Something I wrote years ago.
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Old ghost, friend of this house, remain!
What is there now to prod us toward
The past, our ruinous nostalgia?
– Weldon Kees
Last October, I spent most of my Saturdays, and many Sundays, on long walks while talking on the phone with my boyfriend. I would start at my apartment on 122nd and Lex, ending downtown near Christopher Street or Washington Square. I tried to walk by the water if I could, and would often walk to the West Side because I preferred Riverside Park to the East River Parkway. It is quieter but more alive, with families at the play equipment and old couples walking their dogs in the October sunshine.
My boyfriend was unusually sentimental last October. It seemed to me that he was less afraid of the future and we spoke a lot about the coming year. We had been living apart while I started my career in New York and he finished his last semester of school. During these long conversations we decided that when he graduated the following April, I would transfer to Oregon, where my family lives, and we would adopt a dog right away. We talked endlessly of camping trips and hikes, canoes, pumpkin patches, bike rides by the river, concerts, restaurants, and lazy Sundays at home, curled up with apple cider and our new dog. The specifics often changed, but never the feeling. It was hard now, being apart, so overworked and busy, but on those long walks in the cold fall air and warm October sun, I could drift easily into a future full of my family, my dog, and this man I loved. It was a future where I didn’t have to feel so alone, as I did in New York and had for many years. I'd hang up the phone, pull my scarf closer around my neck, and look at the bustle of the downtown traffic with a fresh expectance, already less lonely.
Even before those long, hopeful conversations, I'd always had a special love for October. It is the season when my mom's memory returns to me in her most joyful, vibrant form. She died in the spring and, over ten years later, the stench of death still permeates April and May. Did you know that people often piss themselves as they die? That is the stench of dying—piss, vomit, sweat, stale hospital gowns, a flushed face suddenly turned the color of ash. I could choose not to see the increasing hollowness of her cheeks when her eyes were the same, a brilliant, defiant flash all the way to the end. But when the eyes go still, only the hollowness remains. It happens in an instant and stays with you forever. This is spring.
But the stench of spring and the warmth of October are how I know that the horror movies are wrong. Tragedy and pain do not tether ghosts to the earth; we are not haunted by the bad memories, but the good. It is love that makes ghosts linger, and love that makes us beg them to stay, even if their presence hurts us. It is why we leave cakes and candles at their graves on All Hallows Eve, hoping that love will bring them back to us again, if only for a night.
This is why the sun shines differently in October, because it is the same sun that shone on each of my birthdays when my mom picked me up from school for a “doctor’s appointment”. I can remember her smile as she would say this to the school secretary. I realize now that she didn’t need to lie. I don't know why she did and I can't ask her, but I know that it made me feel like her accomplice in a grand escape. Maybe she too was thinking of my classmates running the pacer test in PE or reciting numbers and verbs for the Spanish teacher, while I got to pull on my plum-colored corduroy jacket and walk with her into the crisp fall air.
Why can't I remember the color of her car? I remember the smell so clearly—a delicate, musky air that was oppressive in the summer but warm and comforting in the fall. Sometimes she bought air fresheners and I hated how strong they smelled, how they masked the muskiness that I had come to associate with trips with my mom and the rare days when I was allowed to sit in the front seat.
We always went to the mall first, where she would let me pick a birthday gift for myself. The most memorable of these was a black tote bag with a large photograph of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. My mother and I had watched Gone With the Wind while taking down our Christmas tree the year before, and I had been obsessed ever since. I carried that bag everywhere the following year, the year I started middle school. I felt that the bag identified me in a way that I liked. My mom called it my old soul, her way of glossing over my preteen awkwardness in the way only a mother can. I don’t know what happened to the bag. I can’t imagine that I would have thrown it away, especially since that was the year she started to get really sick, but I don’t have any memory of it after she died.
After the mall we ate lunch at the Olive Garden, which was the fanciest restaurant I could think of at the time. I ordered endless salad and breadsticks and nothing else, which is the only thing I have ever eaten at Olive Garden since. I talked a lot when I was alone with my mom, more than I ever would around anyone else. I felt my own shyness quite painfully at that age, and anything I said would be so overthought in advance that it came out in quick, nervous bursts which would have been unintelligible even without my speech impediment, but were much worse because of it. It still hurts me to think of the confused looks that came over people when I spoke to them like this. I remember once I tried to tell a story at my friend Hannah’s Passover dinner and, as I left the room afterward, I heard one of the parents quietly ask, “Did you understand what she said?” It took years for my cheeks to not burn with shame whenever I thought of that moment.
My mom was one of the few people who made me feel like I could speak clearly, like what I said was understood and was important. I always felt larger in her presence. In the hospital before she died, she wrote me a poem that ended with the words: “I see you, I love you.” Even then, she understood exactly what I had always needed from her. To have her to myself on my birthday, at a nice restaurant in the middle of a school day, to feel like she saw me as an equal and talked with me the same way she talked with other adults—it meant the world to me when I was still painfully shy and didn’t know how to speak to anyone else.
It was the best birthday of my life, and still is.
That is the version of my mom that I remember on October mornings when the warm sun shines through cold air. This morning, over ten years later, I walked to a coffee shop near my apartment in Sugar Hill and I felt that I could just as easily be walking out of Olive Garden with her, through crisp fall air and into her car. On mornings like this it is easy to forget the hollow body on the hospital bed and instead remember watching my mom laugh from the driver's seat, graceless and unguarded, surrounded by that soft musky smell as October leaves fall around us and the sun angles across cloth seats and dusty cup holders. This is the version of her that returns to me on October mornings. It is her presence that makes the sun shine so differently than in any other month; it's the month when the warmth of the sun can still overcome the cold.
Last October, my boyfriend learned that he was going to be a father. I didn’t know until Thanksgiving day, when the girl who was having his baby told me that she had been pregnant for over a month. The long October walks, the hope of a future less lonely, slipped into a wet, confused winter. He said he didn’t tell me sooner because he knew that it would end our three-year relationship and he wanted to hold on a little longer. So every Saturday, and often Sunday, we talked endlessly about a future that he knew would never happen, and he would hang up the phone and cry while I pulled my scarf tight around my neck, smiling through the warm October sun at the bustle of downtown New York, feeling secure in the hope of a future when my loneliness would be lost in him and the life we had planned together.
I woke this morning, the first of the October, and walked out into cold air and warm sunshine. I thought of him and of those long walks with a dull, nostalgic ache that comes as a physical pain in my throat and chest. It has taken a year, but I think I am grateful that the heartbreak was not handed to me until November, just as I am grateful that my mom did not die until the spring. I walked for a long time today, alone, as thoughts of him and of the future that is lost to me now drifted into memories of my mom. I realize that I have found much of what she wanted for me—confidence to speak and be understood, a love of self that was elusive to me then but that I wear so comfortably now—despite unexpected loss and many confused and lonely months and years. That loneliness is still a dominant feature of my life, but although it weighs heavy in my chest, it has lost its sharp edges and doesn’t hurt me so much anymore. I am less lonely in October. It is a time of year when the doors to the past slide open, just a crack, so that the ghosts of those I have lost and still love can come back to haunt me for a time. In their company, the cold loneliness is briefly overcome by the warmth of the October sun.
