Last night, Billy opened his arms and hugged us both. He thanked our little family for a fun summer then walked our daughter off to bed for the night. Second grade began this morning for her. We walked together in a light drizzle until we found her door. The crowd was all combed hair and new backpacks. A fresh start.

“Why isn’t kindergarten called ‘1st’?” she asked me once, on another morning walk.

“I hear ya,” I told her. There’s kindergarten, a garden of children, a grade in its own right, but then there’s the first grade. It’s the start of something else. We agreed it would be hard to do it any differently now.

But she’s not wrong: it’s all strange and relative. What is 2nd grade but the one before 3rd and the one after 1st? The rest is detail we have to fill in.

This August will be full in its own right, even if it didn’t have to straddle two states of being, summer and school year. I didn’t want to miss that moment, the gathering on the sidewalk, the chime of the bell to mark the change. You’ve arrived, you’re here. You’re in the right place. This is it.

I chose the first day of school over a big corporate conference this year, the biggest annual gathering for the business we partner with. It’s thousands of affiliated people, in one of those sprawling downtown convention centers.

When they first released the dates, I felt some offense. Didn’t they realize this would overlap with the start of school? How could they expect me to go, to choose the conference over the launch of a new school year?

Long story short: no, and they don’t, and it’s not personal.

Oh, right.

It’s not personal.

My choice is, but none of the details are about me.

Back at home, the drizzle settled along my hairline and I was as dewy as the yards and soccer fields were. I started my workday and put on a playlist—”Abundance,” I’d named it. Along came Eva Cassidy singing “What a Wonderful World.”

My mother loved Eva Cassidy, and almost any version of “What a Wonderful World.” She made an art piece out of the lyrics once, with a canvas and gold lettering and Mod Podge and copied sheet music and a tiny globe in the form of a marble. This summer, when I finally sorted through the last of her craft supplies, I found the sheet with the missing letter stickers and recognized immediately what I was looking at. She was there, in the spaces left in the paper backing. What couldn’t be said again.

“Too young. So sad,” she once said of Eva Cassidy’s story: Cassidy died of cancer in her 30s. “Such a beautiful voice.”

Eva Cassidy made her last public appearance one September night twenty years ago. She closed the set with “What a Wonderful World.”

August is on its way to September, my mother’s birth month. She didn’t like it, she had told me.

“9/11, Dan and Mori…” she rattled off, by way of explanation. There were a few too many heartbreaks among its days. Some things had come to pass—not things she had any more control over than her own birth, but they landed in September all the same.

Her birthday is sometimes a biggie for me. I’ve spent a few of them on sober mom meetings, missing my dead mother and crying. I’ve spent time alone in my house, scrapbooking or painting something or otherwise keeping my hands moving.

Sometimes I listen to musicals and go for walks and talk to her.

Sometimes I tell stories about my mother to my daughter or recite lists of the things she loved—songs, hazelnut coffee, that scene in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty where the fairies fight over the color of the dress. Blue! No, pink! Then blue. Then pink.

There’s nothing about her earthly birthday that does any of this to me. It’s just one of those days, like the first day of school, that makes me think about others of its kind. She was once here for this day, and now she’s not. It doesn’t help that it happens to arrive just ahead of another fall milestone: a seasonal slide toward depression. It happens to a lot of people, it’s not personal. The days get shorter and the colors fade. We need the light. Humans can’t create their own.

Every summer, I make a plan with my primary care doc.

“If I need a fall bump, can I get one?” I ask about my antidepressant. I’m on a lower dose: it would be reasonable to double the dosage, and to expect that to help. Should I need it.

Two years ago, I struggled mightily as the light faded. I was nearly paralyzed with depression by October. It was the worst spell I’d ever experienced. So when the time came again last year, my doc tried to reduce the friction it would take to get help when I needed it.

“You wouldn’t have to come in,” she said when I asked about a fall bump then. “Just email me. Get in the portal and tell me how you’re doing.” It was such a relief to know that was all it would take. Click a few buttons, say the word, and we could adjust the chemical inputs. It wouldn’t be the whole story, but it was an important part.

This year, she was ready. She sent over two prescriptions the minute our appointment ended: one for my current dosage, one for its double. I had a three-month supply of both tucked into my backpack within hours.

There’s no way to prepare for any of these moments. The first days, the last, the waves that knock the air from my lungs. But there are these things that help, that make it more possible for me to be present.

That’s all I want. It’s all I wanted this morning, with my kid and my guy. To be there with them. A lot of things can wait, but this one wouldn’t. Trees of green, red roses too. She’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.

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