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I have heard stories about people who break their backs in cold climates and are then restored, their spines protected and supported by being frozen, which stanches hemorrhage and enables slow healing, their recovery thoroughly miraculous and ruthlessly scientific.

At the end of 2013, I wondered if a frozen body might similarly protect and heal a shattered heart.

Back then, I would have denied this inclination and dodged the question. My love of hockey had nothing to do with the guy who had taken me to my first game. He had broken my heart like an old-school scoundrel, new-school sociopath. He had ripped his mask away, in a phone call I will never forget. After I hung up, I threw up.

I wore my bewilderment openly with those I loved. The stages of grief and revelation were relentless. The many furrowed brows and much sincere sympathy from those equally taken in by him did not stop the internal swirl: “What had I done? What had I said? Will he come back? Why did he go?” Endless ruminations, constant questions.

Does it protect the heart more when extremities go cold because the blood must warm critical functions? The body knows that the heart matters more than a finger or two, more than a random toe. When the heart stops, life stops.

Could the same ice that may enable a paralyzed person to walk again make my heart open to love again? Or was it merely that water in its frozen state simply does not move.

Or maybe, ice is a state of pure transformation. Water, altered to frozen from flow, from movement to stasis, expands; its previous constraints, if they existed at all, likely to burst. Ten cups of water become 11 cups of ice.

Cold suspends and protects. Whatever frozen water holds cannot be easily reached.

If it is an emotion, does ice smother it, like a mammoth entombed in tundra, long hidden until a sudden exhumation? To free it, you must chip away, with force, with metal, with sharpness, with determination, with heat.

In December 2013, awaiting the new year, I burned various items, hoping that the elemental could outfox the primal, that fire could melt memory, that ice could dull loss as it does every sharp thing that goes against it. And I pondered some maxims meant for broken hearts.

What does not kill me makes me stronger.

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.

If you take a skate to ice, if you float on top of it, does it set you free?

The more you learn about skating, and the more you talk to those who know a lot about it, you will hear: Trust your edges.

To anyone unfamiliar with skates and the best way to use them, this will make no sense. Aren’t you balancing on a flat metal blade? Is the edge that sharp star-like thing on the front of the skate? (FYI, that is called the toe pick, which is only found on figure skates. Hockey skates are angled, pretty much the opposite of flat, and do not have a toe pick—I didn’t know they were different, either, at first.) There is a lot more going on with that skate and the person controlling it than is immediately obvious. Anyone who makes skating look easy is using the edges.

Hockey and ice skate blades have edges on either side of the thin flatter middle. The edge on the big-toe side of each skate is known as the inside edge. The edge on the pinkie toe side is the outside edge. Skaters who really know what they are doing, who just effortlessly fly around, know the best edge to use at any given time and even can emphasize the front or back of these edges to suit their needs. Any beginning skater will start to feel (or, in my case, almost never feel) the edges when working on stopping. You cannot stop if you stay on the flat middle of the skate blade. You need to work the angle, to find the edge, if you want control.

When a skater first hits the ice, if that skater truly knows the score, she is testing those edges, getting a feel for them on this day at this particular time. Does one seem stronger than another? Has one dulled enough to require attention? Can she find the best balance among them? When she tests them, do the edges hold?

As a skater, your body and, by extension, your edges are different every day. It doesn’t take long to see where the vulnerabilities lie. As you get stronger on the ice, your edges tell you more about where you stand, about what you need to do to find the most balance, about the little mistakes that may drag you down.

Edges come into play with everything. Whether you call them boundaries, standards, or bullshit detectors, you must learn to trust your edges off the ice, too. Your edges keep you straight, allow you to react quickly, help you get to where you need to go next. They keep you focused and aware. And once you have learned to feel what they are telling you, they give you the balance and the means to meet whatever you encounter with some measure of strength and grace.

 

My last grandparent was taking her last breaths, and I was sitting in Verizon Center watching the Capitals play the Panthers. My mother had been giving me updates throughout the previous weeks that Grandma was feeling worse, that she was ready to be done, and my mother was by her side on this night, Nov. 2, 2013. But there was no way I could make it back home in time. So, when I surveyed my options of what to do as this was happening—especially as my mother was sure Grandma would be gone in mere hours—I bought the last-minute ticket that brought me to section 119.

If it seems odd that I took comfort in going to a hockey game instead of staying home to cry hysterically and alarm the pets or watch yet another British mystery that I had already seen three times, I must admit to being a firm believer in denial as a first reaction to any tragedy. But that would only be part of the explanation. Grieving alone for a woman who would soon be at peace after a life well-lived did not seem right. It would make Dorothy sad to see me as the recluse I was slowly becoming, and I wanted to think of her from a place of joy. From outside the litany of losses that had marked the past few years of my life, hockey had become the new good thing, separate from everything else that had fallen apart and with a strange power to calm me down. It also didn’t hurt that my grandmothers—Dorothy, who was now in hospice, and Ruby, who had died 11 years before—had been the only ice skaters in the family.

Being One and Three

Although it is a somewhat rare occurrence these days, my parents had me when they were fairly young—both of them were 21 when I was born. Having such young parents meant that as a kid my babysitters were a fascinating rotating cast including not only grandparents (who were younger than I currently am now when they first watched over me), but also great-grandparents, great aunts, great uncles, my mom’s stunning younger sisters and their equally bewilderingly beautiful friends, assorted neighbor and church kids, students from the teams my dad coached, and my dad’s bachelor college drinking buddies.

My parents were the ones who stayed in our little town. Because of that and because they were young and without a lot of money and because people were close to each other in a way that they aren’t these days, I knew and remember all of my great-grandparents, save my dad’s mother who died long before I was born. Growing up, I was a bike ride away from many relatives, although I could walk right through the woods to visit my mother’s parents.  

Dorothy and Ruby were both World War II brides, class valedictorians, and farm girls who survived the Depression. In short, they were women of substance, tenacity, smarts, resourcefulness, and heart who raised children also deserving of those adjectives. For Dorothy, and my mother’s side, I was the first grandchild. For Ruby, and my dad’s side, I was the third.

Key Figures

Dorothy had been extremely close to her siblings. They would ice skate in the rink or on the frozen rivers and ponds. They did this regularly, large groups of young adults spending time together as the war loomed in the background, ready to change all of their lives. Dorothy skated to be with those she loved, and her interest in continuing to skate changed as marriage and the war changed those who had skated with her. She still took her kids out on the ice, but it was not her chief source of amusement past a certain point. It may have been hard for her to continue; she associated skating with a life, time, and people she loved dearly and lost in many ways through the war.

For Ruby, however, skates of any kind were a way of life. Between gas rations and working the farm she struggled to keep afloat for her aging parents, Ruby roller-skated down the road when she had some place to be. In the winter, she would get there by frozen river and ice skates. She loved to be active. She loved water. When she wasn’t in it, she was on it. She taught her children to roller skate and ice skate, and she went with them until doctor’s orders forbade it. One broken arm too many in her early forties meant no more skating of any kind, which always seemed so cruel. You break a heart to fix an arm? I have her skates and the “skating skirt” she made.

Ice Blue

Unlike many of my friends, I did not have phantom or abstract grandparents, blurry memories of vague faces because I was too little to have ever really known them. Mine had been in my life my entire childhood, my entire adolescence, and in Dorothy’s case, as I was staring down middle age. When Ruby died, I was 32. When Dorothy died—I got the call from my mom as I sat at the Verizon Center—I was 42. Their loss remains keenly felt.

But, so does the connection. When I switched from hockey skates to figure skates, I felt this keenly as well. Circling around the ice, moving from this edge to that, working on a slalom, attempting cross-overs for the first time, I often thought of them. Of their movements into grace, of their strength and beauty, of continuing a joy they had to stop. Of their blue eyes that skipped a generation to me. And of their circling with me and through me as I lived the things I loved and not the things I feared.

“You not fall if you wear figure skates.”

I was looking up at her, a heap on my stomach on the ice, the hockey skates that betrayed me attached to my splayed legs. To my credit, it was a graceful slow-motion-type fall that I was rather proud of successfully executing. But the Russian was unmoved.

“You could ice dance. Why do you wear those skates? You will ruin your form if you keep wearing hockey skates.”

I was starting to think she had a point. It was week four. I had skated for two weeks in all-purpose rental skates, a peculiar hybrid of figure and hockey skates designed to offend no one and confuse everyone.

Because I had not died during the first two lessons, I felt brave enough to wear my hockey skates and was once again back in the universe of no stops because there was no toe pick I could use to cheat. Plus, I liked the flatter blade. I kept pitching backward, then forward, then downward in these freaky fast-angled foot-covers.

Maybe it was time to revise goals. I went home and ordered from Amazon what I thought were figure skates. But, really they were cheap and supposedly warm enough to wear on an iced pond. They would last a while, until I decided to buy a real pair.

I am easily persuaded by Russians.