Opinion Today: It’s OK to mourn the end of summer

The passing of a season is a good time for reflection.

View in browser|nytimes.com September 2, 2024 By Parker Richards Staff Editor, Opinion Summer is ending again. Climate change has made it a hot one for many of us, but still: Vacations have been taken, inchoate romances found and lost, hydration sought, green leaves pondered. I'm one of those people who, even during our best summers, wish a little for autumn. The wool and cashmere will come out, the linen and light cotton be put away. The rumble of the air-conditioner will no longer block the church bells from haunting my apartment. But no matter how much we love autumn, a seasonal change can be a time for reflection. We mull on what we've experienced, what we've lost, what we've gained. We think about our own choices, how we've dealt with another few months of life. The year is more than half-done, after all. Cody Delistraty has thought a lot about grief — he's written a book on it, in fact. And Cody thinks that the end of summer is a space for grief, not the intense, soul-racking kind that comes with the loss of a loved one, but the kind that comes with reflection. We're thinking now, he argues, about the summers we've had, but also about how we may have failed to achieve what we wanted with the season. Maybe that just means a small sorrow that we didn't get to the beach quite as much as we'd have liked. In a guest essay for Times Opinion, Cody argues that it's all right to grieve summer's end — and that doing so can be healthy. We should, he says, look back on our lives: journal, think, ponder. And if that means a little grief, that's OK. Read the guest essay: Tam Stockton Guest Essay How Should We Mourn the End of Summer? Sadness is a natural response to the passing of summer. We need to cope with small griefs using mechanisms similar to those we'd use for large griefs. 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