Wake Me Up When September Ends
This deeply moving song by Green Day begins with the line, “summer has come and passed” and goes on to lament, “here comes the rain again falling from the stars, drenched in my pain again becoming who we are…”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say to me, I wish I could sleep through the holidays, or the birthday, or the anniversary, or the winter, or the summer, or September for my friends who lost loved ones 25 years ago…. Wake me up when September ends.
And ironically even though we may want to sleep through it all, many of us are sleep deprived, we can’t firkin sleep! Our brains won’t let us. We may try to hibernate, or wish it away, or keep busy, but it always catches up. Grief demands our attention.
Yet, when we wallow, cry, or sob, or feel the feelings we don’t want to feel, or while our brains traverse the maze of the woulda, shoulda, couldas, or revisit the hospital room, the accident site, or the funeral parlor, we are in fact “becoming who we are.”
Most of us don’t want to become this strange new person; our world is shattered, our dreams are lost, our future has become a nightmare, and so we aren’t very interested in becoming anything.
We knew how to do life with our person, but now we may feel quite lost. Who am I now? How do I go on? Do I even want to go on? We resist, we protest, we can even begin to hate the situation and even turn in on ourselves.
25 years ago on September 11th, the world changed for everyone, but it was personally and immensely shattered for some of those who created and serve at Stephy’s Place. The word bereavement means to be broken in pieces and they were as broken as anyone could ever be. Over these last 25 years I have had the distinct privilege to observe how they have gradually, slowly, meticulously and painfully picked up the pieces as best they could and put together the new person that they would become; the person each of them is today. Those beautiful, broken people show us all that we are together in this, and they provide living proof that grief does indeed heal and can bring us to a new place of personhood and perspective.
Yes, September will come and go, as will all the other months to follow, and if we do the hard work of mourning, we are allowing ourselves to gradually become the person who we are to become. In other words, every time we cry, sob, talk, share, or write about it, every time we give ourselves permission to mourn, we are in healing, transforming, becoming.
But please don’t be surprised when you find yourself going backwards. Many people want to just give up when they feel this, but believe it or not, backward movement is actually forward movement in grief. If you are going back, it means you need to. Wherever you are in grief is exactly where you need to be.
Grief is a painful, spiritual journey of self-awareness. It’s certainly not a journey we would have chosen for ourselves. Regardless, it is a journey on which we are currently embarked. We must learn to be kind, gentle, and loving with ourselves. It’s a time to get to know yourself and an important time to love yourself and be compassionate with yourself.
A time to mourn can become a time to befriend yourself like never before.
Stephy’s Place Reflection by Kevin Keelen, M.A. September 2026