At 2:00 a.m. the phone rang. I answered. It was Ned.
Ned was adopted when we were all too young to remember. We were not close; in fact, our proximity in age made us rivals. Our youthful interaction involved his angry lashing out and my cynical disdain. As he grew older, Dad had kept Ned’s expressions of anger in check with a firm hand. In recent years, Ned seemed to have grown into a bright and capable man, marrying a woman toward whom he seemed tender, earning advanced degrees in market research and landing a prestigious job at a large company in Philadelphia. At the rare gathering since then, his physical threats had mostly subsided, and our verbal sparring dissipated with the years. We hadn’t had any experiences to build a bond in the wake of our clashes, though, so I cared for him cautiously.
Someone had already told him what had happened. Through a hazy consciousness, I heard his voice, scratchy through the phone, stammering, alternating between hoarse and screechy.
“I know,” I said again and again, because I didn’t know what else to say. “Don’t worry about anything here. We’ll take care of it. Just get here when you can. The funeral’s not till Thursday.” Hanging up, I laid back down and went back to staring at the ceiling in the relentless midnight light.
In the days to come, I focused on a discrete set of activities. Church, funeral home, music, notifications, obituary, burial, house. I waded through the narrow muffled tunnel of what was required and what I thought I could control. And yet when the organist, a longtime friend of Dad and Kathy’s and an accomplished musician, offered to help with the music, I was relieved and grateful. Looking back, it’s clear that while I thought I was handling a host of details, everything came together because of an outpouring of support, usually silent, from people at church, friends of Dad’s and Kathy’s, parents of friends of mine from growing up.
I had always thought that when Dad died I would collapse in a heap. I had even envisioned it: years from now getting a call at my office, letting out a cry and a wail, having to be carried out because my legs would not support me. It was one of the things I was most terrified of. And yet halfway through the week, I had not cried at all.
Peter flew in on Tuesday. I waited at the airport, which might have been another planet. I was a void, a hole where a person used to be, a black cutout of space. People came through the security gate meeting friends and families with smiles and hugs. I stared at them. They looked two-dimensional, figures from magazines.
Though I was surrounded by strangers at the airport, I was glad to be away from the house and the planning. I sat on the plastic terminal chairs, staring at Dad’s and Kathy’s pictures on the cover of the Anchorage Daily News. We had decided not to talk to the press. The newspaper printed a picture of Kathy in long braids and a windbreaker taken twenty-five years prior next to Dad’s serious but handsome picture from the website of the law firm he had founded three decades earlier. The headline was large and bold: “Victims of Improbable Attack Were Wilderness Vets.” The connection to me, to Dad and Kathy, seemed unlikely, impossible. I stared as though trying to interpret a foreign language.
For many months after, it took every ounce of emotional energy I had to get through a given day. I had no buffer. Remembering to eat was a problem. That first week, Dad’s sister, Aunt Marcia, reminded me, “Have a little something, just a bite of protein.” I ate one bite of whatever was at hand. It tasted like nothing. Peter fielded phone calls. The idea of talking to anyone, even well-wishers, even friends, was exhausting. Peter proofread and formatted the funeral bulletin. He slept on a trundle bed next to mine, holding my hand.
The boys’ wives headed out to pick up the tan-colored heavy paper I wanted to hold the funeral bulletin, and the green ribbon I wanted to tie it together. The church told us they were expecting six hundred or more people. Aunts and uncles helped fold and tie the programs together, but hadn’t expected to do so many.
“Do you want to just put ribbons on the programs for family?” asked my mom, who was helping to coordinate. “There are a lot of them; this will take time.”
“No, let’s tie ribbons on all of them,” I said.
“Shannon, you have to understand what this is about,” said Sam’s wife, smiling.
I looked at her quickly, and spoke slowly, my eyes weighted with lead, my words made of acid. “Don’t tell me what this is about,” I said. “I know exactly what this is about.” I am not proud of my unkindness. My focus was reptilian: looking purely on doing what I thought needed to be done, and doing it as well as possible. She cringed, wilting, and I don’t know that we ever fully recovered.
Ned arrived later than expected. My uncle Tom picked him up from the airport. “The flight was cancelled,” Ned said. “They were trying to reschedule all of us, and there was a long line of people trying to go on their stupid cruises and fishing trips. I just yelled, ‘My dad was killed by a flipping bear, and you’re worried about your fishing trips?’” He laughed. “They moved me to the front of the line.”
I looked at him with disgust and walked into another room. He was proud of how he had acted? He thought that honored Dad and Kathy? He thought it was okay to act that way? I didn’t know how it could be that this man and I shared the same family. His reaction polluted a sacred if confusing time. I tried to put it aside.
Later that day Uncle Tom came into the dining room, where we were making final edits to the service bulletin. “I don’t know what you’re all thinking,” he said, “but I’d take the living room set if no one else wants it.”
I stared at him, trying not to scream and not to cry, and looked back at the computer.
“We haven’t talked about it yet,” said Sam.
The week of the funeral, thunder announced the approach of black clouds rolling over the Chugach Mountains. I did not remember ever having heard thunder in Alaska. I did not remember there ever having been such dark clouds. I knew that there was another power here, unseen, even unfelt. I was doing what humans do in these times, looking for signs, for symbols, for something to lend meaning, but felt flattened, stretched, and dried, an animal skin put out to cure, cracking from exposure. Sun broke through the clouds, sometimes tentatively, sometimes suddenly. Then it poured rain, as briefly as a passing sound. And then there were the rainbows I’d hear about later. It was too hard for me then to see past the storms.
Dad’s older sister, my aunt Georgia, stayed in Arizona to care for Grandma, who wasn’t able to travel. On the phone, Aunt Georgia recalled a conversation during Dad and Kathy’s April visit in which they had talked about end-of-life planning. She remembered that Dad and Kathy mentioned wanting to be buried in Healy, a small town four hours’ drive north of Anchorage and close to our family cabin. But Anchorage is where all of us, including Kathy, had spent our lives. Anchorage is where Dad and Kathy lived even as they planned for more and more time in the wild and at the cabin after Kathy retired from teaching and Dad neared retirement from law. Most of the people we knew, or who knew them, lived close to Anchorage. I called Dad and Kathy’s friend Shorty to ask about the cemetery in Healy. He said that he would take care of it. And I coordinated with our home church of St. Mary’s for the funeral.
Our community at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church was more of a constant in my life than our family structure or the house we lived in. We went to church as a family at the A-frame building in midtown Anchorage from as early as I can remember, and we kids were confirmed there. Dad and Kathy were married there. Dad had been raised Baptist, my mom Lutheran, and they started coming back to church when I was born. “I was willing to barter with my own soul, but not the souls of my children,” Dad wrote in a journal. He told me of the spiritual legacy he believed the women in his family had passed down, a joyful and strong faith. He spoke of this faith as the greatest of all treasures.
St. Mary’s had experience with Alaska’s brutalities too. Ten years earlier, another parishioner, Marci Trent, and her son and grandson were on a trail run when they came across a brown bear defending a moose carc
ass. Marci and her son were killed. Her fourteen-year-old grandson climbed a tree when he heard the commotion and was rescued. Marci was seventy-seven years old, well known and loved among the many communities of which she was a part, including the long-distance running community, in which she held several age-group world records. We saw her not only at church but in the 10K races we entered with Dad. Her son was a well-known musician and music teacher. The New York Times told the story on July 3, 1995, ten years to the day before we buried Dad and Kathy. “Mrs. Trent had suffered massive injuries to her head and chest, while Mr. Waldron had apparently bled to death from a severed artery in his leg.” A later account notes that her spine and neck had been broken. It had seemed bizarre, horrific, isolated. Not something that would happen to someone we knew. Certainly not something that would happen again. A freak accident.
Maybe it was because of this that I never asked why, never asked the question that has no answer.
Thursday afternoon, our priest observed the Episcopal ritual of receiving the coffins as they arrived at the church. At the front doors, he draped the coffins with vestments, red and white. He prayed. He walked ahead of the draped caskets as they were rolled in and placed side by side in front of the altar, placed where weeks before Dad and Kathy stood in line to take communion. The Episcopal funeral liturgy celebrates the resurrection of Christ. The priest had begun our formal ceremony of grief, and of celebration.
In the hour before the service, the only semblance of a wake we held, I stood at the coffins with a few others. I remember only Aunt Marcia. I remember a gutteral sound coming from her throat, and wanting to claim it, because I didn’t have any sounds, and wanting her there, because I needed someone to love me and say it was okay, but also wanting her gone, because I wanted the space to myself. At first we each circled the coffins warily, or perhaps it was our grief we were aware of then, keeping a distance to keep us safe. I finally laid a hand on one of them with care, as though it might scald at the touch, and then let the weight of my arm sink down, and there was so much weight. Aunt Marcia put both hands on the coffins. And then she closed her eyes and tilted back her head and started to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” For a moment I stood mortified, shocked by the nakedness of faith and grief exposed by the singing voice, exposed and magnified like holding up a glass to the sun. And then I joined her, my voice less sure, more childlike, our hands pressing down with the impossible weight of sadness on the hard surfaces of coffins lying quiet beneath the vestments.
I don’t know whether I came back to the Episcopal Church at the time of the funeral, or if it came back to me. I’d left it in grad school, fed up with the church’s involvement in politics. I’d attended a Presbyterian church instead. But brought to my knees in life, I came back. It was the liturgy I had missed, the liturgy containing in its words and seasons a wisdom surpassing its parts. I felt the familiar rhythm in the prayers and music I knew. I believed that these connected to the sacred—believed it, but at the time did not feel it. And I did not feel that this rhythm and structure containing millennia of study and prayer quietly and invisibly built a foundation under me. I was grateful for the things to do, the things that must be done, even without understanding their importance. I felt nothing other than the vague sense that I must somehow survive this funeral, survive this day, survive the rest of my life.
At the funeral, melodies from Handel’s Messiah lilted through the congregation, seemed to swirl around me, hold me, encircle the coffins, and soar to the mountains just outside the windows that formed the front wall of St. Mary’s. I spoke, and Kathy’s brother spoke. I’d cobbled together words only that morning at Peter’s urging. I knew our faith celebrates resurrection, and so I tried to be upbeat, and it all fell flat, because resurrection does not come without crucifixion, and you cannot celebrate Easter without living Good Friday.
Through that wall of windows behind the altar, the clouds lifted around sharp ridgelines still crusted with snow and the deep valleys of the Chugach. These were the mountains that framed my city, that had framed my life with Dad as I grew. Memories played out shallowly, etchings on a glass: running with dogs, a tent blowing down in the middle of the night, dog paws cut by scree. And then the memories disappeared, and I stared at the mountains because they were familiar, and because they were there.
The thing about these times is that you are constantly battered by stupidity and selfishness when you are least equipped to handle it. After the service, as we walked out of the front doors of the church, someone asked if they could take a photo of us. I looked at the woman with exhausted and unbelieving eyes. “This is my father’s funeral. There will be no pictures today,” I said. Later that week my uncle Tom said, “Well, there must be some money for you kids, right?” None of us responded. Furniture and photos and money.
The thing about these times is that you are given more kindnesses than you can ever know. Before the service, I saw a man from the congregation setting up a video camera so we could send a copy of the service to Grandma; he had taken the day off work to find a way to put everything together. After the service, the choir director came up with a gentle smile and offered tapes of the Bach Magnificat in which Dad had sung a solo. One of the other men in the choir came up with watery eyes and handed me a rose the choir had placed on Dad’s chair. I’ve tried to recall these things, to go back and see them and hold them in memory, and know I will never begin to know them all. And I also know that these kindnesses far outnumber the insensitivities.
Our priest at the church told me that Kathy had been visiting an old student of hers every week in prison, and that now he would start making those visits for her.
One of the Laotian refugees who had lived with us for six months when I was ten years old came up to me: “Shannon, be strong,” he said.
An Inupiat man with kind eyes and dressed in a dark suit had traveled from Barrow. He and Dad had worked together for decades. He wanted to say hello, and that he was sorry.
We smiled and talked to people we had not seen in years. The reception felt oddly like some sort of respectable gathering highlighting social graces. I suppose in some ways it was. It felt vaguely—to the extent that I had any specific feelings—important to be strong, to represent Dad well. The priest I had grown up with, now retired, was there. I was taken aback by, though later thankful for, his words: “You kids don’t know what’s happening yet. In another four, maybe six weeks it will start getting really hard. Take care of yourselves.”
The pews were packed with colleagues from the office and their families, people I knew from church, and many people I didn’t know at all. This is when I started to understand something that would take me years to process: that each of us lives a thousand lives. “Each man is a universe,” says Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My selfish claims to grief were false; none of us who grieve have a corner on the market. Even if Dad was the most important person in my life, and Kathy right up there, I knew only pieces of them. They were part of a web of humanity, and the web was torn, and those of us who are left all have to do the work of repair. Grief is something we claim with even a passing knowledge of someone, rocked by the finality of death in the intimacy of its implications. They are in our lives, and then they aren’t.
A few days later, one of Dad’s colleagues shook his head and looked into the distance. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “I saw him every day of the work week and some weekends for twenty-five years. I can’t believe he’s gone.” I felt a twinge of jealousy. He’d spent more time with my dad than I had.
Burial was scheduled for the next afternoon, since Healy was a four-hour drive to the north. It rained on and off for the duration of the drive.
The cemetery in Healy sits on a hill framed by mountains of the Alaska Range. Dad and Kathy’s friend Shorty, who lived nearby, said that he walked his dogs there every day. It was the place with the best view of the northern lights when they danced in fall and winter night skies. The tundra was decorated with early fireweed and lupine
, a fence of spruce trees. Shorty had dug a perfectly square grave facing east to hold both coffins and hauled away most of the fill. Holy Mary of Guadalupe, the church Dad and Kathy attended when they were at the cabin, put together an interment service with music we had selected, played on guitar. Dad’s army friend George and his wife, Joanne, stood off to the side next to a lone pine tree, as though unable to step any closer to that hole, as though standing next to the tree might protect them somehow.
Father Jack performed the service for our small group standing on the Alaskan tundra. The mountains stood witness, watching familiar scenes of death and grief that played like shadows on their slopes each day.
I stood at the corner of the chasm closest to Dad’s coffin. My breath came shallowly, a susurrus leaking oxygen to reluctant blood. I knelt. I kissed the hard, cold surface of the coffin. The week caught up with me like a rifle shot. I touched the coffins with faltering fingers. Again. And again. The dark, gaping hole. The cold boxes. My legs gave way. I felt Peter’s arms supporting me under my ribs. My abdominal muscles heaved against him, shuddering, fatigued. “Amazing Grace” played very far off in the distance. My awareness of needing to be in control, of needing to take care of things, collapsed. Things were taken care of. Now I did not know what could hold me together. In that music of life not constrained by time, a cacophony of sound overwhelmed the harmony I thought I knew.
There is no machinery to assist in a rural cemetery, where friends dig friends’ graves. Several men helped lower each casket into the ground with thick straps. The weight was significant. The effort was clumsy. One of the boxes dipped. “Watch it!” Ned snarled, snatching the strap from one of the men lowering the heavy load. His lower jaw jutted out as he took over at the foot of the coffin. Briefly, through unfocused eyes, I noted his old anger emerging even in grief. I stayed pressed into Peter’s body. Slowly these boxes, these sarcophagi, descended.
North of Hope Page 9
