Embracing the evening

What feeling blue at dusk can teach us.

My mom tells me she sometimes feels bluesy at dusk. “When the sun starts to set and that cool night breeze arrives, I feel so sad and nostalgic and I don’t know why,” she said. A friend who was drinking too much once told me that evenings were the time of day when he most craved alcohol. “That’s when I start feeling depressed and a drink makes those feelings feel less bad,” he’d said.

Dawn, like summer, brings sunlight and birdsong. Sunrise is a time for coffee, finding out what’s going on the world through the news, and “good mornings”. There is hope in the newness of the day. This is the time of youth, of new, exciting adventures, of romance, childbirth, travel, and discovery.

Evenings, like autumn, are a time when things are put to rest, when the light of striving and doing fade and the world begins it’s retreat into darkness and silence. But there is still enough light left to see the ending of things. The children are gone, the careers have fizzled, the days of wild roving are over, and the body is already going to waste. You realize: “This is it. This is the sum of my life. There are too many more yesterdays than tomorrows and today is slipping away”. Metaphorically, dusk is the usher of death.

Like my mother and friend, I too experience heightened grief-related emotions during the liminal hours of twilight. My awareness of the passage of time becomes most acute as the sun begins its departure. The funny thing is, in my dreams, it is always evening. The sky has that peachy or purply pastel hue that makes everything feel soft, like it’s getting ready to melt away into nothingness. When I was a high school student living away from my family for the first time, evenings were when I felt most homesick. That ache in my throat threatened to push rivers out of my eyes. I would think to myself, “How silly you are to be crying like a child over family who are still alive and just an airplane ride away.” I wondered why homesickness hit me with such ferocity at dusk, and this was what I came up with: Maybe the light of dusk is what the ambience is like in heaven — the original home of my soul — and so in the evenings, I remember that place where I came from and it makes me sad because a part of me misses it and longs for it so, yet I know it is impractical for me to exist there in my present state.

For my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, I went on a family vacation to the Canadian Rockies with my parents, my husband, my sister and her partner. It was the first family vacation we’d been on since I was 16 (I’m 47 now). One evening, my father, mother and I sat on the porch watching the sun dropping down behind a mountain. My father, who is losing his vision, put on some music and started to dance. My mother, whose breathing is now labored, joined him.

A week before this trip, I watched “The Life of Chuck”. There is a beautiful scene where the lead character, a 39-year-old accountant named Charles Krantz (Chuck), hears a busker drumming and spontaneously starts to dance on the street — the most carefree, uplifting dance that brings joy to everyone witnessing it. Chuck would die nine months from that day. Later in the movie, we see that even though Chuck didn’t consciously know he was going to receive a cancer diagnosis, he had, as a teenager, already seen how he would die, perhaps he saw how old he would be too.

Maybe in one way or another, we’ve all seen this also. Do you feel the sky’s sorrow at sunset? As the light dims and the air cools, do you hear the whisper of all the things you’ve loved, lost or are losing? Do you catch glimpses of all the dreams that came true and the ones that didn’t? When the evening comes, we can hide, or get drunk, or rage against the dying of the light. Or we can dance. Dance our way home.