Sadly, the summer is coming to an end. Seasonal change is inevitable. Times waits for no man and the earth keeps on rotating on its tilted axis, which is why the seasons change. That knowledge is the extent of my recall of high school biology.

Change is one of life’s great challenges. At summer’s end we all must face the browning of the leaves and the turning of the page. Labor Day has come and gone and with it the end of blessed summer. As much as we might like to hold onto summer for a few more months, this is not possible.

Often enough, time is marked by loss. We are upon the anniversary of 9/11, and everyone of a certain age knows exactly where they were on Sept. 11th, 2001. Or to go back further in time, we all knew where we were the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

Other losses are far more subtle. The losses brought on by aging are like that. First there are a few more winkles, then some aches and pains, some weight gain, a growing lack of mobility and finally the expansion of your group of acquaintances, which will now include a long list of medical specialists such as podiatrists, dermatologists, cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, radiologists, and urologists.

This week was U.S. Open week at Flushing Meadow and Serena Williams said her good-bye to tennis with a heartfelt, tearful interview where she expressed gratitude for having a wonderful career and said it was time to move on. But not everyone gets to speak to journalists to say good-bye. Most of us must face and resolve loss on our own. Freud said that losses cannot be resolved but instead must be replaced.

Losses must be dealt with, and the question is how. I suspect everyone has their own way to cope with loss. In Japan they have a form of therapy called The Sleep Treatment, which puts depressed people to sleep for a while. Some people drink to cope with loss. That works for some, but who wants the hangover? The culture offers slogans like “this too will pass” or “there’s always tomorrow,” but these have only limited value.

Any form of art allows for one to address loss. One of the primary reasons people take photographs is to memorialize experiences. The famous photographs of Dorothea Lange such as “Migrant Mother” captured the exhaustion and the bravery of Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s. People take photos to hold onto the past and not let it go. This is a good way to manage loss.

Writers manage loss by writing. Maybe the best at this was E.B. White, who wrote the classic essays “The Ring of Time” and “Once More to the Lake.” “The Ring of Time” was about Ringling Brothers Circus rehearsing in Florida with him as witness to a big brown circus horse as it harrumphed around the practice ring under the supervision of a 40-year-old female trainer. The training session included her daughter, a scantily clad teenage girl, who jumped on the back of the horse as it made its circle round and round the ring.

White managed to transform this repetitive boring little task into an unexpected moment of otherworldly enchantment by pointing out how the younger generation, the teenage girl, will someday be replacing the older generation, the mother, as time slowly moved them forward. This is great writer at his height, confronting the sad inevitability of change and aging. He is repairing that which needs repair.

Artists do this kind of thing all the time. One of the reasons Julian Schnabel became a world-famous artist was due to his use of broken plates on the surface of his earlier canvases. This idea was borrowed from Antoni Gaudi, the architect genius of Barcelona who used all those mosaics on his buildings and parks. Mosaics and broken plates imply the putting back together of what was once broken. Like the Humpty Dumpty poem but with a twist since all the king’s horses and all the kings’ men do put Humpty together again.

The symbol of a broken plate that is repaired is just what we all do when we lose something dear to us. We all lose things like youth or love or safety or status or something as simple as summertime and our task is to somehow fix the loss, replace the loss or get over the loss. In order to be happy and content we must act like artists and be creative enough to repair or replace what we have lost.

And so when it comes to the end of summer, I suppose that means it’s time to get out the skis and start waxing them up. And as the green leaves are replaced by the brown leaves, I suggest you get out a pen or a paintbrush or an instrument and use some of your creative ability to fight off this seasonal loss.