An annual autumnal anguish

It feels like summer’s finally over. It’s been pretty hot even through the majority of September, and the rains that came were either parts of thunderstorms or hurricane-driven, so they didn’t really feel like “fall” rain. Then yesterday I read about the fall foliage outlook, which makes it feel like fall … and it started raining.

The change in seasons is more than just a semantic difference for me. I always get a bit doleful this time of year because it signifies a pretty dark anniversary for me — the gut-check realization that things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. And it always coincides with the first rain of fall.

It was literally my first day at work. The first day of my first job right out of college, and I got a Facebook message from a high school friend I hadn’t spoken to in probably four years, asking for my phone number. He called me later, around 6 p.m.

I remember exactly where I was when I got the call, standing in an empty office, staring at the drops of rain as they rolled down the window. I remember walking home immediately after, lost in thought as I gazed at the trees that had just changed their colors.

My friend called me to tell me a relatively good acquaintance (the technical definition would be “person I was friendly toward who I never happened hang out with”), who I had gone to both high school and college with, had taken her own life. (I wrote an essay about that day some time ago, if you’d like to read it, but it’s much too long to even excerpt here.)

It was the first time I had really dealt with death of someone my own age after high school. Death is unexpected for the young, but at least sometimes it feels like it makes a perverse sort of sense: crazy accidents, car crashes, sudden medical emergencies … none of those really give off the “Well of course it happened that way” vibe, but at least there’s some logic behind it. In those cases, maybe there was a car involved, driving much too fast to stop. Maybe the rope broke when he/she went rock climbing, so nothing could be done.

But this? This felt more like typing something into the computer and having it just freeze up, completely unable to do anything except flash cryptic error messages that don’t actually help you fix the problem. Unexplained error. File not found. Connection unavailable.

It broke my heart, in a somewhat oblique way. I identified with her, as I had known her practically my entire life and even received the same scholarship to the same university 300 miles away from our hometown.

I felt responsible, like there was something, anything, I should have done to help. After it happened, I immediately resolved that I would do better by all the rest of my friends. I promised myself I would do a better job at keeping touch with them on Facebook (which, looking back on it, is like the bare minimum one can do and still be said to be “keeping up”), and making sure to call and visit and … of course it didn’t happen. In my defense, I was still living 300 miles away from the vast majority of them at the time (since increased to nearly 2,700), but the simple truth of the matter is you can’t keep up with everyone you’ve ever met, or even everyone you’ve ever called a friend. It’s just not possible to do that and have any other kind of life (up to and including eating, sleeping and working).

But there are things you can do. Things that I do. Little things. But I think they help — not just to mollify my own guilt, but I think they also might help the people I’m “keeping tabs on.” For example, when I see one of those cryptic depressed Facebook statuses (“Everything is SO HARD lately” or “UGH why can’t it just stop?!”), I don’t immediately dismiss them. I don’t necessarily jump into action right away, but I will keep an eye on things. I make sure there haven’t been a lot of those kinds of posts in a short span of time. If the number starts to worry me, I try to figure out if anyone else has been in touch with them — either through the comments or even something as stupid as the Likes.

If it seems like no one’s been reaching out, I make sure someone does. I try to be discreet about it — if it’s someone I don’t really talk to on a regular basis, I might try to go through a mutual friend or something, but if I can’t find anyone else I will make it awkward and just start chatting them up (via whatever means are available to me).

It may feel weird at first, but it’s completely worth it.

I think about these things all the time, but it gets especially bad around this time of year. When the first rain of fall comes (again, not a calendrical definition, more of an emotional one), I go over the whole thing, again and again. It brings back a little of what I felt that day, walking home from work, leaves crunching underfoot.

Autumn generally has a melancholy feel to it, what with leaves turning brown and falling back to earth. It may have been thematically appropriate from an aesthetic point of view, but it certainly didn’t make the experience any easier to get through. And it makes me all the more resolute to make sure I never have to endure the entirety of that feeling again.

I always try to make sure I write for a purpose, to make sure that I have a point. So let me just leave you with this: Live like you’re responsible for someone else. You don’t have to make sure everyone you know is always happy, you don’t have to be available every time the smallest thing in life goes wrong … but at the same time, make it known that you’re available for people when they truly need help.

In the grand scheme of things, being available for that kind of comfort, advice or help is an incredibly small portion of your time, and will be a minuscule part of your life — but it could be huge for that other person.