Quinn Flores’s Family Journal
Winterfest Day during my first year in high school was the saddest day. I came into the kitchen early, excited to start preparing fruit salad for our Winterfest breakfast, and there was Toonces, collapsed on the kitchen floor. He’d passed away during the night.
We were all upset, but in addition, I was also really worried. Mom hadn’t slept all night. She often stayed up until the early hours when she got home from a performance, continuing to play her violin or to read or even just pace and talk to herself. Dad said it just took her a while to unwind from performing. And I was just afraid that this would be too much for her.
But she ended up getting over it quicker than the rest of us did.
I was still shook up from it–I felt like there was this deep hole in me–when Mom had dried her tears, washed her face, and was setting up the tree in the living room.
“How does she do it?” I asked Grandma Asuka. “I thought she would be more upset.”
“You know your mom has lost a lot of family,” Grandma Asuka replied. “I think that changes how one views death. Your mom believes that Toonces isn’t really gone–just his body, but not his spirit.”
I didn’t know. I still felt sad. But if that helped Mom get through this, if it was a way where she wouldn’t be crushed by Toonces’ passing, then I supposed it was an OK way of coping.
“We should join the rest of the family,” Grandma Asuka said. “It will help them, and it will also help us feel better.”
So, we carried on with the day.
Mom and Dad seemed genuinely happy, in spite of it all.
And the rest of us did our best to go through the motions.
I took a long run after we got the tree up. I just needed to be alone for a while. I needed to be free to experience these emotions: the pain, this emptiness, the worry for Mom, the confusion of not understanding her response. And I needed to get back in touch with me, in the middle of all those dense feelings.
It helped a lot. I must have run for an hour. By the time I got back home, I’d discovered something. I’d discovered that I was capable of handling huge and complex and devastating emotions, and it wouldn’t destroy me. In fact, all these feelings could move through me–they were part of life, part of being alive. And these feelings weren’t me–they were just the responses, reactions, neurological messages, and emotions moving through me. They were here to inform me, not to compose me.
I credit that run with being my first step in consciously understanding emotional regulation and interpretation. I learned to listen to my emotions and to let them move through me. And that, though I didn’t know it at the time, became one of the keystones of my life, personally and professionally.
I returned home to a kitchen full of people! It was our Winterfest Feast, and we’d invited old family friends, neighbors, my aunt Rosemary, and even Dimitri and Principal Abe.
And I was ready to enjoy their company.
It was the first time Dimitri met my family, and he said he really liked them, my dad, especially. My dad liked him, too.
But Principal Abe was the one who really seemed to have a good time. She reminisced with my mom and dad about their high school days, and, fortunately, she didn’t embarrass me or Dmitri with any stories about us or our friends.
It was fun to see her in a different context, and she made friends with the entire family. She and Grandma Asuka, both a little shy, both a little socially awkward, especially bonded.
Night fell, and all the other guests had left, and Principal Abe still stayed. I guess she liked not having to be alone on Winterfest. And we liked having her there.
I was feeling pretty good, actually, by the time evening rolled around. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what a sad start to the day we’d had, and I could feel I was still grieving. But I was also feeling comforted, there in the warmth of our home.
I also felt comforted in the warmth within me. Late at night, after Principal Abe finally left, after everyone else went to bed, I sat up in my room. It felt good to be alone again, even though I was in a house humming with the emotions of my family.
But through the hum, quiet descended. And I felt that I was OK, and not only OK now, but that I would be OK. I felt I had within me what I needed to make it through this complicated life.
Cathy Tea's SimLit Anthology 