The End of the Summer of Our Discontent

Falling back signals a new start for my body and me.

CW/TW: mention of pregnancy loss, death, and sexual assault.

The data is clear; when we ‘Spring forward’ rates of car accidents, suicides, heart attacks and strokes increase. This disruption may only affect others for a few weeks, but for me and my mood disorder friends, the physical and mental effects don’t shift from us until we ‘Fall back’.

I must be wary of mania in those first few weeks of springtime. I was distracted by wedding planning last year, and I spent months before, and the big day itself, in a hypomanic episode. It did enable me to assemble an epic five-day celebration without collapsing, and our spontaneous honeymoon staved off my inevitable crash, but most summers I’m not so fortunate.

Me as a very happy (and slightly manic) bride dancing with my husband and the Warwick Gombeys. Photo by Three Act Studio.

Yes, I know, I know, time is a construct. But so is our entire society and we still have to live in it. One year, I tried to act as if the time didn’t change, but found it was impossible unless I became a complete recluse.

To be fair, that is how I spent most of the pandemic. During that seeming end of days, I came to call myself “The Hermit of Bailey’s Bay”. I’d watch the ocean crash against Bay Island from my window thinking that with all the iguana-resembling rock has seen over millennia, this was a minor blip. For me, the experience of spotting the first cruise ship on Bermuda’s North Shore after 18 months of empty ocean came as a surprise – this relic from a faraway past drifted by as if in a dream.

Bay Island and my favourite resilient tree on the trail behind our home

Truthfully, I’ve never returned to my pre-pandemic level of socialising. This may be because I started dating my now-husband (a father to two sons) in January 2020 and my life has changed so much since. I am rarely alone these days, which is hard for someone who requires solitude to restore myself. I can’t as easily crash into a non-verbal, hidey hole for hours after I’ve been peopling out in the streets. Healthy partnerships require communication and connection (blahdy blah blah) and that takes up energy.

Plus, Ajala has an irritating tendency to talk through every minute of a movie. There is so much pausing and shushing by me that there is no chill in our Netflix (my first bout with Covid stole some of my hearing which also doesn’t help). He’s the cinema chatterbox my sister Nadia and I would silently judge with only a glance. Except, dear reader, I married him. And thus, the added cacophony from the outside world can drain me if I don’t claim enough silent time on my return.

Like many situations in life and trauma, I can’t completely blame my summer seasonal affective depression on saving daylight.

I wasn’t always like this.

I was born in the middle of August in Bermuda! I love heat, sunlight, the sticky salt spray, warm pink sand between my toes and plunging into the ocean. In England for our month-long summer visits, Granny Rose would make me the most delicious chocolate hazelnut birthday cake with hints of orange and strawberry jam to devour during my annual pool party. Long summer holidays baking myself browner in the activities of the day delighted me.

So, what changed?

This year, there was no doubt about the root of my despair – experiencing the death of my daughter inside my womb on our first wedding anniversary and the resulting postpartum depression and grief consumed all the light of the summer sun. I have struggled to do much of anything but survive.

Finally, after months of twice-weekly therapy, an intensive treatment regime and total surrender to the latest layer of emotional, mental and physical pain, I have begun to emerge.

Four weeks ago, I went out alone for the first time and managed to both enjoy myself and avoid a panic attack. For most of these past few months, within minutes of leaving the house my heart rate accelerated, my breath became sparse, and perspiration formed. In May, I had joked that my husband infected me with his sweating gene when I became pregnant. Suddenly, there was no more joking or laughter or much of anything at all but tears and pain.

It makes sense. My body knew more deeply than my mind wanted to admit; we were post-partum – albeit without a baby – and should be cozied up, healing wounds, breathing through grief and giving ourselves time to catch up to the shock of it all. My mind kept saying “If I could just…” (insert next mini-hurdle) then I could prove I’d be okay. My body knew better. And now I can see it took another full trimester for us to step out into the sunshine again.

But what about the summers before?

Is it that bipolar disorder tends to begin surfacing during teenage years?

Or was it that I was raped a day before my 16^th birthday?

Were my glowing memories further soiled by an accidental teen pregnancy the summer of my gap year? With no money or health insurance coverage to navigate Bermuda’s expensive, confusing and restrictive abortion process I worriedly watched the weeks tick by until I could gather enough funds to fly to Planned Parenthood in New York City. (The irony that I had to flee to a country steeped in the battleground of maternal health and fertility is not lost on me).

The trauma of that experience – knowing how deeply I wanted to be a mother one day; while also knowing how completely unwell, young and lacking qualifications I was at the time – haunted me for years. Yet, that procedure also gave me a chance to get well, earn a tertiary education and stay alive long enough to want to start a family today.

Could it be because my dad died in July, three weeks before I turned 25? Wearing black as we walked to his grave in the high heat of the midday sun, my friend (and later our wedding singer) Mia Chambray sang his favourite song Ave Maria acapella. She learned it within five days and her beautiful voice reverberated through the graveyard, bouncing off the headstones as the pallbearers struggled to lower him with sweaty hands slipping on rope. That quarter-century was so painful to celebrate as I drowned in grief; just as this past August’s milestone fortieth was one of wishing to be dead with my daughter instead of alive, alone, without her.

Chair dancing with a bad back during my birthday serenade. We cried sharing memories of each other, but they brought me my first joy after Alora’s death. Video by Dion the Creative.

Before we were married or even engaged, in the highest heat of our second pandemic summer and a week after my birthday, I discovered my husband’s year-long secret relapse. The pain of betrayal annihilated me and further forged sadness into my body. To his credit, a year later he rewrote the story of my birthday, proposing to me at home with a handwritten letter, surrounded by photos and belongings of our Ancestors, including my dad’s glasses, calling them in to bless us.

Our proposal coffee table. (Thank God we no longer have that rug).

Same kitchen, same day, when Alora was only a twinkle, and we were newly engaged.

We married during the summer solstice and while I began to love summer again, my body did not catch up to these newly told tales. She keeps the score, the record, the archive, she keeps it all - a museum of losses and violations and death.

Every spring, when we turn the clocks, she braces for what is to come. I soothe her with my words, convince her there’s nothing to fear, but inevitably we walk together through this life. She and I both lost Alora. We both grieved her in our own way – sometimes in sync, often at odds, but she’s the one who’s always right about the how and the when. We’re on her time.

She speaks her own language, and I’m learning to listen. It hasn’t always been easy, but it has always been true. And I’ll be sharing just how I’ve discovered the Rosetta Stone I need to translate her messages to me in part two.

Coming soon.