On Complicated Grief and Seasonal Obsessions

Last week marked the three-year anniversary of the apocalypse sky. Which means it’s also been three years since my father’s cancer diagnosis and the beginning of our search for a temporary home in the Sacramento area to support him. By November, we had packed up the cottage and moved. It was the week before my birthday.

It all happened very quickly. I’ve never had a ton of close friends—my difficulties with social cues and anxiety followed me into adulthood—but I didn’t really say goodbye to the ones I had. I had to keep moving, and if I cried over everything and everyone I was leaving behind, I was afraid I’d never stop. So I just left. And as we walked up to our new house, a murmuration of starlings surged to meet us. That moment felt like an invitation. There could be magic in this house too, someday.

After that, time stopped. Dad got sicker. Caretaking was simultaneously a privilege and the hardest thing we’ve ever done. He died in May, six months after we moved. He died without catching COVID, due to luck and resources, along with my draconian enforcement of isolation rules. He was more isolated than he should have been, but at least he wasn’t living—dying—alone.

I intellectualized. I raged. I wrote all summer. That was supposed to be the hot vaxxed summer, remember? We had a tantalizing glimpse of life before. 2021, when recovery felt possible. This was all just a blip. This was temporary. We did it!

But then fall came. The Delta wave came. The starlings returned. I discovered the famous pumpkin patch just north of our house, and it became my whole personality. It was our first real venture out into this new world. I bought what felt like a hundred pumpkins, but it might have been more.

I blinked and it was January. We were back at our fertility clinic during the beginning of the Omicron wave. That journey that would span almost exactly a year, involving hormones that numbed me to just about everything but my underlying anxiety and, you guessed it, existential dread. A failed transfer cycle and a miscarriage later, the weight of everything I’d been repressing finally became too much.

I grieved. Everything. I missed the spring. I haven’t really stopped crying since. But the keening unlocked something. Some greater capacity to feel. An ability to let my body do what it needed to do without my intellect interfering. Time started to flow again.

I’m not saying I learned anything, or I’m glad it all happened because I can’t join in the ritual of making meaning out of traumatic experiences. I believe life is beautiful and cruel and, above all, arbitrary.

But my voice is stronger now. I sang all summer, and the leaves are changing again. The pumpkin patch opened last week. The starlings haven’t returned yet, but they will. We may also return someday. But for now, I'm attending to that long-ignored invitation. There is magic in this house after all.