October is a melancholy month. Along with the beauty of the autumn colour, the golden, slanting sunshine and Keat’s “mellow fruitfulness”, there is a finality that hangs in the air. For this is the month of endings. The summer finally leaves us, the days become darker and the temperatures drop to frost our gardens, readying us all, humans and wildlife alike, for the hardships of the winter months to come.
Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash
I have strong memories of an autumnal holiday spent with a group of friends one year in Tuscany. We were three couples, and in the heady days before children came along, our holidays were very indulgent affairs. We would spend hours at the market buying local produce, cook slap-up meals for each other, drink too much wine every night and get up late in the morning.
I remember that particular holiday for several reasons, not least the wildlife: we found a scorpion in one of the bedrooms, bats flying round the sitting room at night, the occupants of a hornet’s nest that were not at all happy when we disturbed them by lighting the pizza oven, and an army of black squirrels that made so much noise clattering about in the loft at night that we had to sleep with pillows over our heads!
The house was on a rise in the middle of an olive grove with thickly wooded hills all around. We watched, one afternoon, as a helicopter in the distance, time after time, emptied its water bucket onto the flames of a forest fire. We had never seen or imagined such things then. Now, sadly, they are all too familiar to us.
But what prevails most strongly for me from that holiday is the mood of melancholy. I don’t mean we didn’t laugh or enjoy ourselves. It was the land around us and something in the air that felt sad. The summer was over. It was late September and autumn was very definitely on its way as still-hot days gave way to chillier nights. The countryside had begun to take on the hues of the season and everything was still.
One friend had brought his paints, canvas and easel with him and each afternoon, as the rest of us read or lazed in the sun, he stood, silently, painting the landscape he saw around him. I can’t remember now, how long after this we all began to have children, but perhaps it was this I felt sad for, the ending of our carefree days and the realisation that this might be the last of the times we would spend together as this group.
I am feeling especially melancholy this October as health issues have dogged several of my nearest and dearest recently, and the eldest of my two brothers died on Thursday. It was not a shock: he had been ailing for quite some time and struggling in hospital for the last seven weeks. It was dreadful to watch him gradually fading - and fighting - and whilst we realised he was unlikely to recover, there is always the vain hope that things might turn themselves around.
Sadly, it was not to be, and now we have all the tasks to undertake that arise with someone’s death. I am lucky, I do not have to do this on my own. I have siblings, and we each play our part and support one another and my bereaved sister-in-law. It must be so hard to do all this alone when one is grieving and feeling unable to do much in the way of anything practical. I know now, when October comes along in future years, I will think with sadness of my brother’s passing. It seems fitting he has died in this month I have always thought of as being an ending.
Nick was 15 years older than me and moved to London from our home in Belfast when I was growing up, so I never really got to know him well until later in life. He was quite different to me and my other two siblings – good with figures, old fashioned and traditional, to the point of being eccentric, working in the insurance broking industry while me and my other two siblings are creative types and work in the media. It would be fair to say we all thought of Nick as a bit of an oddball, but he was our oddball and we loved him and his funny ways very much.
When my parents died, quite a few years ago, I found it very difficult, but accepted that this is the way of things – a child will almost always lose their parents rather than the other way around. But when a sibling dies, it is much more of a reminder of one’s own mortality and the fact that we need to grab life by the horns and make the most of every day.
Yesterday I walked in one of the Royal Parks near my home. It’s the rutting season. The huge red stags, their muscular bodies fuelled with testosterone and adrenaline, and heads crowned with impressive stands of antlers, strut around to impress their herds of up to 40 female hinds and to assert dominance over other stags.
Their loud, baying roars can be heard everywhere as they challenge other males and sometimes a fight will break out with violent clashes of antlers as the steaming bodies crash into one another. These battles determine which stag is going to gain control over the herds of females.
The smaller stags lie in wait for their only chance to try to mate with the hinds, when the dominant stag is in battle or exhausted after a fight. The female red deer are in oestrus now and the winning males will mate with the hinds in their herd. The young develop through the winter and in late spring, once the weather has warmed, the fawns are born and life begins again.
This set me to thinking that autumn isn’t, therefore, just about endings, it is also about beginnings, and very special ones at that. I was delighted to read that one expert, in National Geographic, mentioned that the word fawn comes from the Old English for ‘glad’. How could one experience any other feeling but gladness when seeing the first fawns of the season?
I came home reminding myself that the cycles of birth and death are often intertwined and that with every ending, there comes a new beginning. Me and my siblings are extremely lucky to have had such a loving and supportive upbringing (see “Why my parents were practically perfect” in the Home Truths archive). For this reason, I have resolved not to feel sad about my brother’s passing, but to accept the inevitability of death after life and to celebrate the 81 years Nick enjoyed, along with all the special times we siblings shared when we ate, drank and laughed together as one.
As the demand for magazines, sadly, decreases, many journalists and well-known writers have moved here to Substack where they have the freedom to write what they wish, talk directly to a large audience and, if readers take out a paid subscription, earn money for the work they do. You can support me and my work by taking out a paid subscription – or, if you feel you cannot afford the £1 a week it costs, please feel free to take out a free subscription. They all help my audience grow. For either option, just tap the button below
So sorry for your loss, it is never easy to lose a loved one.
Xx
Sending a big hug. Very sorry to hear of your loss. Lovely, lovely words as always Susy.
Thank you