Suzy Says

I have never liked August.

For me, it has always a month of endings. We used to go to Maine every summer, where my father worked at the Mt. Desert Island Marine Biological Lab, or MDIBL for short. So all four of us kids were packed up the day after school ended, and we drove to Maine from NY state. We stayed there until the day before school, when we drove back. In retrospect, I am amazed at my parents’ fortitude, since it was a 12+ hour drive, and well, four kids.

So we had three glorious months of summer to fill with nothing but pleasure: swimming, sailing, climbing mountains, exploring the woods, seeing friends, buying penny candy at Bee’s (est. 1874), the annual lab picnic and the Fourth of July boat races. This is an unparalleled luxury to be savored, because once you grow up, you never, ever get that again. When August reared its ugly head, you started seeing school supply sales, a grim reminder that prison doors would soon be yawning and the joy of the summer would be over for another year.

In August, 1977, my mother’s mother died, two weeks after Elvis Presley (I find it odd that Elvis’ daughter chose not only the month her father died, but the 25th anniversary of his death, to get married yet again. But then again, she did marry Michael Jackson, which automatically puts her in the certifiable freak category). All of my grandparents would die within the year: my father’s father on Christmas Eve, 1977; my mother’s father less than three weeks later; and my father’s mother in August, 1978. They were all born in the 1800’s and lived into their 80’s, but it was a staggering blow to lose them all in such quick succession, and it didn’t help August’s cred with me, either.

And it’s not just my family. The dark month also saw the death of the beautiful, doomed Marilyn Monroe, just as she was really starting to get her life together and at the height of her beauty – she never looked lovelier than she did in the photos Bert Stern took of her shortly before her death. She is surely one of the few women who can make a scar actually add to her beauty. Marilyn had this to say about aging: “I want to grow old without face-lifts…I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know yourself.”

The talented, lovely singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash last August. She was at the beginning of a very promising career and life, being just 22 when she died. The brilliant guitarist and songwriter Stevie Ray Vaughan also left us in August in a fiery helicopter crash caused by pilot error. Note to self: never fly with anyone in show business. It does not improve your chances of survival.

On the last day of August 5 years go, Princess Diana was killed in Paris. I remember waking up very late that night to see John standing in front of the TV, saying “Oh my God” over and over again. When he told me what had happened, I couldn’t believe it. A year later, I visited her family home and her peaceful resting place, overwhelmed with sadness at the loss of this beautiful, complicated woman who had just wanted to be loved.

This Sunday marks a year since my father died, suddenly and unexpectedly, in his beloved and native London. In the catalogue of death and disaster in the month of August, this will always be the worst for me. I don’t think I will ever see the advent of the eighth month of the year without thinking of the phone ringing at 6:30 in the morning and hearing my little sister’s tight, unnatural voice saying, “Suzy, Dad’s dead.”