Entry Five: Wednesday March 4, 2015 5:45 pm

Upon experiencing snow for the first time, a blind acquaintance dubbed this foreign phenomenon “silent rain.” As I sit in my tree and listen to the audible ksh, ksh, ksh of crystallized ice colliding with the vinyl of my coat, I can’t help but disagree. I’m struck by how loud that sound is in the otherwise silence surrounding me. The flakes pelt my face with their initial sting, surprising because of their size. A single flake lands on my lip and I focus on the feathery cold as the snow dissolves from the tips of the flake inward. I breathe in and out as the flakes build up and up and up upon me – except they don’t at all because they melt as quickly as they land. Still I wonder what would happen if I drifted off to sleep right here. Would someone find me tomorrow buried beneath the blanket, sitting in a tree?

I open my eyes. The snow clings to the gaps in the bark. It makes the scales of bark stand out, highlighting where they curl up and away from the tree. I lean forward and exhale hot breath onto a patch of snow. I watch as the white fades to translucent, the substance pixelating as it sweats into water, dripping down the tree. The tree cries. The sky cries. I cry.

I feel four graves today. Two are familiar: Kole and my tree. Two are new – doubling my pain in a matter of hours.

The first of these new graves I can see from my tree. At the base of the hill, behind the shed maybe twenty yards away, the white snow is trampled in a circle by dirty, brown boot marks. You cannot tell it now, but the hole was dug by a newly purchased lifetime-warranteed shovel. It is somewhere between one and two feet deep. On top, lies cinder blocks slowly being covered in snow; within the hole lies our sweet Annie. Her disease was unmanageable. Her suffering: intolerable. Putting her down: unthinkable. But it had to be done.

The other grave I cannot see; it has not even been dug yet. It will house my cousin taken from this earth after a four year battle with osteosarcoma. Osteosarcoma is a cancer in the bones. It most commonly affects children and young adults, and it has one of the lowest survival rates for pediatric cancer. Frequently the cancer spreads from where it is initially found (for my cousin, the leg) to the lungs.  Despite limb-saving surgery, chemo, trials, fundraising, research, praying, praying, praying: another grave for another young boy.

I look back to my notebook to find that the melting snow has soaked through the page and blurred the ink into a sopping mess. The melt begins to seep through my pants and chills my legs as well. I crouch down further into the arms of the tree. I hug my knees and say to myself, “Just when I thought this was getting easier.”