When I was a kid, my mom had a strange habit of sleeping with the window wide open—even in winter. I used to tease her, piling on blankets and joking that she must be part polar bear. She’d just smile and say, “Fresh air keeps the soul alive.” I never really understood what she meant.
She passed away recently, and the house felt unbearably quiet. While cleaning out her room, memories clung to every surface. In her nightstand, I found a stack of old journals, neatly arranged.
I didn’t plan to read them, but curiosity took over. In one entry, written years before I was born, she described a time when life felt suffocating. She wrote about feeling trapped by her struggles, as if the walls were closing in. Opening the window—no matter how cold it was—became her reminder that the world was bigger than her pain, that there was always space to breathe and hope to hold onto.
Tears blurred my vision as I realized she hadn’t been doing it just for herself. She was showing me, in her quiet way, how to survive hard moments. Every cold breeze carried a lesson she never said out loud: no matter how heavy life feels, there is always air to breathe and another day ahead.
That night, I opened my own bedroom window wide. As the icy air filled the room, I felt her presence and her strength beside me.
For the first time since she passed, I didn’t feel so alone.
