Winter is used to death, the dull brown of grass against the blinding whiteness of snow.

It is a
world frozen in death but still, there, under the cold lies the expectation that time will bring
life again. My mother’s blood on the snow was a finality, no hope of renewal in sight. Her life
seeped into the ground and snagged at pieces from mine as it went. The jagged metal of her
car was blue, a weird sculpture of hard edges and broken glass. It had crushed, teared at her
flesh and broken four lives in the process because, you see, there is just so much pain a family
can endure before it fractures. After, we were adrift, thrown against each other and apart again
in an endless sea of blame and stony silences.