Janet Buttenwieser: The New Year
Janet Buttenwieser’s essay “The New Year” appears in Issue 10 of The Los Angeles Review.
The New Year
Cold is the point. We intend to be cold, we wish to freeze ourselves, to numb our limbs and hopefully our minds.
We have a dreaded task ahead of us, even harder than plunging into a forty-six degree lake on the first day of January. Five miles from the beach where we strip down to our bathing suits, your files lay in wait. After our swim, after my scalding shower, I will drive across town to your house. Kevin will greet me at the door, make me a pot of green tea. I will sit in your desk chair, and categorize. I will place the mountain of medical bills in order by date. I will make files for your letters, your college papers. Copies of your passport. Letters from one doctor to another, deliberating the best surgical approach. I will discover your artwork, your poetry. I will look down the hall to the bedroom where I sat holding your hand, sun streaming through the windows, your slender fingers warm against mine. You will sit in a handmade pine box on the shelf above me as I kneel on the floor, deciding where to file the permission form to scatter your ashes.
I survey the crowd around us, a thousand people getting ready to swim. It is a raucous scene, a chaos of people laughing at the preposterousness of what we are all about to do. Clusters of volunteers pockmark the lawn, holding souvenir patches and hot drinks, rewards for the brave and the foolish. Clouds bunch together just above the tree line, sending down occasional drops of fine mist. The damp air is laced with scents of coffee, hot cocoa, and wet dog. I wrap my goose-bumped arms around one another, trying to generate my own warmth.
Kevin wears your wedding ring and his own on a chain around his neck. He has grown a beard, and gotten a tattoo, a raven whose wings spread open across his shoulder. I want to siphon off his pain, to dilute his loss and mine, all of ours. But I am learning that grief is not a temporary state, a demon we can exorcize. Rather, it is like a skin we wear inside our own. Eventually it blends into our body, becoming a part of our being that we carry with us, always. We learn to live with it, to bear it. You are a piece of this new skin, your essence helping hold our broken parts together.
Kevin turns to me. “Ready?” He asks, energy high, the cold working already. “You going?” I’m not ready, but I’m going anyway. We’re both going, picking our way, barefoot, across the wet grass to the throng of people gathered at the water’s edge. The lake is dyed tan from sand kicked up by hundreds of feet. Everyone is screaming, laughing, running into the lake and sprinting back out again in a frenzied, frigid baptism. My first steps in the water cause instant pain. I let the momentum of the crowd propel me forward, deeper into the freezing swirl. This is not the year of your seizure, your cancer, your surgery. I am up to my waist, and then my chest. This is not the year the tumor came back. I take a deep breath and dive down. This is not the year that you died. For a split second I am fully underwater. It is not a numbing after all. It is a jolt, an awakening.