An Ode to Winter in Boston
Adventures can look like settled places, roots established over tiny landscapes, foreign lanes walked until they become familiar paths home. Predominantly motivated by Covid, 2021 cemented a number of insights into my psyche as the paths home in West Seattle became too familiar. Somewhat stagnant and over-tread.
I think I became stagnant. My thoughts over-tread.
In that quarantined space, I had stretches of time where I lived as the book one flippantly fans the pages through. Days passed in the same motion, indistinguishable but for that restless displeasure of dreams unfolding only in my head. I wanted to paint a broader brush on my life’s story. I wanted the view from my window to overlook something other than California Ave SW, to acclimate to the sound of the green line D train instead of the red C line bus, to look at the constellations with them, to hear what family and friends were up to 3 hours before me. I wanted an adventure that included stretches of seasons you could only know if you lived in the Northeast. A Bostonian adventure.
My adventure continues on into my now third Boston winter. I started this piece before the first, in anticipation that my desire to write would be greater than the cold bite that numbed my hands. When I wrote of the broader brush, it did not include the end of a 2-1/2 year relationship that was so close to a marriage I hoped for. Nor did it include the death of my Grandfather, the honoring of his life happening the day before the flight to my Brighton apartment. Nor the death of my Dad, abrupt as winter said goodbye to the hints of spring. The excitement has tried to hold sadness in check even as grief and I matured together because I so wanted those bright strokes to define the whole story. I forgot the hand creating them is a melancholic one, imperfectly healing from my roots in Seattle to deepening roots in Boston.
This slightly strangled ode, written with hands and heart dried and chafed from wind chilled air, is a difficult one. And such a needed one.
bright strokes
The sun shines often in Boston winters. I still think tenderly of the Seattle gray, but I am grateful for the light that enlightens me. Grief looks different in sunlight and it looks different on me here. In years past, it sat heavy on my shoulders. It curled my back with the promise to forever ache, but now stretches with me into mountain pose. We take in the landscape together on walks, my tears dance their way down my cheeks from the way grief and I talk. And like a patron to nature’s exhibition, I don’t wipe the evidence of its raw presence, I know I resisted many chances to release them while alone in West Seattle.
I still cringe at the winter cold with as much displeasure as the discomfort of hurting loved ones. I grow tired from the early darkness as the grief of memories exist too alive unlike the bodies of my dead loved ones.
Melancholic Hand
I learned that an ode is a poem meant to be sung, but when it is written with a melancholically inclined hand (as is mine), it is hard to sing in praise. It ends up as a drowning lamentation (key word: strangled) rather than clear joy. As a chronic optimist (with the melancholic hand), I have often thought the most healing act is to fill the senses solely with light, for melody to announce bloom, silver linings collected even if unrecognizable for the fraying threads that they often really are.
All the while death remains a fearful thing. All the while I resent the wilting of winter. How I thought ill of this necessary, beautiful, season. I thought ill of the wilting because death, darkness, and the cold were not beautiful to me. Every association tasted bitter, took me back to my Mom’s bedside in hospice, found its way beneath the layers to touch my skin, ripple me with goosebumps, harden the scars.
I struggle to appreciate winter because I struggle to appreciate death in myself.
It is hard to distinguish ownership in the end of a relationship. How long do I stay in their shoes I can’t fit into? How long do I temper the temptation to dissociate and instead release the wail from my tight throat? The wails instead indented the page with words I didn’t know how to speak. How hard that must have been for them. If I show you the journals you can feel each letter along the back as if it was braille for how close I was to puncturing the paper, puncturing the image I held of my life with someone I will always love.
It is hard, too, to recognize how life continues after death. My grandfather’s postcards and voicemails, museum visits, and dinner reservations at Horizon House senior home are relics that I cling to. But clinging requires desperation, a kind of possession that ends up carving away the faces in photos because it is too hard to see them framed. I am often not present in the winter, and it has meant missing the moments where he has talked to me by way of wind and chill. In the season of death and rest, when I choose to welcome, I can hear some form of him when I relax my rigid muscles.
I am seasoned in death, but my Dad’s is fresh in unexpected ways. Seven months and my muscles ache like a fresh wound. It is as much 8 year old Kels crying as the 32 year old writing this now.
imperfectly healing
Bright strokes are beautiful. Frayed lines of silver can be a frustrating anchor. Melancholic hands are achy. Heartache creates cracks I fall into. I look to replicate that one winter day where I let gutteral cries fall from the deep of my belly onto the living room floor with the help of Ekua and their grief ritual practice. I kept my mouth open for more to come, the saliva trickled onto the wood as my ego cringed and my heart glowed. Often when I cry, there is some level of restriction, that hiccup vibration of the chest an attempt to control or pace the purge of pent-up feelings, but that day held only jarring release. It was an ode to death. From it, I had more honest room to cherish.
I was told I ruined the relationship. release
The many messages of “how’s my dear granddaughter? Tell me your availability for dinner”. cherish
I should have kept checking in on his health. release
They said they tried their best. cherish
They helped me so much through that first winter in Boston, offered new perspective to death, tools to cope with flight anxiety that I now look forward to being in the sky, embrace of the rawness of the world without always coating it in positivity…all of this that I became more tender to my fear. I will hold that as its own ode. The almost punctured pages? Covered with ink and salt seeped with my gratitude for all that I learned from them.
There is the anger. The restless reflection. The hurt, too.
Gratefully Dying
Near my new home, no longer engaged to be married, rings returned, voicemails saved but numbers no longer tied to the two generations above me, I sit at a coffee shop. Beneath the stream of classical music, as the hum of conversation floats around focused eyes on laptops to the rush of the coffee machine, I cry. I don’t know if anyone sees it or feels it, but it is coming too fast to suppress. No way to hide it. I don’t care to.
Grieving is an abundant act and breath and prayer is my remedy. So, I talked to God at the center of that coffee shop, taking in as much oxygen as I could, letting the salty water spill over my lids like my spilled cup of coffee from the tremorous journey to my lips, until I could steady myself again. Each time I do, I am a new person. That much closer to the death of my fears, my insecurities, the false narratives, and yes, my body.
It is in this moment and many others that I know I am still growing as I am dying. I can be angry and in love. I can be full and lonely. As I walk through this winter season, I practice the painful cherish of all of those parts of death that teach, and release all of those parts of loss that eat at my soul.
I still believe “I love you dearly” is indeed a very deep kind of love.
I will never stop traveling and will send postcards like you. And to you, with my prayer’s pen.
I will heal the hurts that do not make up all of you and hold myself as you could and so often did not.
.Kels.