The Cruelest Month

T.S. Eliot famoulsy wrote that the cruelest month is April. I have found that the cruelest month is January. Eliot spoke of how winter kept us warm under that blanket of snow. I dont say that January is cruel because of the shorter days, the frosty weather or the New Year’s Eve hangovers. I label January as the cruelest month primarily because the month goes on and on. To me January never seems to end. Each day of January feels like they come one after another in a never ending, cruel reminder that all the fun has ended and now there is nothing to look forward to. Decemeber has been turned into a month long, Saturnalia like, party that ends immediately with the appearance of January. The best proof of this sentiment are the dead and discarded Christmas trees that begin to appear on curbs on December 26. THe finality of January is cruel. The depression begins for me the minute New Year’s Day is here.

I can link this impending change in mood to a string of personal losses that I have experienced during January. In facr, two of the most signifcant losses I have experienced in my life occured in January. During this month, my father and my grandmother both died. I am always brought back to memories of windswept cemteries and frozen ground. Alot of emotions and not alot of answers. These scenes weigh me down and add to the growing depressive feelings as if they have hands of their own and seek to pull me down. These memories are like Christmas gifts on an annual subscritption that keep coming back and giving year after year.

January feels like an interruption to me. I am a future oriented person but I never see the future in January. I only see the past. The used up, mentally exhausted, better left alone past. The wasteland of lives over, with the only recurring memory of them being the way they ended. Mental cruelty and obsessive grief.

December always feels like an ending month. December is a month full of excitement anf joy. Everyone, alot of us pretending, to be happy and excited. The parties and customs all revelove around the expectation that the waiting of the Advent season will come to an end and that the joyous arrival of the Lord will have made it all worthwhile. The joyous end of waiting ends for me in January. The feeling wilts and dies just like the browning needles of those discarded Christmas trees that begin to decorate the curbs on December 26.

December will end and January will begin regardless of my wishes. January is to be endured and tolerated, not celebrated. I am content to wait for much more freindly months like April.

T. S. Deary

12/30/23