Summertime Sadness

CW: Suicide, mental illness, substance abuse

I don’t remember when I first felt dragged down by a season that so many favor.

It’s not that I don’t have any happy memories of summer, but that summer in my childhood was also the season of a lot of alone time while my parents worked or golfed, leaving my brother and I to watch movies in our damp, unfinished basement with Slurpees we bought at 7-Eleven using the $20 bill they left on the counter. Summer was camping trips in which I (a kid who preferred to spend her time alone, reading in her room) was forced into close proximity with parents who fought constantly, with no where to escape for weeks at a time. In my teen years, summer was self-conscious afternoons at the local lake in my one-piece Speedo while the other girls strutted around in bikinis.

But those memories could be mistaken for sugar compared to what summer became later, after I graduated high school. It was summer when I hopped up the side of the highway on crutches—two weeks after a knee surgery—just outside my hometown after my mother struck me in the face and I made her pull over so I could get out, even though I had no where to go. It was summer when I came home from my second year of undergrad to find her addicted to crack cocaine—my father had fled months prior—and endured four months alone in the house with her. It was summer the next year when I tried to keep myself awake each night she took too many benzos and passed out in bed with a cigarette fuming between her fingers. And, it was summer when I came home after my second year of graduate school and dislocated her shoulder as she held onto the window of my car while I tried to pull out of the driveway to escape her drunken rage.

In those years, I used to flee to the other side of the lake, since it often felt like the only place to go when I was exhausted from trying to keep her alive, the sweet water cooling the boiling anxiety and hopelessness inside of me. But, eventually, nothing soothed the overflow of too many memories, many of which I held alone. I started to feel a heaviness each summer as the weather warmed, and a sense of dread. I lost motivation. I slept through afternoon after afternoon, just as my mother had done each summer. As my depression deepened, so did my desire to no longer exist.

There are four people in my immediate family. Three of us have, at one time or another, felt determined to remove ourselves from this world. One of them succeeded.

Shuswap Lake at sunset 13/07/24

Two weeks ago, after ten years of avoiding seeing a psychiatrist,