Grief & healing: Dealing with extreme cold

My husband Baheej was raised in a warm Mediterranean climate.

So when he went to Boulder, Colorado, for graduate school, he had no experience with winter weather.

When he finished and we moved to Massachusetts and faced extremely cold weather, he had to learn how to handle below-zero cold. It was a learning curve!

I was raised in Minnesota, so I understood about the dangers of severe cold and how to dress for it. We learned this as kids. We even bundled up and went out to play in it.

Many houses in Minnesota had a side entrance or back porch where we could stomp off the snow, or a kitchen entrance where we could take off our wet snowsuits. We wore head-to-toe insulation!

Dressing warmly is lesson No. 1, followed by limiting time out in the cold and protecting any exposed skin on face or hands. We also developed inside activities and projects for amusement during cold months. A north country lifestyle.

Well last week, it was super cold right here in Illinois, and I fell back on those lessons I learned growing up in frigid northern Minnesota. And It brought back lots of memories about how Baheej adjusted to cold weather.

Over the years we spent lots of time in Scandinavia and took many trips in northern Sweden, Finland and Norway above the Arctic Circle. He learned to enjoy the cold weather.

The point is: There are many, many triggers that bring us back in time to both happy and sad times. Sometimes they take us by surprise. This time, coping with the very cold weather triggered some wonderful memories of Baheej and all those wonderful trips.

• Susan Anderson-Khleif of Sleepy Hollow has a doctorate in family sociology from Harvard, taught at Wellesley College and is a retired Motorola executive. Contact her at sakhleif@aol.com.