The third Monday of January has been declared the most depressing day of the year. Blue Monday was identified in 2005 by Cardiff University lecturer and psychologist, Cliff Arnall, who chose this day as the saddest of all based on calculations of “gloomy weather, post-holiday debt and low motivational levels.”
I remember the third Monday in January as the saddest of all, too. I can still see—will forever see—the hundreds and hundreds of crows circling the grey afternoon courtyard, the doctor in my periphery telling me that a scope at this stage was impossible.
I went into the holding room and stood over Don, his eyes opening for the last time as he commanded, “Get me out of here,” recovering in time to smile briefly at the nurse who, rightly so, was not privy to our familial intimacy.
I always loved him for things like this...that Hansel und Gretel quality of our relationship that set us apart from a world with whom we were not always aligned (which had become our choice, in most instances).
He never wavered in illness, either, always recognizable as humble, humorous, passionate, funny and protective. One morning on the elevator he put his head down on Noam’s shoulder, and once he let me rub his feet (finally), but this was as close as he came to letting the people he loved take care of him.
He was as sick as a person can be in the last eight weeks of his life, wasting away while an incompetent oncologist glibly overlooked a simple diagnosis, despite the roadmap laid out for him. Admission to hospital and treatment, in fact, began a short five days prior to Don’s death, chemotherapy too late to do more than whiten once-coffee-stained teeth; days too late for the scope.
He died later that evening, his family sitting around him, his dutiful, loving daughter devastated, and his sons disbelieving.
Eight years later I sit here without him, missing him, remembering the crows, remembering the darkening sky, remembering the sound of his breathing and the sound of it—the sound of him—gone.
Blue Monday hardly fits a description of the day for me. Maybe I should call it Devastating Monday, Irrevocable Monday, Inconsolable Monday, a day when gloomy weather, post-holiday debt and low motivational levels are followed by immutable longing and the jarring certainty that life will never, could never, regain its once effervescent, conspicuously tender, forever redemptive sweet glory.
