To Know the Dark by Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Winter is not my favorite season.
Even knowing that the winter solstice marks the point at which daylight begins its slow return, this promise of light–this reassurance of the sweetness of summer–feels theoretical at best. This turn toward light should bring me comfort.
Most years, as American Thanksgiving approaches, I mobilize a familiar set of strategies—part ritual, part cognitive reframing—to prepare myself for winter. I read about seasonal rhythms and the symbolic meaning of the solstice. I cultivate coziness: warm soups, layered blankets, the stack of unread books waiting next to my bed. Last year, I even got a dog to get me outside more. But this year, with more than a foot of snow already on the ground and the longest night of the year approaching, winter feels heavier. The cold feels more insistent. The dark feels more raw. I can’t seem to find comfort–or hope–in the dark of winter.
Part of this is the sheer accumulation of grief and loss. This year has been marked by what could be described, in sociological terms, as clustered losses (a new term I learned thanks to Google)—multiple deaths occurring in close succession. This year, my husband and I each lost an aunt. Two close friends lost their fathers. My brother lost his father-in-law; my nephews and niece lost their grandfather only two years after losing their mother. Two extended family members experienced the sudden loss of their babies. My uncle, still grieving the death of his wife, lost two close friends within weeks. This is a long list, and the emotional density of it has taken away my ability to mobilize my typical rhythms and strategies for the cold and dark of winter.
Then there is our broader cultural context: democratic erosion, rising rage-driven discourse, the breakdown of civic norms. It is difficult to locate comfort in winter when the surrounding world feels increasingly unstable. It feels like darkness is growing.
There is, simply, a great deal to mourn.
I have never liked the term loss when referring to death. When my father died suddenly at age 62, telling people that I had “lost” him felt inaccurate. He was not lost. I knew where he was. He just wasn’t where I wanted him to be. But then I had a reframing: in talking about grief and loss the other night, my most trusted friend said, “I didn’t lose [my mom]. I lost who I was when I was with her.”
This reframing captures grief’s dimension. Death does not only remove a person from our lives; it removes a version of ourselves shaped by proximity to them. In that sense, I have lost who I was when I was with my father and my aunt. I have even lost the version of myself who believed deeply in democratic institutions and civic stability.
Here winter becomes a meaningful analogue. Winter asks us to pause; grief forces us to. Both impose a kind of temporal and emotional stillness—an interruption of normal rhythms. Both create a liminal space, a threshold between what was and what is not yet.
Winter asks us to pause. Grief forces us to.
This pause–this stillness–can feel both sacred and unbearably heavy.
The winter solstice is the most literal manifestation of this liminality. It is a moment suspended in the in-between: no longer descending into darkness, not yet rising into light. Grief lives in this same suspended state. It is the interval between the life we once inhabited and the life we must now learn to navigate—a life altered, fragmented, and fundamentally unchosen.
Winter does not pretend. It doesn’t soften itself to make the darkness easier to bear. Winter, and the winter solstice, presents the darkness in its full, unfiltered reality.
Grief operates similarly. There is no romanticism in its initial impact—no tidy arc, no soft illumination. It hits like cold wind to the face, piercing and biting. It leaves you with the raw fact of absence and the unfamiliar contours of your altered self. You are different because you have to be different. But it’s rarely a gentle reframing or reimagining. It’s rather more like rocks eroding to sand because of harsh winds and freezing ice.
The winter solstice, contrary to popular interpretations, does not immediately usher in noticeable light. It marks a pause—a bottoming-out—a moment when the Earth’s tilt slows just enough to reveal where we are: between what was and what will be, between identity lost and identity emerging. The already and not yet.
Contemporary grief models often emphasize resilience or post-traumatic growth. Yet such frameworks can obscure the reality that grief’s work is often not progress but survival. Most days it looks like breathing without apology. Winter makes no demand for transformation; it demands only endurance. Not hope exactly. Not light.
The solstice teaches one thing with certainty: darkness has a beginning and a middle. Whether it has a definitive end—like grief—we do not get to know.
Winter is unadorned in its honesty, and grief mirrors that honesty back to us. No embellishments. No performance. Only truth.
And the truth, at least for now, is this: We are still here, inside the longest night. And for this season—for this year—that may be enough.
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