Snowfall

Often, Christmas is not just a time for joy and happiness. Today’s post, from Jessi Falke, remembers such a Christmas, and explores loss and healing one Christmas at a time.

She said the snow made everything fresh. When the junkers out back were detailed with white. Cars with open wounds and twisted insides, strewn about the yard in various states of mid project. My grandfather knew where every part was, how it came together. His work kept him busy, except when it grew too cold. When the snow covered the oily grime and softened his cars into rises and falls. Gentle sighs in a sleeping world. 

Grandpa always tried to make the parts fit, even that morning. When he lay facedown in the snow. He once told me that it was the most peaceful way to die, freezing to death. You fall asleep and never wake up. Drift away like the snow. Covered in a fresh layer of white, reduced and softened. A quiet death, like the one he was avoiding inside. I don’t know how he stood up again, what pieces he left behind in the snow.

On the way home from the funeral, I asked him if he was sad. It could have been a naive question coming from a nine year old. Really, she just wondered if her gruff grandfather ever felt sadness. If his love for his wife, rarely expressed, was deep like the movies, red enough to bleed in his grief. She was seated behind him as he drove. Instead of dismissing the question, he met her eyes in the review mirror. “I’m sad because I chose her special. She was my bride.” 

She died on Christmas morning. After the presents were opened, a terrible, final gift. The call carried words like snow over junk cars. She died peacefully. She was no longer in pain. She was with Jesus now. Platitudes to cover open wounds and twisted insides. Her funeral was stained with poinsettias. A local diner gave a milkshake in lieu of flowers, the same as what they made for her whenever she walked in their door. Milkshakes were all she could drink after her throat cancer. My father offered to let my brother and I split it. I thought of how we couldn’t share drinks with her when she was alive, in case we caught something. I refused. 

Our grief was measured in Christmases, one fresh snow after another. Easing our landscapes in glistening tears and quiet relief. Grandpa left the house when he remarried. It saw many more winters quietly fall around its eaves. It did nothing to dampen the silence within. Before her death, she dreamed of turning it into a boarding house, but she grew too sick too soon. One winter, I put on a suit and signed my name to its address. The nine year old still remembers her conversation in the driveway with her grandfather. At 24, she feels as though she chose this house special too. At Christmas, the house is filled with light and laughter. The following Christmas, the abode is full of boarders. Her father helps set up the Christmas tree for the first time in 16 years. 

I still think of my grandmother at Christmas, on the anniversary of her passing. I sit in her house and remember her as I watch the snow fall. Our house endures our dreams as surely as it’s red roof endures the snow. We are not less for her passing, and yet we are never quite whole. We are made new in the snowfall.