the winter solstice
Yellowcraig, 21 December
for Karyn
For years now, we’ve tried to mark, to celebrate, the days of the summer and winter solstice with a walk. With the summer solstice offering daylight until after 10pm, that’s pretty easy as even if the date falls on a weekday, we can always drive down the coast for an evening walk. This year, with Raf, we headed for a late walk at Yellowcraig as the setting sun steamed through the clouds and dappled the wet, rippled sand with glowing light. It was beautiful.
And on Saturday, the winter solstice, we headed back to Yellowcraig for a mid-afternoon walk as the light was fading. I’m always tempted to write ‘late afternoon’ or ‘evening’, but the reality is that these midwinter walks are in the middle of the afternoon, with a sunset time on this walk of 3.39pm.
I didn’t take many photos. In reality this walk was wild with an intense wind that was whirling the beach into a sandstorm at times. The upside of this was the quietness as there were only a few other walkers, which meant that we had the beach to ourselves at times, and that felt so good. Raf was running and running, unfazed by the whipping wind, delighted by this freedom after a week where we’d either been indoors all day, or had stressed local walks. This wild weather was exactly what we needed; a grounding for the mind.
Late on Thursday night last week I’d opened Instagram to a post from a friend, someone I’ve got to know, to chat to by DM, since June last year, when Harris was in hospital, but more so since October last year. Only it wasn’t a post from this friend. Instead her sister was posting from the account to share that Karyn had died on Sunday 15 December after a brief but devastating illness. The shock of that. Someone I didn’t really know, but someone I’d shared conversations with after Karyn lost her boy, Mylo, on 8 October 2023, just 12 days before Harris passed. We found ourselves walking this path, an ocean apart, yet experiencing these same chapters of emotion. We wrote to each other about grief, about trying to live with loss, about the unbearable sadness of those early weeks and months, about the guilt we carried, about the love we carried. In a post Karyn shared on 8 October this year to mark the one year anniversary of Mylo’s passing, she wrote: “Neither of us would have ever chosen to leave the other. You never left me, my heart just beats for us both now.”
I felt these words. It’s how I feel about Harris. And here, just weeks later, this kind, thoughtful, deeply compassionate woman is also gone.
As I walked here on Saturday, the wind skelping us as we wound along the top of the dunes, looking out over the beach to the Forth where that same wind was whipping across the top of each wave, I was thinking of Karyn. If you were to ask me questions about her, I wouldn’t be able to answer them. I don’t know her last name, or what she did for work. What music she listened to or how she spent her weekends. But I know that she was kind, caring, and that she loved her boy, deeply, and that as I shared my grief and love for Harris, and then for Bracken, and as Richard and I walked through those tough yet precious weeks and months of uncertainty and fear and anguish and loss, she listened, and she shared her grief and love back.
We wrote with rawness and honesty, from the heart, and we chuckled about memories too. There was also lightness in our conversations - about Raf, about her Westie lass Maisie. I’ve learned that Instagram in particular is a place where friendships can evolve that don’t need the conventions of knowing all the usual things about someone’s life. You can bypass all of that and find connections on another level.
In one of our DM conversations back in January, we wrote about encountering people when we need to. That somehow we find people when we need their words, their experience and understanding. I’m so grateful that we found each other, albeit in sadness, but also with light.
And so I share this here, in this post about this day, this date that moves us slowly, gradually, back towards the light, and back towards the hope of spring ahead. I shared this walk on Instagram stories on Saturday and I know that Karyn would have loved this sky and this wide beach and this gentle light, and watching Raf run and run, simply joyful, leaving a trail of paw prints across the sand.
Yellowcraig, East Lothian, 21 December 2024.
#yellowcraig #eastlothian #scotland #wintersolstice
