I couldn’t tell you what it is about Octobers, but nearly every drama and trauma of my adult life has landed on me in an October. It makes for a month littered with traumatic anniversaries and destructive memories.

October has been a haunted month for me, for reasons entirely unrelated to Halloween.

Some of those events were of my own making and doing—which doesn’t make them less traumatic, but adds a layer of guilt on top of the rest. There was my divorce, from my first marriage. My annulment, from the con artist who was already married to someone else—my (very brief, but far-too-long) third marriage. The suicide (in front of my eyes) that ended my second marriage, with my husband’s funeral two days before our wedding anniversary. Suspension from my academic career, due to my alcoholism. Shut-down of my restaurant (which I’d opened on a shoe-string budget with loans from family after I got Sober) after I relapsed into alcohol again. The three-months-early arrival of a baby for whom I’d already found an adoptive mom (an “oops” baby—in my 40s—from the con-artist marriage). Everything medical went sideways, and I landed in the hospital’s “internal medicine” wing for a full month (along with baby in the NICU for three). A mental breakdown that landed me in the psych ward for ten days.

Year after year, October brought me bad things. I don’t generally think of myself as a superstitious person, but as I tallied up my “negative anniversaries” in October, I came to dread this month every year.

October gave me one highlight, though, ten years ago. A kind man with a shy smile—one of the elders of my church—offered me a “loaner” car when he saw me (six months pregnant in 90-degree heat) walking up to church, after my soccer-mom-van broke down. And when he handed me the keys, he asked me to dinner. (So yes, I was pregnant on our first date!) When baby’s arrival sent things sliding sideways the following week, he came to visit me in the hospital.

I disentangled myself from the bed, took the rolling pole that held my IVs (and my catheter-bag, charming!), and then my unwashed, rumpled, hospital-gowned self took a walk around the maternity wing with Jon. He reached out to take my hand, and I had all the butterflies of a teenager brand-new to love. (And heck, if he wasn’t running from me THEN, I’d surely never have to worry about how I look in the morning, for the rest of my life!)

Jon had been widowed for five years, and (as the two widowed people in our congregation) our pastor may have had a hand in nudging us toward one another. In any case, Pastor Matt married us a handful of months later—so even though it was a year with one of those “October traumas,” I had this ray of sunshine enter my life in October too.

I continued to get twitchy at the approach of Octobers, though, and my run of rough Octobers wasn’t over yet. The psych-ward stay happened in our first married October. That felt like catastrophe—but it still had a “sunshine” side too: a resulting diagnosis of Bipolar, and (more importantly) treatment for that. And it’s probably not a coincidence that once the Bipolar got treated, I found myself able to stay Sober as well.

As the next October approached, I got twitchy again—so Jon brought up the topic of my fear in an A.A.-related prayer group we attended together every Tuesday evening. With all of us in a football-type huddle, arms around each other’s shoulders, we prayed for a number of things—including a lifting of the “October Curse.” I gritted my teeth through the month, and every Tuesday night we continued to pray that I could get through October smoothly.

For the first time in over a decade, I didn’t add any new “trauma anniversaries” to my October calendar. The power of prayer!

The “curse” has stayed lifted—but every year as I get to the end of October, I still send up some extra prayers of thanks, that PTSD didn’t get me, and neither did anything else. I made it through again—as always, with a lot of help.

To end on a note of humor, since now you know all the history… On the morning of my wedding to Jon, my mother (a very no-nonsense person!) said to me, “Listen up. You’ve been divorced, widowed, and annulled. You have literally gotten out of a marriage every way possible. THIS one sticks!”