Prelude

Fall is a tough time for me.

I don’t really know if that’s true—but I think it a lot. It feels like something I should say. The fall is when I celebrate two terrible anniversaries. The death of my parents.

It’s strange that I only realized, this year, that they are exactly 4 weeks apart from one another. October 17th and November 14th. They both fall on a Thursday this year.

Right now we are in the middle of that cadence. In the four weeks between the death of one and the death of the other.

At first, I thought of this time as a prelude—as the years before the other’s death. The long stretch of time when I built so much—when I crafted the narrative, the pillars of my beliefs—all of that, condensed into four weeks.

But the dates are wrong for the metaphor to work. In real life, my father died first. In real life, he started it all, he shattered the illusion. But in the cadence of these four weeks, it’s my mother’s death that begins the march. It’s the closer of the two—the more recent, the fresher, that crashes through the chilly weather. And my father finishes it all. As though it is a slow, quiet finish. The echo of a final note, hanging in my mind.