Winter is but a season. It is associated mainly with snow, darkness, cold, and grey. For us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth tilts away from the sun, causing shorter daylight hours. In this darkness, many cultures created ceremonies seeking to recharge the sun. Winter is also the season of death. The cold temperatures and lack of readily available resources in our ancient past leads many, especially the sick and elderly, to breath their last breath. I think about the season of death–the obituary page is fraught with death announcements all throughout the winter season. Even in our modern, climate-controlled environments, deaths “cold hand” finds us. The “Cold Hand of Death”. So synonymous with death is cold that we view death as cold.

Our family started this blog in hopes to have a space to provide a family blog — a medium that we can shar our thoughts, feelings, and happenings — independent from the corporate social media. It was our attempt to break away. We each fiddled with website development in the past. The concepts remain the same but the tools, despite touting intuitiveness and simplicity, seemed more complicated and hard to navigate. So, we hastily built a shell with the intention to revisit the general format. Unfortunately, as we started this blog in 2020, we did not realize that our lives would fall into winter. Three months after this blog launched, my wife’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer. That fateful diagnosis would be the first of many winter storms having us invite death in for a drink. He must have liked our hospitality. For once invited in, he kept coming back. My father-in-law succumbed in 2022. Six months before him, my wife lost her great-grandmother. In a span of two years, from 2022 until 2024, Death took hold of our family tree with his icy hands and, one-by-one, plunked branches off, leaving a scraggly mess of broken branches.

As Death examined his work with great pride, the emotional toll on myself, my wife, and my children largely went unnoticed. Particularly, while we navigated the depression, sorrow, sadness, and anger associated death on such a large scale, family, friends, and loved ones withdrew from us. We were left naked and no one was around to offer us a blanket. We stood in our bareness, frigid and frightened. We had to navigate the new landscape with fewer people. We are still lost in the wilderness. Though Death revisited us again on a few occasions in 2025, the air suggests that Spring is coming. With Spring, life, we hope, will be renewed. The sun will reignite. I am hopeful that this blog will be revisited and it can be a meaningful expression of our will.