What Kept Me Warm
Ice storm 2021. The power went out, and for four days I lived inside my car.
That’s the simple version. The truer version is that I spent four days trapped with my own mind, with nothing left to distract me from what I’ve been avoiding since my mother died.
People tried to help. They offered advice, small strategies for getting through hard things. One of them said that when grief starts to rise, they force themselves to think about something else. I remember how much that bothered me. It felt like betrayal—like turning your back on someone you love just to make yourself more comfortable.
But grief doesn’t care what you believe about it.
Somewhere along the way, I started doing the same thing. Looking away from photos. Cutting off memories before they finished forming. Redirecting my thoughts like I was steering away from something dangerous. Sometimes the only way to survive a feeling is to leave it unfinished.
The part I wasn’t prepared for was this: the car felt natural.
Not comfortable—nothing about it was comfortable—but familiar. Like I had slipped into a version of life that made a certain kind of sense. Small space. Controlled conditions. Quiet suffering. No expectations. Just stay warm. Stay alive. Make it to morning.
I had known that feeling before.
Years ago, I lived in a small house with one Dearborn gas heater that warmed a single room. The rest of the place stayed cold. At night, I’d sleep on the couch inside a sleeping bag, covered in every blanket I owned, pulled tight up to my neck. It sounds miserable now, but it wasn’t. It was mine. It was enough. There was a strange comfort in narrowing life down to something that simple.
The SUV felt like that—like a stripped-down version of living where nothing existed except survival and silence.
On the fourth day, the lights came back on at my mother’s house. I went inside to check the heat. Thirty-four degrees and climbing. Then I checked the other house. Everything was working again.
I stood there, in a warm house, with electricity humming back to life around me—and almost immediately, I missed the car.
That’s when it hit me: it wasn’t the car. It was the clarity.
Inside that vehicle, there was no pretending life hadn't taken a massive turn. No questions about what my life was or where it was going. No space for regret or comparison. Just a single, honest objective: get through the night.
Out here, in the world with lights and heat and fully furnished rooms, everything comes back. The past. The silence. The absence of the one person who made all of it feel anchored.
For those four days, no one called to check on me. Not one person. I’m used to being alone. I’ve built a life around it. But that kind of quiet—total, uninterrupted—introduces something else. Loneliness. The kind that doesn’t just sit beside you, but settles in.
More than a year after my mother died, there I was with nothing left to buffer the truth: no one is coming to check on you. This is your life now. Learn it.
At some point, I broke one of my own rules. I took a photo of myself in that car, bundled up against the cold, and sent it to someone. Maybe it looked like a joke. It wasn’t. It was grief asking to be acknowledged. It was me, a version of me I don't like, reaching out without admitting that’s what I was doing.
I regret that.
My mother used to tell me not to tell anyone everything. Keep some things to yourself. Let other people talk. Listen more than you reveal. At the time, it sounded cautious. Now it sounds precise.
Because most people aren’t really asking how you are when they say how are you? They’re offering a greeting, not an opening. And grief—real grief—is too raw to hand to people who don't really give a shit.
A real friend already knows you’re hurting.
Everyone else is just waiting for their turn to speak.
And that’s the part no one tells you when the lights come back on:
Warmth doesn’t fix living alone..
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