Melancholy May and coffee lifelines

Posted On May 25, 2026

Has anyone ever noticed that if life is going well a subpar cup of coffee is barely a blip on the radar? It’s simply a little ripple that does nothing to upset the stable keel of your life. On the other hand, if the boat’s already rocking, it’s been a particularly rough week, or you’re already coming at the morning from a state of depletion, that first overly bitter sip hits like a tidal wave. 

The best measure of my mental state on any given day is how much attention I pay to mixing that first cup. Easy, breezy, and chatty – all good. Then come the mornings where I mix and measure like I am concocting a lifesaving potion – watch out world. These are the mornings where coffee feels like the last tenuous tether to joy. 

Once upon a time, May was my favorite month.  Growing up in the deep North it was the month where the snow finally melted and also (usually) the month it stopped falling. It meant  school recesses being enjoyable again instead of hypothermia survival drills and color and vitamin D began creeping back into our lives. May was the return of hope!

Last May delivered a gut punch my inner circle is still reeling from with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis for one of my dearest friends. The whole month was a blur of medical jargon, uncertainty and grief. It was a dreary, cold month with the weather mirroring the unpredictability of life and massacring a high percentage of my seedlings. 

A funny thing about the nervous system is how subtlety it can be triggered by weather patterns you don’t even consciously register. May rolled around this year in a mimicry of last year’s cold and drear, and I could feel myself being dragged back into all the feels of 2025. Then this May decided it had its own unpleasant surprises in store. 

We kicked off the month with a sickly 11 year old battling a stomach bug. Higher than normal fevers brought us to his pediatrician’s office at 2pm on the first Monday in May and by 6pm he was in surgery for a very unhappy appendix. 

We were lucky. He had barely started having pain, even though it had clearly been gumming up the works for awhile and had just started to accelerate to critical. He did great in surgery, came out of anesthesia spouting scientific facts about the original purpose of the appendix, and the general consensus was that they caught it early. It was all positive and great.  Could my nervous system hear that over the weather patterns and hospital smells? Not a chance. 

After a night of dozing uncomfortably on a shared hospital cot to the lullaby of monitor alarms and the hiss of compression boots, I staggered out into the world to try to get some caffeine a good hour and a half before the hospital cafeteria geared up. My only recourse at this hour in this little town? Dunkin’. 

I think I’ve gone into this particular Dunkin’ maybe 3 times in the near decade we’ve lived in the Midcoast. It’s small and most everyone uses the drive through. As soon as I went through the door I was met with hostile stares from the crew of 4 guys with overgrown beards and neck tattoos hustling orders through the windows. No one said a word to me and one glanced meaningfully at the automated order kiosk. In a haze of sleeplessness and adrenal let down, I jabbed at the touch screen and waited. And waited. And waited. About 7 minutes later. I wandered closer to the drive through, and saw that there were two coffees just sitting on the counter. No one had called out a name or a number, they had just deposited them with my drink ticket on top and expected me to psychically intuit their presence.

I shrugged. No big deal, Dunkin’ coffees were always a million degrees and probably still wouldn’t be drinkable for a half an hour. I grabbed them and headed for the car. I was half way there when my brain finally got my attention. There was no heat coming from the cup. Glancing down I realized the cups didn’t even have the paper protectors designed to insulate me from the warmth that was supposed to be radiating from the coffee.  With almost comedic slowness I stopped in the middle of the parking lot, took a sip from one of the cups, and was immediately hit with a tsunami of rage. 

I hadn’t been expecting much. This is considered sacrilege when you’re a New Englander,  but I’ve never been a Dunkin’ fan.  All I had hoped for was something hot and sweet that would get me through the day. 

This was hands down the ABSOLUTE worst cup of coffee that I had ever tasted in my life. The fact that it was cold was only the beginning of the insult. It somehow tasted tar bitter AND watered down at the same time, a feat that should have been impossible. This tasted like coffee that had been sitting on a burner overnight, had been shut off over a half an hour ago, and had not received even a fraction of the ridiculous number of sugars I had ordered. I stood stock still in the parking lot for a good 30 seconds, seething, weighing my chances of improvement (and survival) if I went back in and confronted the pirate crew running the counter.

 Ultimately I opted to drive back to the hospital with my failed coffee mission. I may or may not have shed some tears of frustration on the way. My husband tried to assure me it couldn’t be that bad, right up until he took the first sip, quietly put them down, and walked out into the hall. I sat next to my half dozing son, zoning out to  Bugs Bunny on the tiny hospital screen, still fuming when my husband returned from the nurses station with two plastic hospital mugs, and an incredible amount of sugar packets and non dairy creamer. 

Wordlessly, I sat and mixed like my life depended on it. One non dairy creamer, a touch more from a second packet until the color was right. One sugar. A second sugar. Sniff test. A 3rd sugar for good measure and out of a certain desperation. I wrapped my hands around the cheap, maroon mug, felt the heat, took a sip. 

A sigh that felt like it came all the way from my toes rolled through my body and I felt my nervous system downshift, just a little, for the first time in 24 hours. I gave my husband a teary smile and mouthed thank you over our dozing child’s head. 

A couple dozen cups of coffee later, the lad is almost back to 100%, life is starting to return to some normalcy, and my morning caffeine doesn’t feel quite as high stakes. And yet, I’ve been more mindful this May, making sure to hang on to the little life lines, lean into the little rituals, and try to be in the present moment while honoring memories of the past. One sip at a time.