Death-anniversaries; reflections at year three- Hollie Starling’s Shared Experience

It is well accepted that a significant bereavement produces ripples, often for significant periods of time. But even now, though I know exactly when to expect those ripples, I am still surprised by how easily they can knock me over.

Since it happened, August isn’t really August anymore. Its associations have become stretched and distorted. August was the endless, edgeless, sun-sticky expanse of the summer holidays. Later Augusts: the in-between time, a summer job in my home town, spending all my wages on nights out and treading water before exams and responsibility and decisions. Right up until that final one, August was for the out-of-office, mid afternoon beer gardens, napping on a patch of lawn, planning nothing much, worrying still less.

In the UK at least it feels like the month of August is a slow run up to the long bank holiday at the end of it. The last spurts of summer and an almost craven need to maximise returns. It was at the beginning of this bank holiday, in 2020, when my dad killed himself. That day was overcast, the temperature cool, making the feeling of being out of step with reality even more acute. It still feels as though it’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t happen in August. August: the word itself looks weird to me, the odd man out among the other sensible months. It means glorious, regal. I think of augury. An omen of death, divined from the behaviour patterns of birds. 

I have a particular interest in the seasons of the year. Last year I wrote a book about it, exploring my grief and efforts to understand my dad’s suicide through the lens of seasonal changes and the rituals humans have created around them. During my research I stumbled across something surprising. Everyone, including me, tends to assume that suicide rates peak in the winter, but it’s actually the summer months when numbers are highest. Why would this be? Every suicide is a combination of individual factors, almost always beyond the ability of family, friends or healthcare professionals to attribute anything as reductive as a single ‘reason,’ but there are some theories to explain the apparent seasonal influence on suicidal ideation. Perhaps the person experiencing such feelings finds summer challenging because of the contrast; their pain may be thrown into sharp relief against everyone conspicuously enjoying themselves. As a result they feel out of step, seasonally unanchored.

It is now August 2023 and this ripple has reached me. I’m finding reasons to stay in. I’m taking a perverse delight in the drizzle of this summer, a disappointing wash-out to most but to me a convenient reason to avoid making social plans. I used to find the absolute height of pleasure to be the palest rosé in a glass from the freezer and an empty afternoon’s worth of ‘just one more top up?’ But nowadays I do my Dry January in August, because I can’t trust myself to join in with this toast to the sunshine without compromising my emotional floodgates and falling to bits in public. Even my sobriety is out of step with the year. 

I find I have to tip-toe around so many bits of the calendar. Christmas, his birthday in February, the absolute wrecking ball that is Fathers’ Day. Now though, as the third approaches, the ‘deathiversary,’ though I will perhaps always find it exquisitely painful, is morphing into something else. Unlike the other occasions there is no greetings card for it, and I suspect it is the specificity, an intimate ritual of remembering and marking to only those cognisant of it, that gives it its power. He had a day of birth that we celebrated, and now we have the opposite. It’s the closing of the bracket. Whatever its difficulties for me, the day belongs to him. 

So I do plan to ‘celebrate’ it. I take a strange comfort in the provocation. With each passing year he is further away, and the continuation of my introspection is, to larger society, perhaps a bit unnecessary and even morbid. Which is why marking the day feels so important. To pivot my entire year around, even. To defy that ‘moving on’ that is unspoken but expected, for that one valve-loosening day to indulge every cell in my body that needs to hold on to my dad, pour over our shared bank of memory and, yes, ruminate on the manner of his death, as a lighthouse in the dimness, even if it’s torch light is just for me.

A curious thing, since I’ve been involved in suicide prevention advocacy, has been the addition of another significant date in my temporal calendar. August brings the anniversary and then exactly two weeks later, World Suicide Prevention Day. I am surprised how much this day has come to mean to me. Everyone involved in its observance on 10th September has their own rewritten calendar with its own terrible pivot. Those we spend in private, with a catalogue of emotions that may change from hour to hour and from year to year but never completely dampen. WSPD however is gloriously public, a facility of memorialising and reminiscence, an opening of wounds in company that comprehends, or as shared voices in outrage at mental health policy and lethal prejudices; all acting as reminder that hope comes from community. The first WSPD after my dad died, through want of anything better, I lit a candle and talked a bit to people online about him. Barely an observance, but it struck me somewhere deep down.  

Death anniversaries can feel tyrannical, an ambush forever lying in wait. Parent loss in particular may produce a heightened sense of vulnerability, and that yearly reminder can be almost as disorientating as the first. Wanting to block out the world and pick at the scab, perhaps combined with the beauty of loving reflection and the intensity of raw emotion, may be something we instinctively wish to do alone. But don’t disregard that there is a community of people who understands that. They also know that while the first year may be the hardest it doesn’t necessarily make the successive years easier. If you can bear it, engaging with WSPD in any small way can help. It is a shared anniversary for all those who understand that loss isn’t one fixed date on the calendar. 

Written by Hollie Starling

The Bleeding Tree : A Pathway Through Grief Guided by Forests, Folk Tales and the Ritual Year by Hollie Starling is out now in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats and is available to buy here.