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Fall, my favorite season — 39 Comments

1. “I hadn’t thought of that…”
   Keep the box of tissues close to hand Neo…there’ll be more of those moments. I wish it were different…but I pray for peace that is beyond understanding in each of them.

2. Once again, my deepest condolences, Neo.

   My sister, in the space of two weeks, lost her husband of sixty years, and her home, as she moved into assisted living, and she’s in the process of losing her mind. She always said getting old sucks.

   I remember my grandparents saying that as they aged into their late 80s and 90s, no one their age was left to them, siblings and friends all gone before them. This is hard.

3. I miss Summer already, and its 70 degrees and sunny today.

4. Amen, Kate, Amen. For those of you not churchy, Amen means agree.

5. This year I spent part a recent day talking to the cemetery staff about possible plots in which to bury cremains.

   I buried some of my parents’ cremains at the family plot in flyover country—the sexton told me he had buried my paternal grandparents. My sister also kept some cremains. She periodically asked me where she should bury them. I replied, wherever. Finally she is going to let go of them. She is flying from FL to NE for her 30th class reunion, and will dispose of the remaining cremains in a state forest in our hometown.

   Some poetic justice here. When I was in 2nd grade, I went with my father in the early morning to that state forest, where he uprooted some mountain laurel for planting on our property. My sister told me that he also unrooted some hemlocks from the state forest. That was not legal. I was not aware of the legality when I was in 2nd grade. If the hemlocks and mountain laurel are not being returned to the state forest, at least the cremains of the guilty party are being returned.

   Legal..I am reminded of the extensive remodeling my father did on our house. He paid for digging a new well and installing a furnace, and fireplaces. Extensive plumbing and electrical. Work he did himself included taking out a set of stairs and installing stairs in another place, extensive cabinet work (he and my grandfather built them), various floors often from wood he cut himself, putting in a cement floor above the kitchen. None of that involved any permits in our small town. Nowadays, depending on the jurisdiction, that work would involve permits up the wazoo. More laws, but how necessary?

   I find October to be my favorite month, both in NE and in TX. Especially THIS October, as this has been the hottest September I have ever experienced. Usually the temperature drops from 98-100 degrees to a more comfortable 90-93 when September begins, but not this year.

   Growing older, and having your friends and family die off before you do is sad, very sad. My maternal grandmother died at age 95. She lived her last 5 years in a “home” that was within sight of her house of 4 decades. I prompted my grandmother to make a series of recordings about the old days and such. In her final recording, made after her daughter—my mother—had died, she said that she wished that more people would visit her at the “home.” She went on to say that in the years that she lived in her house within sight of the “home,” she always found herself too busy to visit someone at the “home.” She concluded that she got what she paid for.

   Several years ago, my sister and I visited our cousin in OK. We drove by the town where our parents had grown up. That retirement home is no longer open for business, but the empty building remains. Most of my mother’s generation moved away, so there were no longer the quantity of elderly people around to populate that retirement home.

   My brother’s mother-in-law recently died at age 96. As she wanted, she died at home. My recollection is of some delicious Christmas Day feasts at that house. My poor sister-in-law was pushed into her traditional older sister task of satisfying everyone regarding the timing of the funeral, and details like open casket or not. Thankless task. As she is one of seven children, there was a lot of disagreement. To her credit, she got it done, as she always does.

6. Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

   Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
   Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
   I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
   I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
   The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
   And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
   But last year’s bitter loving must remain
   Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.

   There are a hundred places where I fear
   To go,—so with his memory they brim.
   And entering with relief some quiet place
   Where never fell his foot or shone his face
   I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
   And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

   –Edna St. Vincent Millay
   ___________________________________

   That’s a sonnet I can hear loud and clear.

7. huxley:

   Thanks.

   I have indeed thought of that poem in recent weeks.

8. I’m very sorry for your loss Neo, and for the grieving you are going through. While everybody accumulates things as they go through life, not everybody can bear to part with their things as they get older.

   But there are service companies that are structured around this process specifically and are quite discreet and understanding about providing practical support in a difficult time, when it comes to sorting through an empty household with those in mourning. Probably there is a combination of uniquely personal and sentimental items, in addition to the more mundane things that are easier to let go of. Perhaps you might explore getting some of that help to ease you up, or perhaps you already have.

9. Aggie:

   I have a friend who does that professionally, and I am hiring her. The much harder part is missing him. He’s been a huge part of my life since I was 21 years old.

10. May I respectfully suggest donating to a church-sponsored thrift ministry? Not a commercial for-profit store but a ministry that seeks to assist the local community.

    The wife and I volunteer at our church ministry. Multiple times a year the ministry receives what are obviously estate items donated after the owner’s death. Somewhat sad to receive items that were once highly important to someone. The joy, however, is seeing those items be re-purposed for use by younger couples who are just starting their adult lives together. It brings joy to see them celebrating their finds that are new to them and that generate new memories.

11. After I lost my beloved wife & companion of 38 years in 2018, I cried at least once a day for six months. I even remarked to myself on the first day that I didn’t cry that this was my first tearless day.

    While the finality of death brings the great sadness that she is now gone from my life (perhaps forever, but I fervently hope that we shall be together again in the next), the finality brings with it the knowledge that there was nothing medical science and certainly not me could have done to save her, and that I did all that a man could do in taking care of her affairs, her funeral (a beautiful and moving service), her memorial service, and the care of her memory. When the time came, I did my duty. I find some solace in that.

12. My older sister was my closest sibling. Her husband sent me some of her cremains after her passing 35 years ago. I kept them for a number of years, carrying them from one foreign posting to another, and finally decided after nearly a decade I could leave them on a hill on my farm. That was 25 years ago. I still miss her, but no longer in the same way. No longer in a way that I couldn’t let go. Letting go of a loved one is not a rapid process. Take your time.

13. Thank you. A good post. I marveled at the fine fall day on this morning’s walk. Your post connected with that and I took the time to read the whole post. My sympathies. Just face it all bravely.

14. YoungHegelian:

    I strongly believe the hospital made a series of errors that led to the death of my ex. This means that I lack a sense of acceptance. And yet not only would a medical malpractice suit not bring him back, in my state it would have to be an airtight case before a lawyer would take it.

15. Neo, I hope this is not disrespectful, but your writing was so vivid and poignant that I could visualize it all as if I were watching a clip from a film, and I wanted to see the whole thing!

    So much good counsel from the commenters, I will only add again my sincere sympathy for your loss.

    My mother’s sister passed away in September at the age of 92, the last one remaining from that generation, and had only a simple grave-side service with her children, her grandson and his family (who all live in the same housing development by design), and my younger sister. The rest of us could not go, but the others were able to visit with Aunt P. only a few weeks earlier, as we all felt that would be the last time.

    All of her generation of family and friends had gone before or were unable to leave home or (more often) their care facility. And yet, the alternative to that situation is dying young enough to have them come to your memorial, which to my mind is worse.

16. @ huxley, thank you for the poem. Edna St. Vincent Millay really captured the unexpected dilemma of remembering a loved one in both familiar and unfamiliar places.

17. Fall has been my favorite season, probably because of childhood memories. Friday Night Lights. From age 8 through 18, fall Fridays were a great social event. Not Texas, Western PA. No more – school consolidation ordered by the state created one 50 boy team where there would have 6 or 7 or 8. That’s 250 to 350 kids who didn’t get to play. Across all the districts affected, probably 10,000 fewer players. Not only less competition, producing an inferior sorting mechanism, but it reduced the students identification with the team. Fewer football scholarships so fewer guys going to college. I could go on and on (obviously!) about the evils of humongous school districts, but I’m off topic. Even though football is not the feature that it once was, I still have an almost “imprinted” level of affection for the season.
    My wife and I are all set for the end; prepaid cremation set up. We’re the insurance company’s favorite clients: that was set up over 30 years ago. The first to go gets to hang around in an urn for awhile, then the ashes get mixed and scattered.

18. Deep condolences, Neo.

    When our son died in a mountain climbing accident, we were in very deep grief. And now, 47 years later, we miss him still. We might have spent many years unable to smile or feel real joy again. But an angel in the form of the wife of his employer stopped by our house about a month after he died and told us how much her husband liked our son and what a fine young man he was.

    Then she dropped the bomb. She and her husband had lost their son in an auto accident some years before. For months they were paralyzed by their grief. One day a man asked them if they thought their son would want them to spend their days in grief and loneliness? It made them think and it came to them that their son would want them to go on and live full, rich lives to honor him.

    It made us think as well. I had a vision of him standing on the summit of a peak named LIFE. He was beckoning to us, smiling his crooked simile, and his message was, “Come climb this peak in my name and to show your love for me.” It was the beginning of our wading back into all that life offers – the good, the bad, the happiness, and the grief.

    It didn’t happen quickly nor was it easy. But one step at a time we trudged on keeping our eye on trying to live our lives in a way that he would want us to.

    I hope this anecdote may help you think about what your ex would want you to do., Neo.

    (My eyes are still quite bad. I can make a comment occasionally, but it takes time. I read some of your posts, but that also takes a lot of time and effort. My bride of 70 years is in late-stage dementia, and our daughter, some hired care givers, and I are her support. It’s time consuming but it’s a labor of love.)

19. Keeping you in mind.

20. J.J.:

    That’s very beautiful. Thank you. My condolences, even after all these years.

    It has occurred to me that my ex wouldn’t want me to be mired and bogged down by grief. But so far, I just feel his loss very acutely.

21. Having lost my Wife of 57 years in July of last year, I understand all the comments. I did the necessary cleaning myself. Lots of memories of our travels around the world. A life time of memories. I still have a great deal of things we acquired together. I don’t cry as much. I listen to Pandora while here and when some song comes on, memories come flooding back, and I cry, sometimes in anguish. I was able to be with her here in our home of 47 years, where she wanted to be. Her last two days are hard for me, because I don’t remember every minute. She had cancer, did the treatments, had ports, pics, so many different drugs. Through it all she never complained. She was so much stronger than I could ever be. It is very lonely at night, but I have our two cats. She chose them so they are very special to me. I talk to her a lot. It helps. Neo, just cherish the good memories. Huxley, that poem is so very true. I feel it every day.

22. Barry, Used to live where our church had a program in that if you were figuring on getting rid of some furniture, call us. Couple of us would pick it up and deliver it to places which needed it…shelters for displaced and so forth. The men’s shelter, not surprisingly, had a hefty crew waiting for us. Getting old to heave sofas into a pickup truck bed these days. But might suggest it someplace.

    When my brother was killed overseas, the Air Force shipped back such personal stuff as he was taking–permanent change of station so there was more than a change of socks–and I have no idea what my folks did with it. Outside of a couple of photos, it was never visible in the house. Don’t know if I could have stood to see it.

23. Dear Neo,
    I know these are difficult days we all must experience unless we pass on ahead of our loved ones.
    This prayer has assured me that God is the God of the living and those who are no longer among us are in His presence.
    Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing for them better things than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
    Amen.

24. When i was 17 years old, my father died in a helicopter accident 2 weeks after his 43rd birthday. Twenty-eight years later my mother died suddenly just before her 67th birthday–she had remained a widow and was a very devoted grandmother to our children. My parents were happily married and I was very close to my Dad. In thinking about all that has been shared here and my own experience with grief, I think I weathered grief better at a younger age. My husband and I have been together since I was 17. I’ve long thought, losing him would be like losing my right arm. I pray for solace for you Neo, and all who are still suffering the effects of loss.

25. The result of losing someone important has specific physical consequences in the brain. Forgive my resorting to ChatGPT, but this is a good summary:
    ______________________________

    When losing someone important, the brain perceives the loss as an existential threat, triggering a survival response that floods the body with stress hormones like cortisol. This reaction activates the amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm system, leading to heightened anxiety and fear, while the anterior cingulate cortex processes the intense emotional and physical pain of grief.

    Simultaneously, the brain struggles to update its internal neural map, which had encoded the loved one as part of its identity and future expectations. The nucleus accumbens, part of the reward system, continues to search for the missing person, causing intense yearning and anhedonia (loss of pleasure), while the prefrontal cortex is suppressed, resulting in “brain fog,” memory issues, and impaired decision-making.

    Over time, neuroplasticity allows the brain to gradually rewire itself, forming new neural connections to adapt to life without the loved one. This process involves extinguishing the craving for the lost person and integrating their memory into a broader life story, though this restructuring requires significant time, repetition, and lived experience to complete.

26. So much grief and loss here, spouses and children gone forever, unbearable losses that somehow have to be born.

    Neo, you write with such precise, profound grief. I know it’s no comfort to be told this. I know there’s no comfort.

27. In 2021 my father died; just short of 99 years old.
    He did not have a will; he died intestate.
    I am STILL dealing with several legal aspects of his estate.
    It’s like a headache that ebbs and flows, but never goes away.

    My point?

    Make sure you have designated all your beneficiaries for all your financial accounts and if necessary, a living trust or a irrevocable trust, as the case may necessitate, and certainly have a will prepared.
    And be aware that having a will does NOT avoid the expensive and lengthy probate process.

    Losing a loved one is tough enough, but tossing a bureaucratic / legal nightmare
    onto your kids or other relations just compounds the misery.

28. John Tyler:

    Fortunately, there is a will.

29. Huxley: it took three-four years for the “brain fog” to clear somewhat after I lost my parents. I’m not sure it’s all gone; I’m not sure it ever will be.

    My older brother is autistic, so the task of clearing out their apartment at the senior community they moved to a few years before their deaths, and organizing the family house they had moved from, fell to me. Since they left everything at the house pretty much as it was they day they walked out the door (they intended to go back to sort through things, but revisiting the home they’d lived in for 61+ years proved to be too grueling for them and my father’s health was already failing), there was a lot to go through. I remember arriving at the house after a two-day drive from Alabama and breaking down at the magnitude of the task and the immediacy of their presence: grocery receipts on the kitchen counter, notes on the wall calendar, my mother’s battered old gardening shoes on the front porch, my father’s study piled with papers, just as he left it. Somehow I managed to get through it. Worst month of my life.

    I’ve kept the house and have been fixing it up in stages since my retirement two years ago. I find it therapeutic to do the things they wanted to do but never got around to. Their presence is still here, but it’s subdued and gentle and has been overlaid by new life. An old family friend stopped by the other day out of the blue, as people used to do routinely in the pre-digital era. She said the house felt less in thrall to the past–“more like it’s yours now, and less like a mausoleum” was how she put it. I took that to mean that my parents’ lives have been safely folded into the house’s history, which is ongoing. There is some comfort in that.

30. Neo: very sorry for what you are going through. Know only that you are not alone.

    My late father was a cognitive scientist. By the way, and since we were talking about it a few threads ago, here’s his one-sentence definition of human consciousness:

    “A transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective.”

    One of the things my father wrote about was the Seeing-More-Than-Is-There (SMTT) phenomenon, a well-known and much-studied brain illusion. He and I never discussed death and whether there is an afterlife in so many words. However, a few weeks before he died–he was bedridden by that point–I pointedly asked him whether it’s also possible that we see less than is there. That is, that there are dimensions of life, death, and this world that we can perceive only dimly or not at all. His answer was immediate and unequivocal: “Absolutely”. Remember, this was a scientist talking. I think we both knew what my question was about. Shortly before he died, my father offered me the consolation of leaving the door open to the possibility of another world. I offer it to you in the same spirit.

31. Hubert:

    Exceptional.

32. I don’t get it. Your ex was your ex, you are no longer married. How can you be a widow? How can you get widow’s benefits from SS? Wiki sez: Legal and Social Definition:(widow is:) A person whose spouse dies during their marriage and who remains unmarried. During their marriage, strikes me as key.

33. Cicero: https://ssa.tools/guides/survivor-benefits

    Divorced surviving spouses can claim benefits if the marriage lasted ten years or more, and the surviving spouse is not remarried, or did not remarry until after age 60.

34. You are daily in my best wishes and thoughts Neo.

35. Cicero:

    We were married for 31 years.

36. Kate and Neo: thanks for helping me understand.

37. I am so sorry to hear of your sadness. Reading your work over all these years made me see you as a very tough, very smart, very non-nonsense person – all of which you are. But we are all people, and we all have sadness in our lives. Please know that all of your readers think so very highly of you – not just as a writer but also as an individual – and we are all hoping for your pain to ease.

38. Paul Verlaine wrote a poem which got more attention than I think he expected; A line was used by Brit intel to trigger an op against German occupying forces in France in WW II.

    “The long sobs of the violins of autumn wound my heart with a monotonous languor.”

    The aptness of its use in this case notwithstanding, the figure of speech definitely wouldn’t work with any of the other seasons. Might have been on to something. The further north one is, the larger the difference in the day/night difference and the faster–it seems anyway–evening comes with autumn , leading to short, cold, gray days. And Paris, for example, is on the same latitude as the north shore of Lake Superior.
    But in the US, dryer than western Europe, we have sunny days and the leaves turn to such an extent that a Brit traveler wondered if our trees are diseased. And Halloween is kind of fun, as is Thanksgiving. And football. The first week back to school.
    Still, as if a continuo in an orchestral score…..Verlaine was on to something and I think it adds to our personal sadnesses.

39. So very sorry for your loss, Neo. I’ve just returned from a 4 day pilgrimage to Assisi, 800 years after St. Francis, which was great but intense visiting of many churches.

    Getting a will is a good idea. My wife’s mother died 2 years ago, with a will, but the 4 daughters aren’t quite yet finished with all the details, and trying to make what wasn’t a fully fair distribution more fair. All want to be fair, but don’t all agree on what fair is. Almost done now.

    As I’m writing to console you, I’m thinking of my own parents’ & older sister’s death. In Slovakia, the week before All Saints Eve is full of people going to cemeteries with flowers & candles. There are a few big ones we used to go to, but wife’s folks & niece (too young, sadly) are buried close so we go there now.

    I didn’t grow up with a cemetery culture, and now think that’s a longer term negative than the short term positive moving on only futurism that secularism encourages.

    Please remember the good parts. And take care of yourself.

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