A Time to Mourn
A Sad, Autumnal Story
Human beings have strange ways of dealing with death. Not necessarily with particular deaths, but death in the abstract. At the holiday most associated with death – or with the elements of it; the bones, the spirits, the masks – we celebrate and are joyous. Small children dress up as though they had died and become ghosts, or skeletons, or zombies. And they eat candy and parade throughout neighborhoods filled with houses decorated as though they were haunted.
In other countries, they call it The Day of the Dead, and adults parade about in the trappings of death. But instead of a time to cry, the day of the dead is a time to sing.
I do not know about spirits and hauntings and witches and ghouls, and I can’t say whether or not they would be any more present in October than in May. But I do know that the holiday coincides with the time of dying in the natural world. Every autumn, old life passes away to make room for the new. I see it all around me, in ways small and great.
I feel it on the grey days as the wind rustles the emptying trees and the emptiness comes in through my window and goes inside of me. Sometimes I go for long walks in the light rain and lose myself in thought. Perhaps all people – or all those who spend any significant time alone in the world on days such as these – experience what I do. I return and find myself unable speak. The stillness has settled too deeply into me and I am separated – even when I am with people again.