"Wake Me Up When September Ends"

Content Warning: This piece explores death, mourning, and mental health issues. Please read with that in mind, and take care of yourself.

Two months out of the year are always very hard for me.

“April is the Cruelest Month”

I am always reminded of my mother’s very premature and wasting death by T. S. Eliot’s famous first line, “April is the cruelest month,” from his lengthy poem, The Waste Land. It was at the end of April, when the cold resolved into the beginnings of blooming and burgeoning warmth, that my mother’s body quickly wasted away.

It was a sudden experience once the diagnosis was made. Stage Four lung cancer, provoked and onset by years of devoted smoking. I remember very vividly and very frequently the final weeks before she shuffled from this mortal coil, my impatience that she found it difficult to walk, difficult to breathe.

The night before she was thrown into the ICU for the final time, she asked me to read her comforting verses from the Bible. Having just converted to Catholicism a few years prior, I was never one of those who could conjure up a biblical verse like a witch conjures up a familiar. I tried to read from the Psalms, things that wouldn’t remind my mother of her impending death. She begged me to sit up with her, the raggedness of what was left of her receding voice refraining, “I can’t breathe.”

I told her that I had to sleep. I had to sleep or I would just fall asleep from exhaustion. That was the last night that I stayed up with a mother who was always there but rarely present.

Counting the Months, the Years

Since my mother’s complicated death, my sister and I would count the months since her early departure from this world. Every year, now, over a decade, we would mentally prepare ourselves for the fact that we would have to deal with our mother’s mortality, and tell each other, “Can you believe it’s been one year, five years, ten years?”

It was a practice my mother used to be in the habit of performing when her mother, our grandmother, died when I was in middle school, of the same wasting sickness. I remember sitting in the dark, listening to music during the summer, and feeling a tremor run through my body, a violent shaking and crying that would not abate for over ten minutes, as though I was sitting in the midst of a frozen tundra.

My mother and sister sat with my grandmother that night at my aunt’s house, as she slipped from the world, dogs howling as she finally let herself go. It was that moment that I, sitting alone in the dark at home, felt this icy tremor move through me, a shaking that would not abate.

After this, my mother would count the months and years of my grandmother’s passing, marking the time with the phrase, “You know, I can’t believe it’s been five years since your grandma died” every summer. She continued this practice, with that simple phrase, for the rest of her brief life.

The Enigma That Was My Mother

My mother was a complicated figure, a revered yet undemonstrative person in whose presence and shadow I still try to untie the intricate knots of my own life, the well-bound trappings of trauma and sadness, and a legacy she helped to build inside of me.

Years after my mother died, my sister and I started to feel comfortable talking about her life and death and their impact on our own. It was during my final year at grad school, in 2023, that we finally opened up, 11 years after her passing, daring to whisper the truth: that our mother was a complicated and flawed human being, not a hallowed saint, untouchable in her death.

Since I was a child, my earliest memories involved the constant seeking of validation from a mother who was never willing to give it, from a woman who hated her own ghost in the mirror so much, that she would create a ritual before work, focusing on her ugliness, her aesthetic imperfections. Watching this ritual, as she repeated Phil Collins’s “Everyday” before work impacted my sister and I more than we could ever admit.

The Absent Present Matriarch

Mom was distant. While she was always there, she was also never there. After my grandmother (who had, until cancer overtook her, helped raise my sister and I) died, my adolescence focused on this absence.

I usually say that my mental health problems began as a teenager, hiding in the bathroom to eat a sandwich out of fear of facing my peers, the years of isolation and distance, the constant crying. But they were always there. I was an anxious child, and the depression began soon after Grandma’s death.

Mom often worked overnight and spent the majority of her day in an exhausted sleep. Her bed was often her only solace, and she spent more time in than out of it. I didn’t understand this at the time, but would more viscerally get it as a young adult, the almost Victorian taking to bed, to sleep, as a way of coping with the disabling weight of depression.

I struggled painfully during that time, silently failing several classes, yet forcing my way into the gifted program. I racked up AP classes, tried hard to achieve some measure of academic success in the wake of having to retake classes in science and mathematics. If not for the assistance of very dedicated teachers and librarians from school, I may not have graduated.

I suffered in silence as my mother slept on. One of the librarians often took me to and from work. One of my teachers took me to an exam I had to complete for my remedial math class, mostly taken online. I received a voucher for glasses from the school when my vision started to fade.

Speaking to my sister of these difficult years recently, she was surprised to find that I had gone through these things, a dichotomy of academic success and failure, resting in one person. Thinking about this now, I am unsure that my mother even knew the extent. I became quiet and distanced, echoing the silence and distance of my own mother.

The Temporary Relief of College

Assisted yet again by the employees of my high school as well as the efforts of my aunt, whom my mother considered a rival, I somehow managed to get into my top (and only) college. Taking the two hour trip to Wesleyan every year was a hopeful moment, a time of connection, a flicker of hope in an otherwise bleak life.

I distanced myself from my distant mother. A few months ago, I found one of her notes, which she would send with the phone cards she would give me so I could call her. The ubiquity of the internet and smart phones did not exist in the early 2000s. Sometimes, too, she would send packages of a t-shirt she found me, a small plush toy that reminded her of me. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

In these notes, she would implore me to call her, to talk to her. I never responded to one in the mail, but would dutifully gird myself and make the phone call from the student lounge, using up the phone card’s minutes as I said very little to my mother.

College was a relief, a demonstration that distance wasn’t always the way of going about things, that there were people out there who cared about each other openly and affectionately. I shared this world with other broken young women, though I thought I was alone in my brokenness at the time.

The Stifling Grasp of Home

When I returned home after my four dutiful years, I felt the flourishing that I had experienced stagnate, and begin to wither on the vine. The depression that had been a hallmark of my youth returned, and I spent most of my time holed up in my room with my dog, my main interactions online.

I began to lose the connections I had made, and fell into a debilitating ennui, exacerbated by the strained relationship with my mother, who lived, after a time, in the other bedroom, smoking and staring at the TV for hours when she wasn’t sleeping.

The absence I felt was infused with something a little different, an aggression that simmered just beneath the surface, an animosity born of silence and discomfort. I realize now that Mom was so lost in her trauma that it was difficult for her to wrench herself from that darkness and interact with the rest of the world. I was a byproduct.

Before I left Wesleyan, I asked my abnormal psychology professor, who was also a practitioner, how to encourage someone to get help for their mental health problems. She offered me some advice, but reiterated that there is no way to pull the strings and make someone seek therapy or medication.

Years later, I understand what my mother was going through more intimately, how, if you let it, the PTSD will consume you, will take your life even if you don’t do that yourself.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

September 11 was a shared trauma. It was, like the Kennedy assassination, an event where those of us who were alive remember vividly where we were. The band Green Day wrote of the despair and brief glimmers of hope that Americans experienced as a country in the wake of this shared trauma with the album American Idiot.

“Wake Me Up When September Ends” could be viewed in the light of this. The beginning of September saw the first of many national scars the United States would take in the name of “freedom.” What followed would just be a continuation of September, a long month of transition, of falling leaves and cooler temperatures, of the infancy of never-ending wars and national trauma.

But when Billie Joe Armstrong wrote this song, he had the death of his father in mind. As a young person, he related, he remembered slamming the door of his room after his father died, and saying, “Wake me up when September ends.”

The idea of sleeping your way through trauma, through acute mental suffering, was one that was more than a little tempting for my mother.

Every September, my sister and I mark her birthday. Often, we take flowers to her grave, opened and closed without a funeral due to the conditions of her pauper’s burial.

My sister, aunt, cousin and I watched from a distance as the machine coldly and methodically shoveled dirt over a body we helped dress and care for when she slipped away in April. The cruelest month.

September is a reminder. I could never say it was a celebration of a life, as my mother only endured life. She never celebrated it. I could count on one hand the times I received the tantalizing validation I craved from her. She lived in the prolonged trauma of her life before she gave birth to my sister and I, the way pennies were placed in green gelatin for us children in elementary school on St. Patrick’s day, suspended there.

But unlike eager first graders excited for the small token, my mother could never dig herself from this state that was neither solid nor liquid.

My mother would have been 70 this year, if she had not passed away in her early 50s. It would have been a reasonable age to keep going, a reasonable age to retire and start relaxing and doing the things she wanted to do but did not have the time for.

September’s Memento Mori

I cannot but reflect on the life of my mother, the marking of the years, the birth of someone whom, in many respects, I barely knew, and who barely knew me. I think sometimes of her specter, of the ghost of her I sometimes see in the mirror when I glance myself walking by. I think of how I understand her trauma, her gelatinous suspension, more than I ever thought I would.

And I consider the choice I have.

My mother’s life, while it felt like a waste to her, was something less, and something more. It was a lesson to me, that, years later, I take to heart.

My mother did not want to live. She spent so long trapped in her own fears, her own trauma, her own depression. She worked and smoked herself to death, wearing the same three worn shirts over and over, the way penitents wore sackcloth and ashes.

She hated others, would talk about people behind their backs, resented any help she received. But she hated herself most of all. I wonder sometimes if she did not look in the mirror and see the ghost of her childhood abuse in her reflection, and look away in disgust.

But we have a choice, just as she had. We can sit in our trauma. We can lay suspended there, like a penny in gelatin. We can spend our lives in bed, spend our lives in a state of inactivity, yearning for years that were ripped from us by abuse, by the unfortunate circumstances of life. We can do that.

But we can live. We can choose to live. Memento mori, the expression goes. Remember that we will die. But in remembering our death, that we all have an expiration date of which we are unaware, we can choose to act in our lives. We can make those scary decisions, we can live outside of our fears, we can live.

Reading My Mother’s Life as a Lesson

September 22 will arrive sooner than I ever wanted. Likely, my sister will urge me to come with her to my mother’s grave, located an inconvenient distance in a public cemetery for the impoverished. We will carefully walk among unmarked graves, buried by the state, to her small memorial stone, which we bought with the disability money she finally received before she died, our inheritance.

We will probably say a few words. Each year, these words of memorial grow briefer and briefer. We will discuss, perhaps, our ideas about where she is now, the hope of her happiness in Heaven. We will then walk away slowly, shed a few tears, and get into the car and leave. My sister will save up flowers for the next time, a Christmas visit.

And I will consider the lessons that my mother taught me, long after her early demise. I will consider how to sit with trauma, how to push forward, how to care about yourself in the midst of frightening circumstances, and how to accept validation from yourself.

I will think about the stagnation that was my mother’s life, about how we would give her nice things and she would hide them away. I will remember her spite, but the spite that she gave herself over all. And I will tell myself that I will not waste away like that.

I sometimes consider that my mother was, in some ways, a walking corpse for years before she died. And she did not wish to live until her cancer diagnosis gave her an expiration date.

PTSD and depression can be all-encompassing. There is an exhaustion, a desire to just succumb, to let the trauma win. It is simple to succumb, to just sleep it off. And sleep is the inevitable and frequent response to a depressive state.

But, I learned from the book that was my mother’s life, that I do not want to wake up when September ends. I want to be alert and alive now.

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