North of Hope (11 page)

Despite the challenges, Kathy brought a beauty and an elegance to our lives that I loved, even as she managed our home with a fastidiousness beyond my tolerance. She and Dad remodeled the entire house soon after they were married, making it their own, and rules changed to maintain its shiny newness. I grumbled during each visit home from college. Kathy was focused on managing
her house. I just wanted to relax at home. I was the less gracious of the two of us.

Dad and Kathy now volunteered together, serving as a Big Couple to a young boy in downtown Anchorage; they worked in the church, doing everything from serving on the vestry to washing windows and delivering food from the church’s food kitchen.

Reluctantly, I learned from Kathy to appreciate beautiful things, to set a lovely table, to put together healthy and inspired meals. She shared my ideas too, adopting the latte I liked as her new coffee drink, and asking me about recipes I was trying. We made pie crusts together and my favorite lingonberry-orange-nut bread.

We also began spending time at the log cabin just south of Denali that Kathy brought to the marriage. The cabin became a place of making new family memories untainted by brokenness. On Dad and Kathy’s final Thanksgiving, Peter and I drove to the cabin with Dad. Peter was the only romantic interest I’d ever brought home. Kathy had arrived a day early, and in the rudimentary kitchen prepared a feast: turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes and brown sugar, beans, four different kinds of homemade pies. Having heard that Peter liked Honest Tea (we usually enjoyed hot tea in the evenings), Kathy bought a case of it at Costco. Dad and Kathy shared photos and stories from their Canning River trip the year before; Kathy taught us all yoga poses she knew as she studied to become an instructor in her teaching retirement; all of us enjoyed a day in the snow, Peter and me on snowshoes and Dad and Kathy on mountain bikes with studded tires. As we headed out that day, Peter snapped a picture of Dad and Kathy that captured such joy as they laughed under their balaclavas, hats, and helmets that we later used it as one of two primary images for their funeral and to distribute to friends. Looking at the photo later, again and again, I saw the creases in Dad’s face mapping both greater sorrow and greater joy, both more pain and more understanding, than did the photo of him in front of that Forest Service cabin when I was a baby.

After I left for college and then the army, before every Christmas and Thanksgiving, a heavy, shoebox-sized package arrived wherever I was living at the time. Inside was a gift from Kathy, on behalf of both her and Dad (but Dad didn’t bake): a tinfoil-wrapped loaf of lingonberry-orange-nut bread. The loaf embodied the sweet tartness of cold fall days and recalled memories of picking berries a few months before on my Labor Day visits. The gift expressed love when words didn’t come easily; the sweetness of the bread balancing the acerbic taste of lingonberries was a promise to work through the challenge of reconstructing a family.

As they approached retirement, Dad and Kathy explored more and more of the rivers of Alaska, choosing a sport that did not tax Dad’s failing knees. They fell in love with the Arctic. I once prompted Dad to consider taking a vacation somewhere more exotic, Italy maybe, where he might enjoy opera and red wine, and he laughed and said he would never see all he wanted to of Alaska and didn’t really see any point in going anywhere else. After working hard for decades at his law practice, Dad glimpsed the life he imagined and knew his time was limited. He and Kathy were living it.

And in the middle of living it, they died, leaving their bodies on a distant riverbank. In the middle of my living, I received the fateful call in Portland while visiting Sam. How can we ever appreciate the full depth of each moment? Is there any way not to look back on those last conversations, last meetings, wishing we had let them seep into us completely?

Hanging up after my brief conversation with Officer Holschen, a few words in a matter of minutes altering my life forever, I sat in time suspended. Then motion resumed, making up for the pause, and never seeming to stop, though always just outside of a fog surrounding me. Leaving Portland, I started a checklist as Sam drove.

I was the oldest. I felt responsible for doing whatever needed
to be done—and, most important, for making sure it was done right. Why I thought I had the ability to do this, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the hubris of the eldest child. Perhaps it was what Joan Didion has called the “shallowness of sanity.”

A muddy sense of the necessary—though how could I know what was necessary?—drove my actions and phone calls. I called Max and Ned and left messages; Ned and his wife were traveling, we thought, back from a trip to Indonesia. We looked for alternate numbers to reach them, calling friends and work, and left messages everywhere we could, with only the request to call back as soon as possible. I knew I could not call Grandma or Kathy’s mother directly, as both were elderly and I thought it would be better to have someone tell them in person, so I called aunts and uncles to find someone to deliver the news. I called Peter. Despite our recent breakup, my connection to him was my closest and most necessary, in part because of his relationship with Dad and Kathy. He said that he would meet us in Seattle on our way to the airport, then come to Alaska a few days later.

Then we called our mom, who lived with her husband in Anchorage and who answered like anyone would on a normal Sunday. Call after call, and again and again the people on the other end of the line went into variations of incredulous hysterics. It was absurd; horror shares an edge with hilarity. Each conversation started like a sick joke. I almost snickered a couple of times, a weird and subconscious acknowledgment of the disbelief on the other end of the line, understanding how ludicrous the call must sound to unexpecting ears, wanting to let down my own defenses but afraid I would never recover.

I didn’t have time or energy to help those I spoke with to maneuver through their responses. And shouldn’t I be the one in hysterics? I wanted to beg for people to be gentle, to be calm, because there was only the thinnest thread holding me together, and if they were too distraught, I might collapse. I cut conversations
short with a sense of guilt and inadequacy. In an instant, all of my emotional reserves had evaporated, the way a fiery explosion consumes a tree, all at once. I had nothing left, feeling only a numbness and a shock I understood much later to be a blessing, a natural anesthetic for the crippling pain.

At SEA-TAC airport, I watched Sam, to see if I could help him somehow. He stared blankly out the terminal window. Sitting next to his wife, I looked without seeing at the
People
magazine she had brought me. “Mind candy,” she said. But she overestimated my capabilities. I couldn’t even open the cover. The magazine sat on my lap, a dead and useless thing. Despite the flurry of planning in those first five hours, my brain was foggy, and I had the feeling of stumbling along a craggy Chugach mountainside, lost in clouds that had engulfed the mountain.

We arrived in Anchorage June 26. At that time of year, even at 10:30 p.m., bright daylight reflected off the snow in the Chugach. The sun’s persistence—the same sun which had illuminated extended hours of running through the yard when I was a child—now felt like an interrogation. Exhausted, I squinted into it through the airplane windows as the plane taxied to the terminal.

Walking off the plane, I held my breath as though preparing for a gut blow. I would have welcomed it in lieu of the gaping, jagged hole of Dad’s absence. I looked around blankly, expecting everyone to understand the horror I felt, the appalling emptiness. Instead I saw a scattering of unfamiliar faces, not looking at me or understanding, searching for other faces, smiling. It was odd that each of these people could not see the rupture of the world, that they could not understand that bedrock had cracked.

On every previous trip home, at least twice a year for fifteen years, Dad towered over the other greeters, usually just to the left rear of the crowd. His eyes embraced me well before his arms could, his enthusiasm and excitement to have his kids come home the focus of his attention. Kathy was always standing next to him,
tall, lean, and smiling. After college, years in the army, graduate school, and finally settling in Seattle, I made that trip home twice a year. Dad’s and Kathy’s jackets changed from heavy down in winter to windbreakers in summer, and Dad’s hair changed from jet black to sprinkled with salt, alarmingly more so lately, I thought. But his eyes never dimmed.

As my mind travels back through each moment of that dark night, the fear of revisiting the pain in those times and places is matched only by what I have ceased to think of as an ironic fear of losing that pain and those memories.

A year before Dad and Kathy died, I’d been on a mission trip to El Salvador with my church. Our last two days in country we spent on the beach. I swam in the ocean, out beyond a strong surf. Another man on our team called to me, and I swam over to him. His eyes were wide. Seeing his terror, I took his arm. I yelled at him to swim with his other arm, but his fear paralyzed him. I held on to him, sidestroking as strongly as I could, focusing on the beach, and trying not to notice the rolling and pounding froth in front of us, the force of the water pulling my body. The surf pulled us toward the rocks. Despite a sinking sense of failure, I continued a strong stroke, my strongest stroke. At last, we broke through the surf, just before the sea would have thrown us on the rocks. I pulled him into shallow water, walked him onto shore.

This was different. Now it was my eyes that were wide. Waters overwhelmed me; there was no shore in sight. There was no one to call. I struggled in vain, sinking deeper, vaguely aware of a cold pressure building, flashes of light far above, but feeling the uselessness of struggle as I descended into darkness. I could not take a stroke. The froth overcame me. I could barely breathe. I did not know to cry out. I had no words for prayer.

The first night in Anchorage, I slept on the couch in my mother’s house. I had never stayed in her house when visiting Anchorage, considering my home to be with my dad. She had picked us
up from the airport, giving us hugs and having as few words as we did. We arrived late. We could go to the house I knew as home in the morning. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep because of the light and the horrible chiming of a grandfather clock. My mind traveled at the speed of my flight home—faster, even—without navigation or destination, pinging through space.

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.