he cross hangs loosely around my neck, blessing and provoking me at the same time. The silver cross is larger than the small gold one I typically wear. About four or five silver-metal threads wrap around themselves to form a thick necklace, one that is as solid and sturdy as the man who once more it. A stick-figure Jesus hangs on this cross, arms outstretched, pleading for answers, just as I had nearly two years ago. But, for now, all I can do is watch it dangle in the window of my office and to look beyond the pane to the frozen footprints in the snow.

A storm iced our town two nights ago. Afterwards, more than five inches of snow poured down, hiding black ice and slick spots. A fifty-year-old woman at the university slipped on a sidewalk and shattered her right ankle. A ten-year-old boy ran in front of a car on University Drive, sliding right under its wheels. The car rolled right over the brown-haired boy’s shoulder and chest, more than a ton of metal crushing down on him. Somehow, the boy survived after surgery on his pelvis, right scapula, and shattered left ankle.

There are moments that freeze us. And there are moments we wish frozen for eternity, the moments when we embrace the one we love for the first time, whether that is a young woman with warm brown eyes or a gooey eight-pound creature in a delivery room that looks more like a skinned rabbit than a child who will soon capture your heart. Or, it might be the moment we ripped the game-winning hit, won the spelling bee, skipped a stone all the way across the Raritan River, or (finally!) understood algebraic expressions. (Forget about the transitive property of equality.)

Perhaps you’d love to freeze the moment atop a mountain in North Carolina with your daughter as thousands of bees hummed as they gathered nectar, flitting across fields of black-eyed Susans. At six thousand feet, though, there is very little warmth when the sun sets, even in July. This leaves the bees in precarious situations, trying to return to the hive before they get too cold to function. That was the case with a bee near our tent that morning, right before sunrise.

Sarah stood looking down on a yellow and black flower where a furry little bee lay. “Is it dead?” she asked my wife.

“No, it’s just sleeping.” My wife looked up at the sun and hoped that was the case.

“Really?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

Even at age four, death angered Sarah. A few months earlier, a dead baby bird had transfixed her. Sarah and some friends had stumbled across a baby wren that had fallen from a nest in the park pavilion, its wings splayed and its head rolled back. Clearly, it had smashed its head and body. “That’s sad,” one kid said. After a few seconds, another young girl spoke up: “Race you to the swings!” They all ran off except Sarah. She stood there for nearly twenty minutes watching the bird, probably wondering how something so young and pretty (like herself) could die so suddenly.

Sarah had jolted me several weeks earlier when we sat in the bottom bunk of her bedroom in Florida. Kristen, who is only eighteen months older, also heard Sarah’s lament. “I don’t want to die,” Sarah said, half crying and half yelling. Sarah spoke stubbornly, implying that by sheer determination she could will away life’s inevitability. That’s how I had felt, too, until recently. Mortality pisses me off. But what do you say to a four-year-old besides “Don’t worry,” or the equally evasive “It’s okay.”

I had felt time’s swift passage in the first grade. Unlike in kindergarten, I now had to go to school all day at Finderne Elementary. No more half-days. I would be forced to attend class all day long – and Mrs. Antwine was scary. She yelled when I spoke out of turn. She had also been upset when a boy sitting next to me, Mark Johnson, peed in his pants. At these times, I would just look out the window at the woods (the tall grass, the dandelions, the worn paths, the creek) that I had explored most mornings just a year earlier. Dick and Jane never had so much fun, not even when they had Spot. I had an epiphany as I walked to school that first day: Life would never revert to the carefree days when I carelessly wandered the neighborhood all day long. Life had changed forever. I nearly cried.

Even now, I frequently think about time’s passage. Can we stave off its effects somehow? Can we somehow slip into another dimension where we are younger? Do we exist in these other places forever? Or are we required to leave the stage, enabling other actors to take on our roles for the next show? Do we alight to heaven, where we meet all the people we loved? Or does some superior being place our consciousness into some collective (or some computer) where we feel but do not think, where our ideas and experiences live but our sub-conscious does not? Are we granted one final wish right after we die? That would explain what happened the evening my father died.

I can’t toss these ideas at Sarah, though. In a few years, she might understand some of these concepts. I hope I am around to discuss this with her years from now. But that night in the bunk bed, she would only look puzzled and grieve some more had I not calmed her with those meaningless platitudes. I certainly hope the New Testament is correct, that there is a heaven, one where we can reconnect with people we dearly loved. But who am I to make requests? I’m just another person fighting futilely against time and struggling with faith.

The following morning, the girls dipped their toes into Wekiva Springs, whose crystal-clear spring waters offer more clarity than anything else in life. Sarah had forgotten her lament. We cupped our hands, scooping cool water onto one another. Sometimes, we paused, watching the spring water slip effortlessly through our fingers. There’s a certain pleasure to that. By mid-morning, the sun was well over the palms and tall grasses that lined the Little Wekiva River right before it flowed east into, and under, a dense canopy of cypress, magnolias and vines, where snow-white ibis pecked at minnows, turtles lounged on logs, and alligators floated, half-submerged in the darker, tea-colored waters not a hundred yards away. Canoeists lazily paddled toward the bend of the river, excited for the journey. Like those canoeists, Sarah doesn’t want the journey to end. She laments death – just not at this moment as she swims in the spring, splashing and laughing with her sister. 

You might also want to freeze a repeated moment, like when you played catch with your father on Sunday mornings, holding the rough rawhide ball in your hand and wondering whether the world produced anything more beautiful and perfect as a baseball – and a father. (And not understanding that these thoughts were merely senses and impressions at age six, but that they would grow into the thoughts of a man many years later.) You feel the cool Jersey breeze blowing in from the woods as you hit ball after ball after church, pounding knuckleballs and curves and fastballs and off-speed pitches. You could handle anything. Even at age six, you knew this was the place where you would pray to go someday after death, not some stuffy place filled with harps and clouds and classical music and angels. Hell, you preferred Yankees anyway. This was your church, where pitches from your father were served like Eucharist and where the bases were rosaries that you rubbed against with your feet. Each time you took off, you eventually returned home. You did not care if you were a poor banished child of Eve. There were no sighs or tears weeping for the Holy Mother on this day. Instead, there was only the sacrament of the game, the rite of the pitched ball, and the divinity of the moment spent with someone you adored.

Inevitably, these moments are frozen over by the moments that jolt you, the moment when you stand there, a slack-jawed eight-year-old looking at your mother, realizing the world is not exciting and mysterious. “No, there is no Santa Claus,” she tells you. A shiver runs down your spine. You do not want to ask it, but: “Does that mean there is no Easter Bunny?” She nods slowly and sadly. “And no Tooth Fairy,” you say, more statement than question.

Sometimes, moments are so cold they numb you. They are frozen off like precancerous skin lesions, reddening and rising before they peel from your consciousness. Even reminders from friends and family fail to bring back these chilly, stinging moments to the point you believe they are fabricating the stories. Like the day my father left us and sent me to suicidal thoughts.

Here’s what I learned a few years ago:

A five-year-old boy stood on a ledge ready to leap out the second-story window if his mother walked another step closer. My mom’s nerves were already crackling. A few months earlier, her husband had confessed that he was seeing another woman. After this talk, Mom had incorrectly believed he would leave this other woman. Now, dad was driving with a load of clothing he had just packed into his Ford truck, right before the boy had returned from kindergarten.

The boy, seeing his parents’ half-empty closet, snapped. Only my mother’s clothes remained. The boy screamed (wailed?) that he wanted his father back. His mother tried to comfort the boy, something she could barely do for herself, but he ran down the hallway. He raced into his bedroom, locked the door, and walked toward the window. He probably relied on a natural instinct: maybe he really did want to die if his father moved out. On Sunday mornings, he would dive onto him as he lay sleeping under the covers. And he would lay there between his parents. He would also hide in their closet and polish his dad’s black and brown dress shoes, put on his shirts, and wear army gear that was stowed in the back behind boxes and under long winter jackets. He always felt safe in that narrow closet. Now, it had been cleared out, exposing more than a few lies.

For one thing, he had been told he was special, probably more so than the average kid. You see, he was adopted at a very early age – eight days. He had always known this fact, even if he had not really understood it. He thought, really, that all kids were essentially adopted. So he was delivered to them by nuns in the middle of the day. Hadn’t storks flown in during the middle of the night to deliver the other kids he knew? On the ledge, he sensed what adoption meant, and his heart ached. Nobody could leave his own child. But, perhaps, a parent could leave an adopted child not worth having. Maybe that’s what the boy considered when he raced to his window, unlatched the security lock, and pushed back the window pane. His dad thought he was not worth keeping so he might as well dive out the window. He feared neither pain nor death. He thought only of the empty closet, and trembled.

His mother, unable to call her husband on a cell phone in 1968, could only watch in horror as her son rocked forward. She had easily unlocked the bedroom door, but instinctively stayed away from the window ledge where her son now stood. She told him that his father still loved him and would be back every night to show that, said it was her fault and that he could never not love him, and said anything she could to get her son off that ledge. Finally, she remembered how much he hated to see blood, so she described how it would flow from his ears and nose and head, and, maybe even from his eyes. Eventually, he stepped back down from the ledge, where his mother nearly smothered him with hugs she needed herself. These are moments worth freezing off.

An ice storm is an amazing phenomenon. And a rare one as well. The United States gets about one true ice storm every three years, on average. So many unusual conditions need to converge at just the right time to coat a city in ice. You first need a moist warm front to collide with a severe cold front in such a manner that the tops of clouds are significantly colder than the bottoms, by at least ten degrees Celsius. Microscopic cloud droplets that fall from the top collect on one another as they fall. These droplets, which remain liquid, do not freeze until they slam into something below, like power lines, tree branches and sidewalks that they coat with a thick layer of ice. Pure water freezes only at the most extreme cold temperatures, at roughly minus-forty degrees Fahrenheit. Despite what we are taught, water does not freeze at exactly thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists will tell you thirty-two is really the melting point of ice. Water needs much colder temps to freeze, depending on its purity.

Ice covers the ground in two forms. Glazed ice is transparent, homogenous and looks like ice cubes cooling your soda. This ice is amorphous and dense, which allows it to tenaciously cling to horizontal or vertical surfaces. Rime ice is milky, crystalline and looks like sugar. This ice causes less damage since it is less dense, meaning it will fall apart in pieces and not pull down tree branches and power lines.

Last night’s storm glazed our city, much to the chagrin of my neighbors, whose tree cracked and fell to the ground, of city planners trying to clear slick roads, and of anyone who lost electricity on this very windy and cold day. The town looks lovely, though. The storm has created an ice palace (not as ornate or cruel as the one built by Russian empress Anna Ivanovna) that looks more like a fairy-tale location than a small, rural city in the Midwest. The sun shines so brightly this frigid February morning that it appears tree branches will melt. But that’s only an illusion, like the fact time can stand still – or even that it can be frozen. The sun sparkles through kaleidoscope branches, whose reflected color changes appear like a blinking Christmas tree with each breeze and with each small shift in the sun’s direction. Ice clings to everything right now.

A branch scrapes against my office window. Footprints track through the side of the house, circling around and around onto themselves. I can easily imagine my daughters throwing snowballs and laughing and falling in the snow with the family dog. I can also see some square deer tracks that meander under trees and bushes where a doe might have rifled for roots and seeds. A summer ago, my daughters had chased a few deer through the neighborhood – fortunately, they never had to face an angry buck.

In the winter, I spend very little time by this window, where old spider webs still cling, like vines, to the screen and window pane. The brown husk of a spider lies on the sill, not far from an uneaten mosquito, a wasted death that not even the ice can beautify.

At what moment did the water freeze on the trees last night? How can water freeze suspended below a branch, where one would expect it to drip off. The sun is low right now, this early in the morning, but it cannot help but illuminate even the smallest branch. I take off my glasses to better see the scene before me. Everything blurs – the branches and rain gutters and children’s playhouse next door and fence posts – into one another. Everything sparkles and glistens in a continually changing pattern of shapes and sizes. The sun refracts off snow so brightly that I have to squint.

The sun is moving overhead, a reminder that I also have places to go and deadlines to meet. But a picture of my father catches my eye before I can start typing. There he stands, a hand in his pocket, the other around his big brother, Uncle Andy, the man he admired most. On the other side, his little brother, Uncle Nick, puts his left arm around Andy as well. They are smiling, pleased to be together again so many decades after playing baseball until dusk, fighting (and nearly dying) in wars, and after years of hard work and not enough pay. They have always been close, even if they had not lived in the same state. Uncle Andy’s eyes are deeper than normal, his arms thinner and his neck tauter. He is dying from lung cancer that had spread to his leg, and elsewhere. It’s clear his brothers are holding him up just a little, just as Andy had watched over them both in Jersey City back in the 1930s.  But they could not know that another disease was about to attack another brother, the middle boy whose cross hangs against a tanned chest.

Emphysema is like a pillow that smothers. The disease attacks the lungs so severely that one, ultimately, cannot breathe. The alveoli trap air, which prevents enough new air to enter. Instead, the lungs trap poisonous carbon dioxide. Each breath yields less and less oxygen. Each breath requires more and more effort. In the end, a person essentially is left gasping for air. That’s what happened to my father the afternoon when I was racing to meet him. I had delayed traveling to Florida, hoping I could get there after proctoring my finals at the university.

I had called the nurses at the hospital each night for a week to see if I would need to change my plans. My father was a fighter, they said. He had a strong heart, the doctors said. Two days before I was set to leave, I received shocking news from a new ICU nurse: “You really need to get down here. He’s in bad shape.” Within two hours, I had packed, arranged care for my girls, and headed south on Interstate 57. Along the way, I had arranged to jump on a plane in Nashville, five hours away. The trees in Illinois had already bloomed, tulips poked through gardens, and the weather warmed up considerably. I passed car after car, going around 80 mph at some points in order to get to the airport on time. I was halfway there.

My sister did not even have to speak. I knew the moment her name popped up on my cell phone. Dad had just passed away, alone in the hospital, not with his son holding his hand and whispering how much he loved him. We did not lock eyes for a moment that said it all. He just stopped breathing and left the world – perhaps wondering why his son had not reached him in time. Life (and death) waited for nobody, not even for me. I cursed and swore and begged and pleaded and prayed for a resurrection unlike anything that’s happened for two thousand years. I bargained and screamed and yelled and slammed my hand against the dashboard and window, not caring if I broke glass or my hand. What did it matter? I called my wife and my mother and headed back home, where I cried for hours.

By the next day, everybody knew. But I refused to speak with anyone besides the church secretary in Florida who helped organize the memorial service. I did not want to be busy in case my father contacted me. But he never appeared. Friends were waiting to speak with me the next afternoon when I dropped the girls at soccer practice. My daughters slid out the car and I took off, back down State Road 130 to Charleston. That’s when I saw it. I suddenly knew how Sarah felt when the sun finally peeked over the mountain that morning in North Carolina, joyous for a sign of life after death. The bee had wiggled (as if it were taking a deep breath), flapped its wings, and lifted up off that black-eyed Susan in order to return home. At first, I wondered if I were imagining the vision, like when you see halos around lights after a day spent swimming in chlorinated water. I looked east again. Two rainbows bent over the horizon, both as richly hued as any I had ever seen before. They arched lower and wider than usual, prompting more than a few people to stop, point, and stare at the twin rainbows. I pulled off the side of the road to take it all in.

When people die, we’re told, we see loved ones who have passed. Some people see lights at the end of a dark tunnel and others see Jesus himself reaching out to them. People who have come back from death confirm much of this. Scientists dispute it all, saying the cut-off blood supply to the brain’s occipital lobe creates the appearance of a tunnel. A world of darkness makes sense to a dying brain, which no longer receives sensory input. There is no explanation, though, for the lights at the end of this tunnel. A dead brain should not retain consciousness.  Some scientists say the near-death experiences emulate birth, when we traveled down a dark canal before seeing the light of a delivery room. But people born caesarian have also reported seeing these lights. (And don’t babies close their eyes at birth?)

None of that mattered that afternoon. I have always teetered between faith and skepticism, something my father clearly would have known. I was still upset my grandfather had not sent me a letter from heaven, as he had promised to a teenager more than twenty years earlier. A single rainbow is a coincidence. Two vibrant rainbows arching overhead, side by side, is a clear sign. I pulled back onto the road and returned to practice, parking the car far away from the other parents. My girls played hard, racing after loose balls, going straight at opposing players to take possession, and leaping right onto the foot of a shooter. Sarah moved left, cut right, and easily passed a teammate to go downfield with the ball. Kristen, meanwhile, pointed and yelled directions to her defensive backs, letting them know where to go; she was taking charge as the goalie. Even from a quarter-mile away, I could see their determination. They were my girls. I did not need to see their faces to know how they looked, nor did I need to have them next to me to know they cared about me.

I know someday my girls might not be there when the time comes for me to evaporate from body to soul. I know they might be unable to see me, or that an unexpected event might prevent any planned reunion. That may be fine for them. I’ll still feel their love. But, dammit, that’s just not enough for me. And, my father must have known that, because those two rainbows shone brightly for more than an hour, arching high over that open field – like a pitched ball on a Sunday afternoon.

Joe Gisondi teaches in the Journalism Department at Eastern.