Best of the Cheerful Oncologist: "The Days Dwindle Down to a Precious Few"

[Editor's note: this essay is adapted from a post written on September 7, 2005]

Oh it's a long, long while, from May to December,
But the days grow short when you reach September...

After a dozen weeks of heat, of searching for green canopies of shade, of donning wet bathing suits and dodging buzzing bugs, summer is coming to a close. Now as the earth has done for more cycles than can be fathomed, it will begin to lean away from our sun like a 6th-grader avoiding a kiss and produce the second of the two seasons of change. Now is the time for dreamers to reflect on the annual shedding of life that autumn begets.

Is spring or fall the more emotional of the planet's biannual transformations? When spring arrives to green up the neighborhood and cheer up the neighbors who have languished under months of dim light the cliché is that all is new; all is reborn - no doubt bringing a smile of relief to the woolen-cap crowd hovering at the local public house. Unlike Mother Earth, however, we cannot regenerate after a season of barrenness - we get just one birth, and that one hits us a little too early in our development to catalog the moment. By the time we are grown we have only vague memories of what it was like to be as young as a warm day in March. Spring is the season that reminds us that unlike the clusters of leaves whispering above us, our time on the branch cannot be repeated.

But now as we put away the shorts and flip-flops and struggle to justify an ice cream run, we experience a more personal emotion - the season of loss. The drifting piles of leaves against the doorstep, the sudden chill across our back when we forget to bring a jacket, the abrupt twilight that falls from the sky during an evening walk, remind us of the twin journeys we and the Earth are on.

Earth will circle back to bring us summer next year. For us though, another year has passed, never to return.

Those who sit outside in the last gasp of a September night may sense the connection between the coming cold and their own remaining days. The two events announce themselves with clarity and precision, like a campanile knelling the final hour of the day: gone...gone...gone.... Before long, before the dew dampens our feet, we wander back inside. From the street a quiet square of yellow can be seen glowing into the soft darkness - then it disappears.

Summer slams into us as hard as a back-slapping cousin up for a visit. It is the season that demands attention, muscles and precise planning. It flings us upside down and fills us with sand; it roars with colors from a thousand delights and never asks once if we're ready to stop. For twelve glorious weeks it owns us.

Then it dies. Autumn sweeps the last remnants of it into forgotten corners and we stand at the window, quivering with remembrance and mortality.

For just one moment this month, as fields turn brittle and winter can be heard in the trees, let us turn and see ourselves once again in summer - in the arms of our tanned parents, running furiously toward a meadowlark, soaked from the river or from rain, surrounded by friends, laughing - always laughing. Our voice is strong. It will carry us far into the months ahead, providing a lasting warmth against the fading light.