Forethoughts of Grief (Plus a New Essay and Remedies for a Winter Sweet Tooth)

Greetings from winter!

For much of the past couple of weeks, hoarfrost has coated the branches of every tree and shrub (plus the arms of every statue and the windshield of every car) in Anchorage. In winter, I live for cold and clear days, when the world sparkles in refracted dusky light and the mountains hold alpenglow for much of the afternoon. This year, to get out the door, I have had to budget several more minutes and come up with many more songs; toddlers, it turns out, do not always love the process of layering long underwear, sweaters, snowsuits, mittens, hats, wool socks, and winter boots.

While it feels cold, it’s not as cold as when David and I traversed the Brooks Range as part of the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic. I recently published an essay with Longreads that tells the story of our experience doing that race. For a week, we skied around 25 miles a day and weathered temperatures that reached -35F (the forecast had called for a windchill of -55F – yikes!).

It was a season of my life when I had a hoarding mentality around outdoor experiences; I was so afraid of time running out as we approached the age when we wanted to start trying to get pregnant. I didn’t know who I would be if I could no longer do hard things outside.

I wrote this essay before ever getting pregnant, and it was interesting, once I began going back and forth with my Longreads editor on it, to revise the piece during this season in my life. I often worked on it from our living room chair while our 20-month-old took her midday nap, propping up my low back to make room for my late-in-the-third-trimester belly. Rereading what I’d written meant encountering a former self, having to recall her beliefs and fears.

I often confront this question when revising old work: how much to preserve the self who penned the original piece, and how much to bring the voice up to the present, with its different concerns, values, style, opinions?

It can be jarring to reacquaint myself with a past self on the page, and I don’t have a set policy about how to manage the recursive selves that emerge in the revision process. In this piece, I ended up largely preserving the mindset I had at the time, which was made easier by the fact that I’d finished drafting the piece while still in that frame of mind, but integrating some of the present perspective, too.

What I’m Thinking About

Despite the chilly weather, our toddler still loves hitting up the playground swing, even though the seat of it remains encrusted in ice after I’ve swept off the snow.

We walk to the swing most days. As I push her back and forth, she claps her mittens together, which means she wants to sing the “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom” song. We sing it two or three or twenty times, and she smiles with all of her sixteen teeth, and kicks her legs back and forth with excitement, threatening to dislodge her pink snow boots. Sometimes, she’ll pause to point to an airplane overhead or a dog (identifying every dog she sees has been a lifelong passion).

As I go through my days alongside her so late in this pregnancy, I often find myself pre-grieving the one-on-one bond we have. There are so many moments when I’m aware that I’m doing something that will soon be harder: picking her up whenever she asks to be held, carrying her places rather than using the stroller (my bump provides a helpful shelf), nursing or cuddling her for an hour in the morning, letting her eat her meal on my lap.

There are so many different feelings in these final weeks: excitement to meet this new child, excitement to no longer be pregnant, nervousness about the birth, curiosity about what mothering two young beings will be like (which often means some anxiety about what that will be like), eagerness to experience the dynamic of being a family of four (plus two dogs). But one of the most dominant feelings I’ve had lately is some sadness as I anticipate the loss of this particular intimacy I’ve had with our toddler for the past twenty-plus months.

This pre-grief has made me think of the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” introduced to me about a decade ago by my dear friend Susan. These lines in particular have rung in my head at various moments in my life:

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethoughts

of grief.

There is some solace in remembering that the non-human world does not do that very human thing of anticipating future hardship. Not having forethoughts of grief requires a trust in my future self to meet whatever challenges arise. I am trying to inhabit more of that wild-things mentality by being more present with our first daughter, savoring our closeness, and remembering the fact that, in having her, I have gained so much that I haven’t felt compelled to grieve what I’ve “lost” as much as I pre-grieved it before ever becoming pregnant. It’s possible it will be the same with this new child. As I came to see in the writing of that Longreads essay – loss and change are not the same.

Dates!

Dates are one of my favorite foods, and the lore that they help “ripen the cervix” is a great reason to indulge in them more at the end of a pregnancy. My favorite snack lately has included opening the dates, removing the pits, and spooning peanut butter into that cavity. Then, I coat these little bundles in melted chocolate chips. The pit removal and peanut butter filling can be tedious, but it’s worth it; kept in the fridge or freezer, they taste like little Snickers. I’m obsessed.

Pie

Oh, pie. My love for pie bloomed alongside my love for picking wild berries. Both loves have remained strong. I’ve been making more lately, perhaps in anticipation of Thanksgiving, or perhaps out of remembrance of how simple and good they are. My favorite pie crust is straightforward (1 ¼ flour, 1 stick of butter, a pinch of salt, a few tablespoons of cold water). I don’t like to mess around with adding eggs or sugar. I also don’t spend that much time trying to make them beautiful. I like a pie that’s simple and fruit-forward, filled with heaps of blueberries or cranberries or apples. For the blueberry and apple, I add just a little thickener, plus some spice for the apple), and one of my favorite cranberry pies, called a “mock cherry pie” in Cooking Alaskan is made with vanilla extract, egg, and raisins.

Thanks so much for reading. If you missed my last newsletter, it was about finding balance in extremes and included a recipe for the granola I’ve been making nonstop the past few months. If you have any thoughts or questions or just want to say hello, you can reply directly to this message. I’d love to hear from you!

Happy wintering,

Diana