surrounding me. Leaving Portland, I started a checklist as Sam drove.
I was the oldest. I felt responsible for doing whatever neededto 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 conversationsshort 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
I was the oldest. I felt responsible for doing whatever neededto 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 conversationsshort 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
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