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How do you explain to two eight-year-olds what happened to their mother? How do you tell them that she won’t wake them up on Saturday mornings with the smell of pancakes on the griddle and bacon sizzling on the stove? How do you tell them she won’t be at tee-ball, baseball someday? How do you tell them she won’t run her fingers through their unkempt brown hair and tell them they need a haircut? How do you tell them she won’t tell another bedtime story and chase them around the house until they are laughing so hard that it’s all too easy to wrestle them into their beds? How do you tell them she won’t take them out to the beach to watch the waves before the hurricane rolls in?

How do you tell them they weren’t worth it?

Wipers beat slowly, back and forth across the snow-spattered windshield. The outline of the skeletal winter trees blurs into the gray sky beyond and the ground below. Even in the car, the acrid smell of woodsmoke issuing from chimneys hangs thick. I lean back into the heated seat, turning my head so I can stare, unseeing, out the window at the muted landscape.

Not how I myself had been told, through nightmare after nightmare. I couldn’t describe to them her hands, the hands that once conducted my memories, weaving them into melodies faintly recognizable but somehow alien. Hands that once cooked the best Italian meatballs this side of the Atlantic. Hands that worked all day but were always perfectly manicured.

In sleep, they are still perfectly manicured. Only instead of conducting a symphony they seize me with terror. Rotting black flesh sagging, trying to cover spindly bones, takes the place of the tanned and moisturized skin I long to remember. Objects of idolatry turned instruments of torture and self-destruction, betraying their bearer by facilitating habit. Betraying me with an unbreakable vice-grip on my mind.

“She must have loved snow.”

The voice startles me out of my stupor.

“I guess so.”

Snow.

Snow, like everything else crystalline and white, falling to cover the warped and worn ground, giving it the appearance of smoothness, of calm. When it melts, the ground will be exposed again, just as ragged as before, its every fault emphasized by the process of thawing, coming out of that elevated state of imagined perfection.

When I was younger, on nights when I’d wake up in a cold sweat, sometimes with my mouth open in a silent scream, my mother would come into my room. I don’t know how she always knew, but she did. And she’d put her hand on my back and tell me to lie down. So I would, and she’d ask me about what happened, so I’d tell her. And somewhere between her asking me what happened and my explaining, she’d start to sing. Not sing in the sense of notes, but she would weave the horror of my dreams into rhymes with such a sweet cadence that I’d find myself drifting back to sleep, her words rocking me back and forth.

Snow. Like everything crystalline and white. Falling and covering the imperfections, the bumps and ridges we don’t want to see. Making life more pleasing to the eye but just as damaged without cover.

Snow held in perfectly manicured hands. Lifted up and thrown high with a deep inhale. Relaxed into and leaned on like the only comfort in the world. Snow. Eating away at the hands, freezing pieces of life, stopping their progress. Stopping the world.

Snow hitting the windshield melts; it might never have been there. But snow doesn’t always pass unnoticed. Snow on the ground melts only to create deeper cracks as it dissolves, eroding whatever beauty lies there, shamelessly, irrevocably marring it.

My mother no longer saves me from my nightmares. I wake alone and terrified, and the dark is not enough to lull me to sleep. So now I sing for myself, weave my own dreams into rhymes, turning the black and deadened hands that rake at me in my sleep into the soft, ivory tapers tipped with red nails preserved in my memories.

I move my gaze to my feet to avoid watching the snow cover the ground.

The twins needed a story like the ones my mother sang, like the ones I now sing to myself. Something an eight-year-old could understand when adults could barely explain. They didn’t need to know the how; that would come. They needed an explanation of the unexplainable. They needed to know why.

At my grandmother’s house, in the room reserved for grandchildren, I sat at the foot of the bed and asked the twins if they’d had a bedtime story yet, knowing the answer. Bedtime stories for others are rarely the top priority of the bereaved. They were nearly settled into their pillows when I heard them whisper. Four bleary eyes, exhausted from the first of what they didn’t know would be many long days, opened to me with the question everyone had been dodging.

The car stops. The wipers scrape to a halt along the bottom edge of the windshield. The parking lot looks icy, treacherous, but it’s a flowering meadow compared to the frigid landscape inside.

Living statues greet me as I walk through the door. There is a stiffness to everything — the starched linens, the cold floor tiles, the clothing, the people themselves. Leaden feet, rebar bones, concrete flesh, faces of immovable stone. Only the eyes show that life lies beneath the exterior cast. Some look everywhere without seeing; others maintain a thin veneer of calm over the desperate desire to be anywhere else. Mostly they are set deep in the faces with marble smiles, coated with diamonds that barely refract light away from the agony beneath.

The warmth of embraces coming from all sides tempers the frigidity of the room until the mourners who steeled themselves for the occasion are melted down into real people, living, breathing, grieving. With gentle hands they soothe away the last bits of stiffness from their neighbors and settle each other into rows of white chairs.

As I stand before them, their gentle murmurings wash over me like waves, rocking me and soothing my own hands, which tremble with some strange mixture of fear and sadness.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and read the twins’ bedtime story.

A bird leaves its mother’s nest

When it needs to spread its wings.

It won’t turn to say good-bye;

It simply begins to sing.

A sparrow singing to the morning sun

Is drinking in the day,

While the caged lark will sing its same sad song

And see each morning gray.

Some people are born with feet on the earth

But hearts set on the sky;

We don’t control when these people are born

Or when it is they die.

It is not for lack of love;

It’s not that she didn’t care,

It’s simply that the time came

That she join the world up there.