The Anatomy of Cold

I’ve come to complain about the cold, and my history with cold, and all of the cold places I’ve lived in, and how I never knew of a temperate climate emotionally, and only recently physically, and how now, in the one mild clime I have come to count on, I have been betrayed by cold—a ghastly, impossible cold that has come to squat here, a colossal frigid hobgoblin crouched in my gentle-weathered city, mocking me with its immovability.

I’m here today to complain about the coldness of grief. About how the journey to my mother’s funeral was riddled with cold. Savage, ear-searing cold, wind blowing off the water, the ferry dock workers bundled in scarves and Arctic gear, running after us, shocked at at our unpreparedness, handing us tissues, breathlessly citing wind chills of 4 below. My face burning with the Siberian wind, my toes locked solid with numbness in my cheap boots, deeply regretting I didn’t bring the green knit hat that I bought at the hospital gift shop when we gathered to Decide, crying in the waiting area with the austere, honest doctor who was there to Present Facts and ask us What We Wanted as a Family. Deeply regretting I didn’t have that green knit hat now, to protect me from the glacial and bitter bite of grief, to envelop my head with the loving intent of the person who made it, perhaps pre-cognating the anguish of its recipient.

What lessons, Cold? What learning, now in my bereavement. When will the warming be? In what timelessness will I wait, to forgive and be forgiven, for the final release of this sorrow that strangles my sinews in its bleak and Polar branches? When clemency. When the sun’s climb into my orbit? God said to wear a coat. I wrap myself in it and remember the Three Friends of Winter: pine, bamboo and plum, thriving in the frost, and I reach, each for each, dreaming of Spring.

In loving memory of my mother, Sandra Lee Farrow, August 30, 1946-December 14^th, 2023.

--Kristen McHenry