When my grandmother moved from her home in Sun City, Arizona, to a retirement center nearby, I flew down to join Dad and my aunt Georgia and cousins who lived locally in helping her move. We put things in boxes and brought them to her apartment, helping her unpack, finding just the right place for her china cabinet, for the glass bells and birds she collected. Grandma, fiercely independent throughout her life, had been loath to leave her home, but her declining health required it. Dad and I stayed in twin beds in the guest room at her new facility. I seized the chance to talk to him one evening, as we sat opposite each other on faded bedspreads. The only light came from lamps on the bedside tables, which cast long shadows and left the corners of the room dark.
“You haven’t been visiting,” I said, intending to provoke. “I don’t get it. When you come with Kathy, you guys don’t show up until the day is half gone. Why don’t you just let her finish her yoga on her own?”
He evaded my questions for a while, then snapped, “Don’t you think it’s hard being down here while you’re here helping? People will say what a big help you are, and Kathy’s going to be jealous. I will not let this marriage fail. You kids will see an example of a good marriage!”
I sat on the sagging mattress, staring at him, speechless for once, watching the electricity snap and pop in the frayed ends of a divorced family. So much said between his words: regret over a failed marriage he never saw coming; love for his wife; love for us kids; the value of family; his insecurities, tempered by his determination. We regarded each other with a mix of apprehension and wonder, each of us trying to comprehend the other’s changing status and the resulting implications of affection and remove, independence and need. I wanted to hug him and say I loved him, say I was sorry we had talks like these, that I just needed to know that I was still important. The most I might have said was “okay” before we turned out our lamps and went to sleep. Or rolled over to stare into the dark.
Thinking back on it now, I craved the gentleness Dad had assumed with age and his new marriage, in part because it hadn’t been as present when I was younger. Part of this gentleness came from the love he had for Kathy. I could see that, and appreciate it as a part of him, as something she gave to him in a way we kids could not. But my need for connection threatened Kathy because my relationship with her, very real in its own right, was made of different stuff. We both wanted my dad in different ways.
I didn’t notice the point at which our roles changed places and I was the one checking on him, asking what they were taking with them when they were gone, how they were going to be safe. As Dad and Kathy headed into the wild, I worried, in the way we start to worry when we can no longer deny the possibility of loss, even though we have not yet begun to understand its consequences.
CHAPTER 4
DAMP SHADOWS
It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
—Tomas Tranströmer, “After Someone’s Death”
My first days back in Seattle after Dad and Kathy died had played out like a silent movie, familiar scenes and even people around me moving in two dimensions, black and white, muted, meaningless. I walked about as a void, a transparent body; no one could see me, no one could understand. I was living in negative. I lived just outside the tremulous border of life, on the fringe, the mirage of separation between worlds obscuring details and depth.
I fooled myself into believing that I could manage myself as a project. I did what must be done. We had a funeral. We buried them. We cleaned out and sold their house. If I planned well enough, my rational side could oversee my emotions. I went to a counselor and to a grief group. I returned to work and soon moved into management, where I dove into projects. I focused on rhythms: working, returning phone calls, seeing friends, going to church. I adopted two adolescent cats and named them Jack—after Father Jack, the priest in Healy who had buried Dad and Kathy, after the Jack River in Alaska, and after C. S. Lewis (Jack was Lewis’s nickname)—and Healy, after the place where Dad and Kathy were buried. If life was about doing the right things, surely I could figure those things out. This was something universal. Everyone loses their parents at some point.
But warning signs flashed like artillery fire in the night, unpredictable, shaking the ground, until I sat cowering, waiting for the next round to hit. I didn’t feel my normal interest in the classical choral group I had sung with the previous year. I lacked motivation to reengage with much at all. In difficult times past, I had sat at my piano and let my fingers explore Chopin, Beethoven, searching for solace or companionship in music. Now I sat at the small dinner table in my apartment, moving food around on my plate in the smothering silence, glancing at the piano, mute against the far wall, feeling early autumn darkness bleed through the skylight above me and suffocate the light.
One night I pushed my plate away and stood. I walked to the piano and sat on the bench. I rested my hands on the cool, smooth keys. My hands would not move. I looked at them—quiet hands sitting on silent keys, as still as bones.
To anticipate the storms, I became a weatherman, reading the signs, looking for cues. If I couldn’t change the weather, couldn’t hold back the onslaught, maybe I could get out of the way. I wasn’t very good at it. Water spouts erupted without warning in the midst of calm. One day at the office, I bolted up, closed the blinds, slammed the door, and sat back in my chair, turning to face the wall, weeping. The dam was weak; I could only try to respond to leaks.
When after the funeral an acquaintance recommended anti-depressants, I was insulted. We were a family that didn’t ask for help. We were tough. I believed this until the day, a few months after coming back to Seattle, when I sprinted out of the office and down the stairs to my car, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone, my body convulsing before I could slam the car door behind me. I went to my therapy appointment that afternoon, dissolved in sobs for the first and only time during therapy, and asked for a prescription. I didn’t go to therapy to cry; I went to therapy to work. The counselor seemed relieved by it all: the crying and the request. He wrote the prescription. I went home and looked at the pill in my palm. Round, white, like a baby aspirin. I didn’t want to cancel out my feelings. I didn’t want to stop feeling the pain that kept me closer to those I had lost. I wanted to hurt, but I also needed to work and live. Refusing to use an available tool didn’t make sense. I waited a day, then another. Finally I added the little white pills to my vitamins and tried to ignore that I was using them. Over time, I started to understand that not asking for help was another legacy I could break. I started to see the damage done in our family that might have been avoided if we hadn’t all been so proud. And that the way that damage had manifested was nothing to be proud of at all.
“Are you over it yet?” someone asked once.
“Have you moved on?” asked someone else.
I knew these were questions asked from a place of discomfort, by people who did not know, who didn’t know what to say. Still, the queries came at me like blades. There is no such thing as getting over it, I wanted to scream, I wanted to whisper. There is no such thing as moving on, at least not how you’ve understood it before. It’s like being tackled by something you hadn’t known existed, then lying breathless on the ground, getting up slowly, and starting to walk again, alongside this thing, along with this thing. It’s no wonder some stories describe the grim reaper as a person or thing hooded and unknown that shows up at our doors, takes up residence in our homes and lives and bodies, a thing dark and physical.
I had to learn to understand the world differently. I had to relearn the world, a world without my father, without my stepmother. Once I did this, I had to relearn myself without them too. It all looked flat, dimensionless, ugly. I did not know how to do this kind of learning. I did not want to learn this kind of life.
Dad said, coming back from his father’s funeral, that he had somehow known as he carried the casket that he was carrying not his father but only hi
s shell. I kept envisioning Dad and Kathy alone in boxes deep in the cold dark earth, now just flesh and bone.
Each day, I came home from work and stretched out on the couch, flattened like roadkill. I stared into the air hanging silent and dead, seeing nothing, waiting to be crushed under the weight of its emptiness. I did not want to talk to anyone, and yet I wished with desperation for someone who would be in that room with me, in that space, just sitting and breathing and giving life to the air. I wished for air that held the possibility of a call from Anchorage, Dad’s voice on the phone, Kathy’s laugh. If I thought at all, I thought in sharp shards of understanding that there were others around my city, around my world, also roiling under the weight of this dark, fathomless pain, and that knowledge was too much to bear.
I put on sunglasses to walk to the grocery store on a cloudy day. Inside, I avoided eye contact. The checkout attendant smiled brightly and asked how I was, a gesture I usually appreciated. I wrestled the corners of my closed mouth upward, briefly, in disbelief at the unknowing of the world. I signed my credit card receipt, dropped my sunglasses back onto my face, and walked out, back onto the street, where I was invisible. I wondered how anyone could be so cruel. I envied cultures that have mourning traditions, wearing black or rending garments. Then people would know; they would understand. Why had our culture done away with all that? To spare the majority the discomfort that each of us must one day face? And by doing so robbing every one of us of the space to grieve and neutering society’s ability to mourn with the bereaved, our chance to appreciate life more for knowing death? I felt cheated. And it occurred to me that grief is something imposed, but that grieving is something that must be learned and, like anything of consequence, would reveal its realities slowly, over a lifetime. I had to learn it, so that I could make it through the shadowed valley and someday come out the other side. In my learning, I wanted to stay invisible—or if I had to be visible, to be left to my mourning. Lord, have mercy.
CHAPTER 5
THE RIVER WITHIN US
The river is within us.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”
Stretching from the gentle braids of the river below us, octagonal shapes, seemingly endless, symmetrical and similar in size, textured the tundra. The pattern looked as though a crystal had multiplied out of control, spreading across the plain.
Wresting myself from my daze, I tried pushing myself toward curiosity. “What are those shapes?” I asked through my headset, pointing at the geometric forms. My voice echoed in the headset as though I were speaking into a barrel.
“They’re called polygons,” Tom said, his pilot’s crosscheck continuing seamlessly, looking into the sky, at the tundra below, at the instruments, and back out again.
“How are they formed?”
“They say they’re made out of ice. Not sure why they end up all the same like that.”
I looked at the uniformity, complexity, and scale of the tundra polygons, amazed that there could be such naturally occurring order. The structure soothed me, an architecture of earth and water, a pattern of the land promising evidence of divine intention in what I saw as chaos. I wanted to know the place I was coming to for healing, hoping that learning more might help fill in the void that had opened in my life a year ago, might answer questions still unresolved.
Despite knowing of the influx of life to the Arctic in summer, looking down at the coastal plain did not yet inspire me to awe. To marvel over precariously balanced and prodigious life requires understanding, and my untrained eyes were not adequate to the task. I felt a flash of panic that I had lived too long away from wilderness ever to be able to truly appreciate this place. Skeins of river wove loosely back and forth on the tapestry of the tundra, braids voyaging through the landscape, returning to the main channel, venturing out again. Large gravel bars separated the river’s threads. From above it looked as though someone had poured a can of paint over an angled canvas so that streams of color navigated their way over tiny inconsistencies to the end. The distance hid the details, simplified the journey.
What was I really doing here? Was I really here to finish their trip? Or was I reacting like a wild animal, facing off against a wild place that had taken my dad and Kathy? Where did I get the idea I had enough experience or aptitude to handle a trip on a river in the Arctic? What was I thinking?
I’d learned to skydive in college while reveling in the myth of immortality belonging only to the young. I most enjoyed relative work, the formations skydivers make in the sky during a jump. One of the most counterintuitive techniques in relative work is the way two skydivers dock, or connect, in the air. If the jumpers reach out to make the connection, their bodies skid across the sky away from each other. Skydivers have to fight the natural urge to reach for something, and instead pull their arms back, orienting themselves so that they move toward their partners’ grasp. You have to trust. You have to let it happen.
I wasn’t any good at applying the lessons of parachuting to life. Emotions were far more dangerous than relying on a small piece of nylon to deliver you from sky to earth. Real risk involves the heart.
Now I focused on the physical, looked at the river winding below. No matter how good our maps, they could not depict the Hulahula River with a high degree of accuracy. In Arctic rivers, the force of water moves huge amounts of rock and sediment. Rivers begin flowing high at early melt, undercutting banks not only by their power but also because the moving water thaws the permafrost below. As the melting slows, so do the rivers, depositing their loads of sediment and glacial silt along the wide channels they cut when the rivers were higher. These deposits, from large rocks to the finest sand, form islands and change the contours of the shores. Over time, the entire path of a river can change as it crawls toward the sea. The power of water. The shifting of the earth.
When I was skydiving, I developed a ritual I observed on every plane ride in the minutes before hurling my body into the rushing wind: I said the Lord’s Prayer. I prayed for those I loved. I prayed for forgiveness. I got someone to check my equipment. This time, I whispered the Lord’s Prayer. I prayed for safety. And I remembered with a flash of pain and derision Kathy’s last journal entry on June 23, her last written words: “Lord, keep us safe.” I scowled out the window. It would be easier not to believe in God. It would be easier not to have to make sense of this. Maybe this place was too far north for prayer, too far north for hope.
“There are a couple of grizzlies,” Tom noted casually. He banked the airplane hard toward the river, and I grabbed the handle above my head as g-forces pressed me against the seat. Below us, two large brown bears ran in long, loose bounds with a grace proportionate to their vigor. As with William Faulkner’s Old Ben, they were “taintless and incorruptible.” They were the wild in its truest form.
Over the past year, I had read anything I could find about bear, probing the dichotomy of my repulsion and wonder, trying to reconcile my horror and awe. The primal connection between human and bear fills volumes, most richly relayed in the oral traditions of indigenous peoples around the world who think of the bear, despite, and in part because of, its potential for danger, as perhaps the purest representative of true wilderness, a wilderness now relegated to the geographical borders of humanity but echoing through the millennia in our psyches.
Indigenous people found physical and behavioral resemblances between humans and bears: the bear’s ability to walk upright, and his footprint, with the indentation of heel and arch, are among the clearest similarities. Bears are considered by scientists and indigenous alike to be highly intelligent and playful. Bears and humans both have omnivorous diets subject to change according to season, making the most of a fish run, a harvest of wild edibles, a deer kill, but typically consuming similar roots, berries, and plants.
Bears are also known for their maternal instincts, so much so that the medieval church used bear as symbol for the Virgin Mary. Mother bears disappear into dens to give birth to—to bear—blind, hairless
, and helpless cubs weighing less than a pound, suckling them in the den, a second womb. Though the mother bear does not eat or drink during her winter sleep, her young grow to the point of viability before mother and young emerge in the spring. But unlike most other animals, a mother bear stays with her young for another two or three years, teaching them to forage, build dens, and avoid threats from larger bears. Like humans, each bear represents a considerable investment of maternal time and energy.
A bear carcass, killed and skinned, is purported to look eerily like a human corpse.
But how do I describe seeing a bear under my circumstances? I knew that bears generally stay clear of humans. I knew that the two bears below us had not killed Dad and Kathy, because that bear had been killed the next day, when the police went to recover their bodies. I knew that before (and after) Dad and Kathy were killed, there were no known bear killings in the Arctic Refuge. I knew that these bears were beautiful. I was riveted in wonder and in horror. A piece of me seized inside. I strained to hear a symphony, but my music crumbled into chaos. The patterns disappeared.
A memory: waking early in the morning in my upstairs room to hear Dad’s quick, heavy footfalls on the first floor of the house moving from the bedroom to the kitchen, the sound of pouring coffee beans, the sound of coffee beans grinding, the sound of his footfalls returning to bed to wait while the coffee brewed, the smell of coffee curling through the house.
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