourning everyone turn by turn because I didn’t know who to mourn specifically. When you live moments in the death of everyone you love, it is harrowing in a way I can never describe. I opened our front door, and by the sound of my mother’s voice, I knew it was a sibling.

October became something else entirely. The cruelest month, a torment that never stops coming. Sometimes I am embarrassed by how deeply I am affected by dates and anniversaries. It has been so many years, and so much happiness has also filled these years.

Grief, of course, is never considerate enough to contain itself to a single month. It fills whatever hours, days, months, years it desires. Despite what I just wrote here, what I remember in October isn’t exactly the grief (as if that can be forgotten enough to be remembered). It is those shattering moments before the news, the moments just before learning the new shape of your life. There are years contained within those moments and they stretch out over the course of your life, curled inside every October.

I actually love the physical makeup of October. The shift in weather to cold, (mostly) dry sunny days; the longer nights, the collective, almost cult-like excitement for the sweaters and warm drinks and beautiful dead leaves. October is museums and long books and roasted butternut squash with brown butter and sage while Miles Davis plays in the background. It is You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally. It is permission to be a little slower, a little quieter, to scoot closer to each other. It is soft and forgiving clothes that don’t hate your body, and warm soup in a large bowl. The days are like poetry; full of meaning and nonsense. What’s not to love?

So, it’s here again. Cold air is fighting its way through the windows and the fairy lights are already wrapped around the trees in the city, getting ready for the darkness October ushers in, coiled around the promise of the holidays. Every October, the clock turns back and I am a teenager. There are no bad news through phone calls, just the promise of my first American Halloween and maybe even a school dance. It’s the first year of college and maybe I’ll declare Journalism even though Literature sounds more fun. It’s four years ago and we don’t have a name for the plague, no idea that something like it could even happen. October comes and it unfurls the years like a carpet before me.

No wonder October is about ghosts. But I try to remember that it is also about a promise that things can be warm and good soon. Just the fact that those Octobers have come and gone and I have survived them is enough to make me believe that things can be good again. October is this year and all the years summed up; everything I want, distilled into this one quiet, dark, serious month that urges me to look for the light on my own, rather than dwell in the darkness. October is a wise old man who knows that everything is provisional.