Grief and Winter
Emotions I must write about to feel fully.
The winter before she died, she did not get to look at the snow once.
It’s always something I think about. When the streets are icy and chimney smoke billows high in the air, I think about what she will not get to see or touch ever again. The five senses are more important when you’re grieving— they’re palpable things, not just the thoughts that burrow beneath the grooves of your brain.
I learned that feelings, like people, can cease to exist in an instant.
She died in the room we shared. The ends of our twin beds brushed against each other and the white walls stretched smaller when it held the both of us inside.
At first, we barely spoke. We’d argue when we did.
“Get out so I can change,” I’d say.
“There’s a bathroom ten feet away,” she’d snap back. “I’m reading.”
I would roll my eyes and huff. Sometimes, I would walk right over to the staff member she despised and ask him to tell her off.
He had an affinity for me— my unbrushed curls, my swollen eyes, the sweatshirts that hung over my knees.
She told me she thought he was creepy. I disagreed because he snuck me spare cookies after dinner and hid them under my pillow.
“You’re just jealous” I’d say. “He likes me more than anyone else.”
He was forty and balding. I won’t write his name on the off-chance he finds this. I won’t write hers, either. There are certain facts I’d much prefer to keep to myself.
We shared a room for three weeks inside of a facility I will also not name. It looked and smelled like every other state-run hospital— the screaming, the crying, the small hints of laughter whenever someone told an off-colored joke.
Each patient acted like a child and an adult at the same time. They all carried history inside of them, festering and oozing like wounds left untreated. Medicated to the point of near-sedation, they sat and wilted. I watched them.
(Five years after my discharge, I can’t imagine what I must have looked like to my parents. Did they watch me sit and wilt, too?)
I lived there for eleven months months of my life. My roommate lived there for the rest of hers.
For some reason still unbeknownst to me, we became friends. We might have recognized the futility of arguing without much of a reason other than boredom. We might have realized how vital it was to find family within each other, how thin our blood ran when no one else was there to see it. Something about a tree falling, alone, in the middle of the woods.
We both liked to make noise.
I moved out of our room and into another wing of the hospital. We still completed puzzles in the common area, our elbows brushing. We invaded each other’s personal space and shared the same copy of The Stand by Stephen King. It didn’t feel like much of an invasion— she’d ask me to twist her long hair into Dutch braids, sitting patiently beneath my feet.
The months inched by in tandem. Neither of us was allowed to step foot outside. From behind a sheen layer of plexiglass, we watched summer slowly fade to autumn.
“Do you miss your family?” she asked.
“They bring me coffee almost every day,” I said. “They’re only allowed to stay for a few minutes, though. And my sister’s too young to visit.”
She nodded, the lump in her throat bobbing up and down. “My mom’s gonna visit soon. She told me she has a surprise for my birthday.”
We sat in stillness. Neither of us mentioned the fact that her mother had not visited for four months.
We continued like that— speaking, but not addressing. Not feeling; just experiencing. We’d talk about books and Scrabble and puzzles. We’d leave out the real parts of living with a disease and a diagnosis, the harsh reality of therapy sessions and the crippling flashbacks. The scars. The lesions. The failures.
Her birthday passed. She turned sixteen. The staff made her a red velvet cake that tasted like cardboard, but I had never seen her so excited to be somewhere. She received a stuffed animal and a brand-new 1,500-piece puzzle.
“We’ll do it together,” she told me.
Although her mother never came to visit that day, she was happy. She laughed at jokes and beamed when we sang, our faces illuminated by the candles that we were somehow allowed to light in the ward’s kitchen.
I consider her birthday to be The Last Good Day.
There were a few more Okay Days dispersed within her final months, but mostly Bad Days. Days where she did not get out of bed. Days where she got out of bed but only to scream. More often than not, I watched four staff members drag her limp, tired body back to the room we once shared.
I knew she was growing exhausted. It seeped from her eyes, to her pores, to her bones. She was growing exhausted from the fight it took to live.
My medication started working. I began to smile again— fully, with rows of my crooked teeth on display. I was allowed to go home for weekend passes. She’d congratulate me and ask me to bring her back souvenirs from the outside. I bought her a journal and a new pack of Crayola markers.
“I’ll draw you a picture,” she said. “Of the vacation house I want to have someday. Maybe in Rome, or Massachusetts.”
I got better. I still don’t really know how, but I did. My therapist told me she would release me soon. My mother cried. My father kissed me on the forehead.
“This is what you’ve worked for,” he said. “I want you to have a better life.”
When it came time to bid my goodbyes, I visited all of my friends from each unit. I gave them little envelopes with letters inside. I hugged the staff member who saved my life. I flipped off the creepy balding man who asked for my Snapchat. (Fuck his extra cookies.)
Before I left for good, I found her sitting on the rickety couch. Her eyes remained glued to reruns of the Maury Show. Her hair began to thin at the ends, frizzy curls wrapped up in a ponytail. She stopped asking me to braid her hair a few weeks prior. She stopped talking at all, really. She stopped making demands and jokes. When I looked at her then, I didn’t see much of anyone I had ever called a close friend, a sister. It shook me to my core.
“I’ll miss you,” I said. I meant it. I already missed her, even though she sat a foot away from me.
“I know,” she said, her body still aimed away from mine. “You need to get out of here, though. I’m happy for you.”
Despite the newfound silence and distance, I know she meant that, too.
Five years later, I regret not giving her a hug. I regret not pulling her skinny body to my own, holding her close for just a few moments. I regret not telling her how loved she was. How many years she could remain rooted to the soil, how the sun's rays could eventually hit her in just the right place. How much peace she could find within rainfall.
I found out about her death through a garbled phone call from an acquaintance who left a few weeks after I did.
“She died,” he told me. His voice was very matter-of-fact, lacking permeance and grief.
I didn’t ask how. I didn’t ask any questions. I hung up and cried to my mother. We cried together.
I realized that the system failed her. I realized that I could experience survivor’s guilt. I realized that the first snow of every year will always make me feel grief. I realized that every birthday that passes will make me feel grief. I realized that I could not braid my hair without thinking about letting hers slip through my fingers. I realized that braiding my hair makes me feel grief.
Maybe I will always be a ball of it— the grief. The guilt. Maybe everything will lessen as I become distant from my experiences and the memories begin to fade.
Today, it is snowing for the first time all winter. Ice blankets everything I touch and see. The five senses are important when you’re grieving. I know this now.
I also know that the snow will melt away and another spring will come. I will kneel down and pull at the daises. I know that I will think of her.