Snow and memories

I don’t normally preface my posts but this time I will. This is a grief story. Everyone’s experience of grief is different and this is just one part of mine.

Two months ago we had snow. It didn’t last. It rarely does. They say we’re due some again but I highly doubt it. Two months ago though, out of the blue the snow brought back a memory that has hovered around me for over 20 years but rarely pokes through into my conscious thoughts. I could have written about it back then but I decided to save it for today. Today marks 21 years for which there are no words that can accurately describe what happened. Well, not true. They can accurately describe the events but not the chaos those events unleashed.

The memory isn’t, as some may imagine, awful and depressing. Rather a testament to the fact that while the grief is swirling around you, it’s not possible to feel unending pain. Instead there is comedy and strangeness and awfulness and blankness and snow.

Enis was born and died in January 2003 in Ankara. Snow thick and heavy on the ground. Sub zero temperatures and snow remain for months. Or at least I think there was snow. My memories become a haze, especially when they are difficult, complicated, filled with shame and guilt. But this isn’t about that.

Funerals happen fast in Turkey. It all blurred. It all felt dark. Long car journeys to Mersin and back. Emptiness. But what I do remember clearly is that not long after we returned to Ankara I asked if we could go back to Mersin. Not to stay with his sister in the city but, asking a big favour of her, to stay in her yayla (summer mountain house) up in Gozne.

Mersin being a coastal city doesn’t get snow. It exhausts itself in the mountains and the cold hangs in the humidity of Mersin’s air making 10 degrees feel more like 5 or less. People in Mersin will drive up into the mountains on the weekend, build a snowman on the bonnet of their car, and drive back down the mountain with the bonnet snowman.

People don’t generally go to stay in the mountains. There are those who live their all year round but mostly places like Gozne, that feel like bustling towns in summer, become deserted villages in winter. Most of the homes are yaylas (summer homes) so have no heating system.

That was exactly why I wanted to go there. I needed to be isolated. To be cocooned by the snow. To feel unable to get away or anyone get to me.

I knew that there was a wood burning stove stored under the stairs. No one had ever connected it, why would they? So M asked his sister if we could go, set up the stove and connect it to the chimney, and stay for a while. She said yes. So we went.

The yayla has two floors - two separate apartments. She rents out the ground floor in the summer and stays in the better, bigger one upstairs. The downstairs was where we would stay because it was smaller and easier to heat. I’d have to go upstairs to use the kitchen but for the time I stayed I was mostly cocooned in one room, looking out at the snow. A lot of the time I was alone as M had things to do down in Mersin.

One of the first things to do was find fuel for the stove. The rule in the mountains is that if you own and live in a property you can go into the forest and buy some off cuts/branches, from the forestry ministry I think. But if you didn’t live in the village you couldn’t. A way of managing the forest.

I don’t know how he did it, I wasn’t asking questions, but we got a lorry load to last us a while. Mersin forests are mostly pine so a very resinous wood. Where the branch meets the trunk is where you find the most resin. In Turkish they call it çıra (chura) and it’s a valuable firelighter because it burns so well. If you’re using pine in the stove you have to check that the logs you are putting in don’t show signs of having too much as it will burn extremely hot and fast.

First moment of comedy out of grief was when, because I wasn’t thinking, or concentrating, or caring, I threw in a big chunk. A chunk that was very clearly where the branch connected to the trunk. It was full of resin. I only noticed when it was too late and the stove started to turn rather red (normally brown). I thought it was going to explode. M assured me it wouldn’t but I sat there watching the stove get redder and redder. Convinced it would explode and yet unable to move.

Then there was the fish.

I have no idea how many days I stayed in the yala probably much fewer than it felt. M would go out every day and I would stay, and potter, and look at the snow, alone, safe, totally lost. I’d cook but only what M brought back. I didn’t make any decisions as I can recall. One night he brought home some fish – çıpra. I think in English it’s sea bream. That’s the weird thing about living overseas, you don’t realise that you are constantly learning new words and so when you’re in a foreign country you learn the names/words in that language, not your own. If I were to see it over here I would still give it its Turkish name.

So fish. It’s not cheap. But it is delicious. The trouble with grief is that it can also take away your tastebuds. And even if I did taste it, I clearly wasn’t concentrating on eating. Çıpra though not huge, is not a small fish and it has some pretty big bones. Ones that you notice when you’re eating. Or ones you should. Except, I didn’t. I didn’t notice until suddenly I had the urge to gag and throw up all my dinner. My lovely, very thoughtful, rather expensive dinner that M had brought in a desperate attempt to bring me back.

So comedy episode number two began. Not till the morning though because it hadn’t really registered what was wrong. It wasn’t till the morning and I couldn’t eat that it became pretty obvious that I had a bone lodged in my throat. All plans cancelled as M started to ring round everyone he know to try and find a doctor to help.

I sat and watched as he told every single person he spoke to the whole story of me swallowing a fishbone and it getting stuck. And despite telling, what felt like, half of Mersin about the fish and the bone and me, he still couldn’t find a single doctor willing to help. I did ask why he had to tell the entire story to everyone he spoke to but it just seemed to be a Turkish thing. Or maybe a him thing. He never seemed capable of telling a short story, it always had to go all the way through.

He ended up finding one person in a state hospital. And in 2003, well before the new hospitals had been built and the health service modernised a bit, a state hospital was definitely a last resort. Complain about the NHS all you want, there’s no comparison.

We get there. To this gloomy, cramped, noisy hospital where they have so many staff who are all paid a pittance. I have to wait while M seems to tell yet more people about me and the fish and the bone. And finally I get to see the doctor who takes one look, is curious as to how I managed to get the bone stuck so far down without noticing and promptly tells me I may need surgery if he can’t get it out by sticking some kind of enormous tweezers down my throat. I hadn’t seen that coming. No wonder there’d been a bit of a fuss.

After a couple of tries he did get it out. It was rather longer than I’d thought. Quite how I’d missed it I don’t know. But then, I wasn’t really all there. I was on medication to dry up my milk supply, that left me dazed. And it was all so raw.

But it was funny. The ridiculousness was funny. Even in the depth of grief things can be funny. Short-lived. It can’t last long because then the wave of guilt comes when you realise you’re laughing and you should be desperately sad. You are desperately sad. But no one tells you it’s OK. It’s normal. Instead you get looks, disapproving looks that shame you because you’re laughing when you have no right to because your world has just fallen apart.

I have no idea why, back in November when it snowed, that memory came up when it never had before. It didn’t hurt though. Even though it was awful. Remembering it 20 years on, I just remember the sense of feeling safe and cocooned by the snow in that single room. Alone most of the time.

The song that always comes to mind on this day is Sinead O’Connor’s Tiny Grief Song. It’s not the song I associate most with Enis but I rarely tell anyone what that is. Neither are songs that make me feel sad but they are raw reflections of what it felt like and sometimes still feels like.

It’s odd what will trigger a memory. And it may be many more years before a flurry of snow will trigger this one again. I’m glad I had it though. A reminder of the idea that grief doesn’t get smaller but your life grows around it. And that sometimes you’ll be slammed right back to where you were but you won’t stay there long, and sometimes it will feel good to remember.