The Blue Ridge Mountains in March still hold snow. The ridges glide through the dove gray skies in a shroud of milky haze. Especially in the morning, this film of milk coats mountaintops, and the world feels somber — split from the light of life. I rise early, feet numb with cold. I look outside at the uninhabitable world and crawl back beneath the blanket.
This is how I pass most of my final year in graduate school: blue with depression, yearning for body heat.
This March, the severance has not yet happened. My grandfather is still alive in the upstairs living room of his white, hollowed-out home. My grandfather passes his days slowly, with tea and a bit of reading. He calls me up to ask about my day — I’ve hardly moved — and while I hear the oxygen tank whizzing over the phone, he gives me a bible verse, Psalm 34. “The Lord is near the brokenhearted; he saves those crushed in spirit.”
I imagine his bristled mustache moving as he speaks. I imagine the smell of instant coffee and fried egg sandwiches; his precision in cutting off the bread crust, not a sliver of brown remaining. Mostly, I imagine sitting beside him at the kitchen table, his spotted hands, his plaid shirt, his smart hazel eyes. My best friend. My teacher of history and art. His paintbrushes dry and flaky in the downstairs game room. Canvases untouched since my grandmother got sick. I imagine us still painting, never having stopped, our joy carrying us through the hours faster than flight.
The psalm helps — I rally from bed and chat with my grandfather a bit. He is giddy with excitement; I’m volunteering today. “I’ll let you know how it goes,” I say before hanging up.
Because the ground is packed with snow, I layer up. At last, I head for the front door, where outside, my mud-caked boots wait for me. The drive to the farm isn’t very long, and when I arrive, the horses perk up at the sound of crunching gravel beneath my tires.
I say hello to my partner for the day. We take the wood-handled ax and hack away at the thick layer of ice covering the water trough. The horses are quiet, the wind heavy; the shattering of ice and our labored breathing are the only disruption for miles. Cheeks pink with cold, we quickly remove the chunks of ice out of the trough and refill the basin with water. After, we are called to wait just outside the barn. The woman in charge holds orange buckets at each side of her body. “These hold the quarantine feed. Don’t let the buckets get near the horses in the front.”
She leads us to the back paddocks, past the giant bales of hay, past the trees, past the dirt roads. We reach the quarantine site at last, knees shaking in the freezing temperature.
“Some kind of flu,” she says, snapping her gloves in place and digging around for the medicine bottle. “Spreads like wildfire. We can’t risk the rest of the horses getting sick.”
I’ve never been this far out before. But there are the horses, grazing in the pasture. I have seen those horses before. There’s Rose and Nibbler and Sun, the one-eyed mule, the tall stallion. So many horses out here — so many more than the ones in the front paddocks.
“We need to catch ‘em, give ‘em the medicine, and take their temperature.” She holds up the thermometer with a gloved hand. “Who wants to do what?”
I call the syringe. The medicine is a thick brown paste, and after catching each horse with a lead, I have to come up beside their head and tuck the plastic tip of the syringe in their mouth. You can see the snot crusting along their nostrils from the cold. There’s green goop in the corner of their brown eyes.
The business is slow. The sun turns orange before we finally head back to the barn. We aren’t allowed inside or anywhere near the other horses.
“Get in your cars and go home,” she says. Once inside the car, I turn on the heater and warm my hands at the vents. My nose is runny, my throat raw from the wind chill. I call my grandfather.
“Guess what?” I say. “I got to give medicine to sick horses today. Can you believe it? It was the coolest thing I’ve ever done on the farm.”
“Really? What was it like?”
And driving home, I describe every detail — the ice splintering beneath the ax, the orange quarantine buckets, the brown paste. The Blue Ridge Mountains draped in white, the snow on the ground sloshed with soil.
“I bet those horses were beautiful in the snow. I bet you could just paint them.”
“It was a really good day,” I say.
In this moment, I’m not thinking about death — I’m thinking about my hands helping to heal those horses; I’m thinking about my heart feeling fuller; I’m thinking it’s already March. And in a couple more months, it will be summer, and I’ll be in Florida with my family. I am thinking about art — about sitting in the downstairs room and painting with my grandfather, and maybe the two of us can paint the horses this summer.
I’m not yet aware this summer will be our last. I’m not yet aware that my grandfather’s illness will take a turn for the worse; that one day in May, he will be cooking eggs on the stove for breakfast, and three weeks later, he will be gone.
I’m not yet aware that grief and loss will hit me like a snowstorm. That in all my agony and numbness, I will not be able to pick up a paintbrush for years. That the desire to make art will be severed from me, just as he was severed from me. That any loss comes in waves, one right after the other; you think you lose one thing, and another thing goes with it, and another thing goes with that. That years later, the entire world will be hit with loss in the form of a virus — that all of us will be quarantined, just as those horses. That the loss will ricochet from each and every one of us, over and over again, as we search for healing in our own little pastures.
Because loss happens more than just once. Loss is seasonal — you can’t get rid of it in a day or two. Loss settles into the heart and makes itself at home, whether in winter or in warmth. Loss places such a heavy emphasis on the absence, and grief is the most natural response. In grief, we lose ourselves into feeling the absence, and nothing else.
Dealing With Grief and Loss
With loss, there is an exodus of the old. We buy a new car, we change our appearance, we clear out the house we shared with our partners. Because surviving grief is a continuous journey, there is no easy fix. Most often, even when we try to change everything that reminds us of the loss, we end up aching over the loss of the old, too.
The best way to purge some of this agony is to simply share it. Voicing our feelings lets us release those feelings from within; we can breathe a little deeper. In sharing, we recognize we are not alone — healing after loss is a part of life; suffering is a part of life; grief is a part of life. But we aren’t abandoned to this fate. We have someone sitting right across from us while we talk.
I’m not an expert at this. I have a hard time talking about my feelings. To this day, I can barely talk about my grandfather without tearing up. When I paint, it’s with gentle and complex emotion. I still feel his absence in the easel standing next to me.
But talking doesn’t always have to be out loud — writing down your feelings helps just as much. I’ve written poems about loss, essays, fiction, plays, and even this article — and with every word, the healing comes.
Action helps, too. Volunteering at that horse farm saved my life. I was in a dark time, and my grandfather was checking on me every week. And every week, I had something to share with him that kept us both going. Volunteering, learning a new hobby, making art, taking up a spiritual practice like reading or meditating or prayer every day — these small acts get us out of the state of grief and into a state of healing and helping others.
Unfortunately, the grief doesn’t go away with these conversations and these actions. Only time can dissipate that raw thirst for what is gone.
Time, and a shift in perspective — I’ve discovered that even though my grandfather is gone, he shows up for me in my daily life. He shows up in my kitchen (his precise cutting of the bread crust). He shows up in my prayers (Psalm 34). And yes, he even shows up in my art: Every time I empty a tube of white paint, I imagine all those horses running over the hillside covered in snow.
And I pick up the brush, and I get to work.
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