Icy rain, falling tree limbs, falling ice, and stormy winds had destroyed the siding on our house, and de-shingled huge portions of the roof. The power was out. Pipes had burst in the basement. We weren’t able to heat the house, and it was well below-freezing in our kitchen.

My entire family – myself, my two brothers, and our parents – were sharing blankets at the foot of a fireplace that hadn't been used in a decade. Smoke was billowing out in all the wrong directions and the heat wasn’t succeeding in the fight against the frigidity. Inevitably, when it was safe enough to go outside, we drove at a crawl to a shelter declared on a wind-up radio.

It was hosted in an elementary school uptown. The crowd was sparse, some in better shape than others, but everyone mostly okay. All the volunteers had on hand was instant coffee packets and cold water, which did little to placate the seniors in distress and weeping children. The rough night was only absolved by my dad’s casual comfort in talking to any stranger who makes eye contact, calm voice steady and reassuring.

Moments of spontaneous chaos – howling wind, a tree branch falling, car alarms going off, the babies all wailing at once – was unsettlingly combined with an indescribable, pin-drop silence that generally hung over those who took refuge alongside us. My father seemed impervious to it all. He drew himself only to listen, identifying sound-by-sound the bangs and screeching beyond the windowless walls.

Otherwise, he resisted the eerie silence and flashes of commotion, focusing on whatever conversation partners settled down next to him. He didn’t say anything particular to the situation – praising my mother for her beauty and patience, highlighting every tiny school achievement popped into his mind about his kids, describing his job function, declaring hatred for his heartless supervisors, or explaining why he disliked sports in the same voice most dads use to celebrate sports. It didn’t matter what he said – it was a river of familiarity, level, inquiring, polite. I don’t know if he knew it at the time, but he was making the world level again.

My mother was exhausted and uncomfortable, but tried not to let it on. She had the kind of burnout, anxious misery right in her eyes that you might expect on a night like that. In just a few hours, her vehicle – ill-prepared for extremes of weather for the record books – had nearly slid off the road with her three children in the backseat.

She later revealed to me that she could only think of the fires across town caused by falling electric lines, amateur-lit fireplaces, and unattended candles during the power outages declared on the radio. Emergency responders were stretched thin and having a difficult time dealing with the onslaught – the likelihood that we would have been killed or stranded by the accident or it’s unattended injuries rang louder than the injuries: getting stuck out on the ice, trapped in a care in a pitch-black blizzard, all at once. No way out. No way to check on us. It was a thought that was obtrusive, paralyzing, and has haunted her nightmares since.

At the time, her poker face was iron-clad. We were all sleep-deprived and moody. Strangers were crowding us in an elementary school’s cafeteria, volunteers were in panic-mode, and the entire room was on edge. It was all encroaching on the quiet peace she had always been able to carve out in one way or another. Our home could have been in any state imaginable when she returned after power returned to our grid, and she knew it.

To top it all off, she was very ill then. Her already-bad lungs were full of poorly-ventilated fireplace smoke. Disintegrating joints aching along bones struck with the gnawing cold. We didn’t know it at the time – a diagnosis was years away – but she was feeling it then. I remember her quiet weeping into a coffee-stained scarf, shaking fingers, and mild hypothermia after sneaking out of our hearth-heated living room into the frigid kitchen to try to sleep where she might be able to breathe – even with a drastic, health hazard temperature drop. Her blue lips and desperate breath had finally given my father reason enough to brave the outdoors to escape in the first place.

Still, she denied her tears and held my brothers and I – when one of us grew listless and fidgeted away, another had grown tired and quickly took the other’s place. As we grew antsy, she showed us how to rest our heads on a rolled-up jacket, letting us lay all over her and whine until she was fraying on the edge of losing it. With seeking arms, she encouraged me to lay my head on her lap, hushing reminders that I was too old to be falling asleep on anyone.

I felt her take a breath so loud it tuned my ears to her heartbeat – and then she smiled.

It was a placating, soothing kind of smile she will always be famous for – genuine when it cannot possibly be genuine. She began to speak, and sound awake, happy even - and excited. It was a switch to faux-energy she learned as a stage actress in high school – “fake it until you make it”, “action means start now!” – and she began telling us about what a great adventure it all was.

How wonderful to be in a mysterious place with people we can make up life-stories for – that must be an old pirate. That must be a retired secret service agent. That lady sells cats. That lady paints magic murals in orphanages.

How exciting to be awake at three in the morning while the world slept!

How fun to be drinking coffee like we’ve never had it, alongside people not brave enough to drink it!

Words wove into stories and consumed our fear. We lost focus on anything but the idea that we were now heroes and adventurers and survivalists, ready for anything, hardened by such a night.

“It’s a story you can tell your grand-kids about,” she said, “and it’s practice for a novel you might write.”

She told us we could survive the end of the world, inventing stories about the new world and the things we would find there.

Someone said, “These lights are like prison! What are you in for? I stole the Arc of the Covenant. I hear you had your eyes on the Declaration of Independence.”

It didn’t matter what movie-knockoff grand heist we had be caught red-handed in, but the details of our great escape had to be epic. It didn't even matter who said it. Suddenly whining grumpiness gave way to excited giggles and laughter that pulled every kid in the room into better humor, except cold babies and their jaded caretakers.

Here’s one thing I learned from two people who decided to hold it together for their kids that night:

It doesn’t matter what happened – how scary, how tedious, how inconvenient. It doesn’t matter how much something sucked, or if all we can do is wait it out. All that matters is the story you tell about it – why you tell it, and who you tell it to.