What Stays: A Response In Notes

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Fall is the time of death. What I think I love—toasty fires, wool sweaters, frosty noses, bronzed falling leaves, burnt marshmallows, red ears, hot cider, apple crisp and chai lattes—they turn into sickness and death... Bare and empty trees, vacant spaces in our hearts, runny noses and a chill that wraps its frigid fingers around my heart and keeps me from ever getting warm....

October six years ago our grandfather died.

Funny how the dates blur; funny how we slip back into life after life itself is shattered. What does it say about our place in the universe that we humans fight so fiercely to survive beyond the blows a natural order brings us, that when our comrades and our wise men and our soulmates go down we go on, and that we recover in us (all but the most brutally ravaged by circumstance) a sense of beauty and joy despite the severance of all happiness? Why do we survive? When the blow falls again, will we? These are the questions I'm asking myself over dishes, over impromptu baking projects, over stretching out a back wrenched and twisted, in the darkness over a damp patch in the couch. And you, little sister, you must be asking your own. Fall is the time of death. Some days I half believe it. Most days, I am convinced autumn is the season in which we're granted to be most alive.

Autumn is calligraphy on parchment, autumn is a leaf-covered bough acknowledging the motherhood of the earth, autumn is a quickening of the lungs; it is the excitement of holidays and family and reunion. We grow darker and colder in autumn, we remember our own mortality, and as a result we wake up to what we love most about the earth and about our existence. Yes, part of autumn involves dying. But the eternal ice it ushers into our world is a myth. Autumn doesn't bring ice, it brings change—sometimes we, being humans, can't tell the difference.

Where is the line drawn between changing and dying? We look at the former and see the latter, but what if it isn't that at all? How are we even to know? Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone—the one speaking was the one chosen to conquer death, to shatter the binding alienation of it. But He was afraid. Death is still alienation. It is separation, it is the dashing of hopes, it is the severing of a connection. It is change in its most brutal and elemental form: spirit being torn from matter, a heart that loves being wrenched away from so much that it loved (wrenched away from all that it loved? only the heart itself can answer that, never we who look on).

I can't remember how October looked six years ago when the call came from Mom to tell us that when she got home from work she had something to tell us. She seemed so calm in her urgency, so steady. I can't remember what summer felt like last month when she called again and asked me how I was doing, and the moment she inquired I knew the pathology report had come in and knew it was bad. Then too, calm. The worst bit about all of this is having to tell people. They're going to be so disappointed, and I hate to disappoint them.

It seems all the leaves are falling at once. Three days ago I drove twenty minutes to sit for an interview, and a scant patch of brown greeted me along the way; yesterday I went in for orientation and rust-coloured woods thronged the road. If summer and autumn paused at the door to have an affair, that affair is ending; autumn moves on. Autumn always moves on. Does that make it a harbinger of death? Maybe. But I can't see it that way, not every day. I can't live with an autumn that only ever embodies dying.

Because here's what comes with the sharp drop in temperatures, in the shriveled leaves of a Pennsylvania fall season: hope. Hope that the suffocating humidity of the summer months is to itself terminal. Hope that all of the priceless moments of an irrational season will infuse the rest of the chaotic year with a sense of order beyond the mess. Hope that everything alive when the air is quickened will be present still when an array of colours gives way to a washed-out brown. Autumn shows us the bones of things; it teaches us what can be grasped to keep us anchored and what can only be carried with us. The leaves go with us wherever we set foot, and people are like the leaves: they come, they flourish, they fall, and we keep going, holding their imprints sacred in our hearts and silently yearning for the day when impressions in our souls are set aside for the real thing before us.

If autumn murmurs one thing, it is that the real thing is as present as it always has been. Not because we see it in front of us as we think it should be, or because it isn't crumpling and decaying with horrifying speed, but because beneath all of that we know that the seed of renewed life is thriving, because autumn begets winter and winter has never failed to beget spring. The leaves come back. The grain of wheat sown produces offspring by the hundredfold. And we go on living.