I came across this essay by Mary Cregan in the Times. Although the author's focus is on depression, and although her own descent into depression was precipitated by the death of her infant daughter - a fate I have neither suffered nor would risk, the fear of such an unendurable loss being, for me, among the most powerful psychological impediments to having children - besides these things, Cregan describes a phenomenon that I, too, have lived with. For most of my life, spring has brought not a sense of renewal and optimism but a heavy, dark anxiety. I do not feel uplifted by spring but oppressed by it. And while I have never attempted suicide, as Cregan has, nor suffered the unique loss that she has suffered, I share in the sense of injury that she lays at spring's feet. Cregan writes,
It's a popular and perhaps dangerous belief, reinforced by that inescapable Christmas classic, "It's a Wonderful Life," that winter is the peak season for suicide. Yet experts have known since the late 1800s that it's not true: More people take their own lives in the spring months than in other times of the year. No definitive explanations have emerged for why this is so.
I can offer an unscientific one from my own experience. For those who are trapped in despair, spring can feel like an affront, the gulf between outer and inner worlds too wide to cross.I can relate to that. When I was 16, my mother was hospitalized with an undiagnosed illness sometime in March. It was no longer winter but not quite spring. This was long before the days of MRIs, so the doctors had no way of seeing the cancer that had already colonized her pancreas. Consequently, she was subjected to test after test, week after week, as the ground fully thawed, the flowers bloomed, and the robins returned on their annual migration north. Spring was my mother's favorite season and one of her biggest regrets that spring - her last - was that she was stuck in the hospital, missing out on all of its beauty. By the time the surgeon had performed exploratory surgery and was able to deliver the death sentence that the cancer would carry out a few weeks later - on Mother's Day - spring was in full stride.
Throughout that period of hoping against hope that she might defy the odds, my family and I made a daily pilgrimage to my mother's bedside in the hospital. And with each passing day, as life returned to the outer world beyond her window, my mother's own life receded before our very eyes. I distinctly remember, thinking back on my 16-year-old self, the incongruousness of the exuberant joy with which the season seemed to imbue everyone and everything around me while I anticipated with dread, panic and misery the impending loss of the person I loved more than anyone else on Earth. Spring, by its very nature, seemed to mock my suffering. A part of me has hated spring ever since.
My twin sister, for whom the loss was no less than mine, perceived that spring just as I did, and has dreaded many subsequent springs just as I have. She describes her reaction to our mother's death not just in emotional but in physical terms: a feeling of combined despondency and sickness. But, unlike me, my sister resolved, long ago, to reclaim spring from the grip of death and restore it to its rightful place in her heart and restore to it, its rightful meaning. She planned her first pregnancy so that her own daughter's birthday would be a consolation every May - the month of our mother's death - as well as a commemoration of our mother's birth, which also occurred in May. "I wanted a spiritual connection to her," my sister told me, "and also to convert my associations with spring from death and despair to life and hope. I wanted that baby, and I wanted her not a month sooner and not a month later." I think my sister was right.
Not long after sharing these thoughts a couple years ago, a stranger wrote these words to me:
You might wish to consider forgiving spring for being the unwitting cruel dagger in your grief, if only because I would venture to guess your mother would not wish you to hate (on her behalf) the season she loved.
I think this stranger also was right. Every year, now, I try to take his words to heart and try to forgive spring, not only for my own good but in remembrance of my mother. Especially in remembrance of my mother since, besides loving spring, her guiding belief was that where there's life, there's hope. And what is hope, itself, but that which springs eternal?
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