home from college. Kathy was focused on managingher 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
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
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