January 8th

Today would have been Jim Johnson’s 90th birthday.

Here is a photo of my dad, date unknown, in Juneau. Maybe Uncle Art took this photo? Apocryphal, I know. All things are apocryphal now that so few are alive to confirm the details of the past. That was my mother’s role, when she was alive. She knew all the names and dates and places; she was the encyclopedic historian of their shared life.

In any case, this was one of my mother’s favorite photos of my dad. Quoting her: “He looked so handsome in that wool coat.” 

I chose just one photo because, if left to my own devices, I’d spend hours (days, maybe years, maybe the rest of my life) pouring over albums and cigar boxes stuffed with photos trying to encapsulate the sum of this man’s life and charms for you—strength and kindness; adventure and routine; grinding work ethic and effortless leisure pursuits; bachelor-turned-husband; doting uncle-turned-father-turned grandfather; a friend to all who knew him.

My father loved all good things and through him (for of him, and through him, and to him, are all things?) I also love cribbage and wine and New Yorkers, Friday nights with friends, feeding devoted dogs table scraps at dinner, reading book after book after book. There were towers of novels lining the walls at the condo, a mausoleum of unread words.

We held a memorial celebration for my dad on Sunday, January 7th, 2018. My stalwart friend Marie helped pull it all together. My main recollection from this period is the blunt, numbing pain of my dad’s absence that coexisted with an oil-and-water/impossible mix of intense relief that his suffering had ended and surreal, shocking disbelief that he was gone, that his story had ended like it did.

He misled me, you see. When I was a kid, he always told me that I would have to take care of my mother after he was gone because, as he put it, “In the normal course of events, I will precede your mother in death.” I grew up with this knowledge of some far-off future event of his demise, perhaps when he was in his 90s or his 100s—after all, Uncle Ivan (whoever he was—a Johnson? A Wallerstedt?) lived to be quite old, as did many on my father’s side of the family. So that was the plan—my father, Gandalfian in his wisdom and age, would eventually just … go into the West, maybe at 120 years old (150? Surely, we would have figured out a cure for aging by then), and I would take care of my mother we would finally travel together to Paris and to the Hermitage, and we would take Sunday trips to the Seattle Nordstrom Erno Laszlo counter, and there would be brunches with well-behaved grandchildren and Siamese cats. 

2017 was a terrible year.

After the memorial (which of course ended up being more somber than the Supper Club party I had envisioned, but dammit, John wore that white dinner jacket anyway), we packed everything up in a laundry basket—mementos, photos, guest book and cards—and I literally haven’t looked inside that basket until this morning, four years and one day later.

The passage of time is funny—not funny ha-ha, obviously, more like, “Am I (answer: I am) funny-in-the-head?” But hey-o this funny feeling is just what it means to be human, and I find it kinda funny and I find it kinda sad that I can even laugh, but I’m also crying, all giddiness wrapped in despair on the knife’s edge of normal. I feel an epoch away from that time, that place, that person that I was, then, in mourning, but also simultaneously stuck, like an insect in amber, in the immovable, fixed aftermath of my parents’ absence.

The longer they’ve been gone, the more I remember them as they were, memories of their frailty and decline somehow replaced with fuzzier-softer-gentler memories of younger Jim and Mary Ann from when I was a child. I was 10 and my mom let me wear her nurse’s uniform, still starchy and clean decades after use, for Halloween in 5th grade. I was 10 and my father held my spongy, bloody knit cap in his hands after I bombed down a mogul run at Eaglecrest and landed, crumpled and concussed, head-first into the stump of a now-bloody tree, and how he joked (after the ski patrol took me off the mountain, after the ambulance took me to Bartlett Hospital) that he had momentarily worried that he’d have to hand the bloody cap to my mother and explain my demise. “Your mother would have killed me!” Funny, my dad.

But then I look at Theo, and he’s 10, and I’m 44, and someday very soon, I’ll be 46, the same age my dad was when I was born, and someday I will die, and someday Theo will be old, and we are all hurtling toward someday, but even before that happens, neither of my parents will be here to witness my children grow up, and this straight-up Fact of Life is so heavy, I just want to excavate cigar boxes full of photos of my dad, youth-trapped-in-amber-colored-photos-from-1979, instead of face the world.

This was supposed to be a brief post to laud my father, but, as usual, my love for him is mixed up with the grief of losing him, and I may never be able to parse those two emotions again. Tonight, we are celebrating my dad by eating Fettuccine Alfredo (one of his favorites, but he was an equal opportunity pasta lover), and opening one of his favorite bottles of white wine (or maybe we’ll just buy a box of affordable and serviceable Franzia and serve it over ice to dull the taste, which would also honor his memory), and playing some cribbage and gin, and then maybe I will read or John will read a New Yorker in our favorite comfy chair and nap with Harley the cat (still going strong at 18.5!) in our laps.

If you wanted to honor the spirit of my dad’s memory, I can suggest a couple of ways:

Go skiing, or teach someone else (various girlfriends, your future wife, your daughter, how I wished it could have been his grandchildren, but maybe it could be yours) how to ski. Be as graceful and chill as possible while doing so. Side note (among this whole novel of side notes and tangents): I have only witnessed my father being un-chill on skis once, when Gordon Brunton convinced him to do a double black diamond on the back side of Ptarmigan. I went the easier route and waited at the bottom of the run for them, and my father eventually shot out through the trees, bounded down the (what seemed vertical) hill, and landed in front of me, unscathed but swearing and panting after exerting some serious effort to navigate those heavy Alu steels through the brush and rocks. He was almost 60. He was over 80 the day of his last ski run at Moose Mountain.

Learn Spanish at 65. Even though he was half-deaf (from artillery training at Ft. Lee or perhaps more realistically, years as an Operator) and could barely understand the instructor, he was more than game for learning new things.

Read a long-form New Yorker article. Just kidding. Just read whatever you want and skip the articles if they’re boring—but he read them all and annotated the Table of Contents for me so I’d know which ones to avoid. Talk about self-sacrifice.

Maintain life-long friendships. Build it into your routine to spend time with the people you like and love. Easier said than done during the pandemic. Every Friday night, my dad would stop by Francie and Dick Mears’s house to chat over a glass of Laphroaig in Dick’s den, and would then continue on to the Big I to sit with the rotating cast of characters from the Friday Night crowd. When my dad could no longer drive, Frank Gold would take him. Frank is gone now too. So many are gone. If I stopped to list them all … I would be trapped in an endless litany of names. I am so grateful that he had dozens if not hundreds of meaningful friendships over the course of his life. We should all be so lucky.

There was supposed to be a final paragraph here (no more, I swear) tidily wrapping up all these thoughts, but I am told it’s time to go. John is taking the girls to dance class and I am going to see a friend. I think my dad would approve—better to take action and be social and see a living friend than stay home and fret over words honoring the dead. I know I’ll be writing about him and trying to honor him for the rest of my life.

Three Weeks

Here’s a primary document — a day in the life during these pandemic times.

This Thursday night marks three weeks that the kids and I have been at home without social contact.

Today is a struggle. Even finding the time and mental bandwidth to write and post this is a struggle of competing priorities and constant demands on my attention (that you parents stuck at home with kids know all too well). I am so grateful that John and I have each other and aren’t parenting alone.

One of the hardest parts of online home learning is the “showing your work” component. I spend more time trying to troubleshoot internet issues, download apps on different devices, manage passwords, help kids keep focused on their screens (and then take photos or videos to document their work for apps that may or may not be responding) than I actually spend with my kids in real time with real hands-on instruction or fun activities. I can understand why medical providers get frustrated with charting. When you’re spending more time with a screen/form than the actual patient, you might start questioning the point.

We have used the YouTube Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems as a special time to decompress with the kids and draw together, but they resent it now. It’s just another chore to reluctantly accomplish instead of an afternoon treat. Why? Because they resent the structure, or maybe they’re feeling anxious, or maybe they just don’t want to be told what to do, even by Mo. You scoff, but you don’t know my stubborn three.

So, I abandon Mo Willems (we have to anyway, since the internet is once again down) but I still feel like I should be doing something, anything, to cross off things on our school list, to Get Things Done. More screens, more distractions, more fights over who gets to play Prodigy the longest. Theo and I had an argument about his keen sense of sibling screentime equity that resulted in me hiding out in his room trying to get an email written and him bringing me a peace offering of a peanut M&M.

I am seriously disheartened by the expectation that we should maintain productivity in these pandemic times. This is not normal life. Stop trying to squeeze in relentless normalcy and the old status quo into every minute of the day. Theo’s cello teacher was like, “Let’s use this time at home with the kids as an opportunity to really get a lot more practicing in!” No, let’s not. Let’s lower our expectations.

I’m guilty of yelling at the kids more than I ever have and I am constantly feeling awful about it. I’m a little manic. I’m exhausted by 4pm. I am carrying anxiety and tension in my body. My elbows and forearms ache. Why do my elbows ache? I am trying to stay away from the news so I can avoid the “Seemingly Healthy 30-year-old Man Succumbs to Virus” stories that make me anxious for my own health and that of my husband’s. We are young (young-ish!) and have no underlying health concerns. Shouldn’t we be safe? Why are healthy thirty-year-olds dying? If they’re wrong about healthy thirty-year-olds, are they also wrong about how the virus affects kids?

When I do read the news, my attention is caught by stories that highlight the incredible lack of compassion for seniors/the immunocompromised, and I get flashbacks to taking care of my ailing parents. So, I recognize today’s struggle — it is a familiar feeling. It’s what I lived through in the last few years of my parents’ lives: constant anxiety, dread, worry, tension, and loss. I don’t have to name this feeling as trauma to know what it is.

I went outside to play with the kids after lunch. Bottle-blue skies, sun, temperatures in the 30s—a perfect Alaskan spring day. I put on my snowshoes and planned to trek around the property, avoiding the steep bit that the kids were sledding on (my knees aren’t what they used to be, before that fateful ACL injury at age 10 on the slopes of Eaglecrest). As soon as I stepped off the well-trodden trail, I sank into waist-deep snow, a whole winter’s worth. Oh, those best-laid plans. I laughed. I imagined what it would be like to just wait in my hole. How long would it take for John to come investigate? How long could I stay there and not return to normal life? My butt was already wet and getting cold. But I was still laughing. I could get myself out, but I was frankly enjoying the rest.

Theo eventually called out to me. “Are you okay, Mama? Do you need to be rescued?” I could hear it in his voice, the extra solicitousness since our earlier argument. “I promise you, I will never leave you!” Channeling Daniel Day-Lewis from Last of the Mohicans, he came to my rescue.

World on Fire

Yesterday after what seemed like the hundredth time I refreshed Facebook to look for updates on the override vote or the fire, I resolved to get off social media for awhile. I was just churning out impotent rage. My self-imposed exile lasted less than 24 hours, but I came here to say this:

I’m not leaving.

Or at least when I do, it will be on my own terms.
 
It’s easier said than done when John’s job is on the line, when 95% of my community is affiliated with or employed by UAF, when the world is burning. (Literally and figuratively! We keep saying this like it’s a joke! But it’s true.)


I love Fairbanks, my version of it. And the best part about my Fairbanks is the people, my people. If you’re reading this, that probably means you. You are my people.


Living in Seattle for the decade of what basically amounted to the entirety of my young adult life, it took me almost five years to really find my people, but when I did, I felt like I owned the world: happy hours, movie nights, camping trips on the coast and Cascades, sailboats, beaches, brunches, singing with the Chorale - it was a dream life. 


Leaving the city and returning to Alaska was like a death, and I spent much of the first few years back in Fairbanks in mourning for that urban adventurous life before children. 


It’s taken me even longer to feel like I’ve found my community in Fairbanks, but I have. And I feel like I own the world again. I sing, make art, read books, and go camping with friends, and I have people over for dinner even with a messy house. And my kids play in the woods and go to dance camp and Calypso Farm and Wild Rose and Denali with your kids, and the world is magical. And every time I start to listen to the siren song of the PNW that calls me back, the thing that stops me is you. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave this community that we have made together.


You make this place special. You make the arts scene welcoming. You make book clubs fun. You make bonfires a sacred rite of fall. You grow food that feeds my family and makes me feel connected to this place. You are a superhero parent and just a gosh darn good person. You make me laugh and cheer when I see you on stage. You make me want to canoe every river and hike every dome of this magnificent state. You make downtown cool again. You make me feel like my kids have a second home. You make our little slice of Fairbanks seem cosmopolitan. You make the community better by serving in public office, or by being a fantastic teacher, or principal, or archeologist, social worker, or just by living here. You make Fairbanks better. 


So stay here with me. Because I’m not leaving. I’m going to help whoever runs against Tammie Wilson (but hey, thanks for at least showing up to vote in Juneau) and Talerico in their next races. And I’m going to support Grier and Scott and whoever actually shows up to help our state from hemorrhaging its people, its resources, and prosperity. Can you hemorrhage prosperity? I don’t care. All I’m saying is that the future looks dire, but the fight isn’t over and I want you to stay because you are a part of what makes this state a great place to live. Stay with me. I’m not leaving.

Perplexingly Unrepentant Righteous Indignation

Last Saturday was sublime, a perfect day to ignore obligations (probate, condo) and go for a walk under that great blue expanse of Fairbanks winter sky. Every personal errand that I run, every crossword and coffee date with John, or evening realization that I failed to accomplish something related to my parents' estate feels like an undeserved indulgence. But I'm a practiced hand at avoiding that weight of guilt.

So I dropped off the girls at dance class and headed over to Creamer's with Bruce for some exercise. Not for a real run, just a little walk. It's been over three months since I've gone on an actual jog with Bruce (knee injury, laziness). As I buckled his harness, I could definitely tell it was tighter than usual – and I'm certain he's not the only one whose dimensions have expanded over the holidays.

Looking southeast toward town 

One happy dog

                                     

Blue shadows in the golden sun

                                     
Fairbanks on a warm sunny winter day is perfection: the immense blue of the sky, the productive crunch of boots on snow, the liquid gold light of the perpetual sunset. Why, yes, there is a reason we live here! Everyone I encountered on the trails was smiling, and we all greeted each other or nodded in tacit congratulations for our mutual good fortune to live in such an amazing place. I ran into friends; I wore sunglasses; the dog was happy to sniff all the smells. The world was grand. (Ask me again in thirty below darkness what I think of Fairbanks – but then, such bipolarity is the essence of being an Alaskan.)

I rounded the bend on the far side of the field, following some rather enormous dog tracks, and was put to mind of an incident that happened a couple years ago at the same spot: I was on a jog with the girls in their big double stroller when a loose and snarling dog started to chase us. I remembered the feeling of slo-mo surreality combined with knee-jerk protectiveness as I put myself between the dog and the twins in their stroller. I screamed at it and held it off until the owner (upset, yet perplexingly unrepentant) arrived to leash it. I was angry that she hadn't truly apologized, and filled with the adrenaline of righteous indignation for hours afterwards.

As I contemplated that moment of maternal rage, a large German Shepherd appeared out of the mist on the trail ahead, dark and gorgeous in its grandiosity. Its paws were the ones that had created the prehistorically large prints we had been following. The dire-dog's ears were perked at attention – and then – it started to approach us, gaining speed with each second. In the moment, it seemed like it wanted to eat us. The owner (who had been taking a photo, transfixed with the beauty of the place, just as I had been) was startled out of her reverie and started yelling at her dog with increasing desperation. "Jasper! Jasper! Come! Leave it! Leave it!" My own human hackles were raised, and it was the stroller incident all over again. I stood my ground. I felt just as protective towards my sweet Bruce as I did my girls. I was rooted to the spot and planted myself between my dog and the attacking German Shepherd as it circled us. I made myself bigger than I felt and yelled (in my deepest, angriest, anti-soprano voice), "Leave it! Leave it! No!" until the dog eventually decided we weren't worth the effort and returned to its owner. This time the owner was utterly apologetic and hastened away, ashamed. I was too stunned to even care and just let her walk on ahead before continuing on the path toward my car, worried that I'd be late to pick up the girls if I veered off trail or turned around the way I came.

Later that evening, as I was half-heartedly attempting to post photos of our walk to Instagram ("Just went for a sunny walk at Creamer's! Narrowly escaped dog attack LOL"), I got an email from a neighbor and board member from my parents' condo association, directing me to check and replace the thermostat batteries and threatening to enter the premises if I didn't respond within the week. Hell is an HOA of retirees with nothing better to do than peer through their window blinds at the neighbor's unit, speculating as to the source of all the world's ills.

It felt just like the adrenaline of the German Shepherd attacking me. Which is ridiculous, because it was just an email, not a dog, but everything condo-related provokes anxiety. There are boxes of mementos and belongings inside that I have yet to cart over to our house. There is a closet full of Pendleton shirts and quilting fabrics that I know I want to keep (do they spark joy, sadness, or both?) but have no idea what to do with. When I drive within a mile of the condo, I feel myself shutting down. "I should stop there now," I tell myself. "Even if it's just for fifteen minutes, I should stop and get things done." But then maybe I'll meet a neighbor who will ask what the status on moving out is, and I just don't want to face them. I often pass by that dark cloud of obligation and find another way to occupy myself. Before we moved back to Fairbanks from Seattle, I'd spent vacations in the warm respite of my parents' kitchen, imagining blueberry jam recipes and Sunday night dinners. Now, the condo had become the albatross around my neck, a problem to deal with rather than a place to enjoy.

Of course we had checked and replaced the batteries, and quite recently. Of course we were visiting the condo and checking on things. Why was I being singled out from the snowbirds who leave their units empty for months at a time when I was a regular visitor (albeit one who seems to be only able to play the same sad Chopin Nocturnes on the piano and pore over photo albums instead of actually moving out)?

My email response was measured, detailed, and calm – the very opposite of how I feel most days when I contemplate the enormity of the task ahead of me in emptying out the unit of a lifetime of possessions and completing all the necessary probate paperwork. I wrote back to let them know that the batteries had recently been replaced and nothing was amiss, temperature or otherwise, in the unit, but that I would ask my husband to stop by that evening just for peace of mind. I pretended that we were all on good terms and finished the email with an innocent query about whether garage sales were indeed disallowed on the premises. They're not allowed, and I had guessed that much, but look at how normal I am! I'm not just a grieving daughter unable to cope with her parents' possessions, but a daughter planning for the future! The future of an empty condo!

John had taken Theo to a movie that afternoon and was already in town. I texted him to ask that he stop by the condo on his way home just to satisfy the neighbor's demands. John was only too happy to comply. He's always happy to comply. He's a real go-getter, handy-man, and do-gooder around the condo, that John. As he has been ever since my parents moved there more than a decade ago. A proper son-in-law, still completing his son-in-law duties even after my parents have passed away.

John later revealed that stopping by the condo hadn't been just an easy in-and-out. The same neighbor who had emailed me just hours before, had apparently noticed the lights on when John had stopped by, and had gone over to investigate ... and instigate a bizarre and patronizing confrontation. John was confused by the repeated insinuation that we had been neglecting the place. The neighbor kept repeating the fact that the batteries had to be replaced yearly and then tossed off a Grandpa Simpson-esque, "AND NO GARAGE SALES!" as the final rejoinder in their increasingly heated conversation. I imagine this neighbor clicking the "SEND" button on that email in righteous indignation, and the stamp on the hardcopy letter licked with Ebenezer Scrooge-like officiousness.

And it is utterly ridiculous, but I am apparently undone by the disapproval of this virtual stranger and can't stand to even check mail at the condo now. The kids were asking why we don't go over to play, and I have nothing to tell them. I just ... can't. A hint of negative energy has me thinking of the condo as a no go war zone. My parents' ashes (and Uncle Art's for what it's worth) still rest on top of the piano there; every time I sat down at the keyboard, I touched the boxes, talismans of comfort (whose comfort, I'm uncertain). I find myself wanting to believe in ghosts, that the place is haunted. It is not. But I want it to be, I want there to be a conclusive sign from the afterlife, a message from my parents that all is well on the ski slopes of Elysium, but any spirits have been resolutely silent on the matter. The condo is quiet, half-packed and still – devoid of ghosts but full of the glare of indignant scrutiny from the neighbors across the lawn.

I can see things from the other perspective. It's been over a year since my dad died. Why haven't I been able to clear things out? Why haven't I sold the condo unit yet? I want to sell it. I want to see a new owner move in. I want to clear my plate of all this responsibility. I want to apologize for my grief and the resultant coping mechanism of procrastination, but then ... I also want others to apologize to me: the salivating realtor who texted within hours of my father's death (I'm sure it was a coincidence, but what timing); the neighbor's wife from across the lawn who never bothered to befriend my parents in their life but was intensely curious about the condition of their condo during their illness; that same neighbor's friend who called to ask (demand) when the condo would be for sale and seemed intensely put out when I couldn't give an exact date; the neighbor who airs his petty grievances under cover of concern about thermostat battery replacement.

Everything is an impotent mix of rage and regret. I obsess over my mistakes and the mistakes of others. Getting angry at my mom when she was oblivious to her symptoms. The dog owner who refused to apologize when I thought my daughters were in danger. The lawyer who drafted my father's will to whom I had to explain Advanced Medical Directives. The neurologist who blithely refused to diagnose my mother's condition until I demanded tests, and whose clinic schedule forced us to wait months for appointments (thus progressing her disease beyond the possibility of a cure). I'm angry that my parents had a tendency to stick their heads in the sand to avoid decisions and I'm angry at my own almost genetic predisposition to do the same. I want to apologize to my parents for not coming up with a quicker, better solution. I want to apologize to the condo neighbors for not moving quicker through my grief. I want that one neighbor to apologize for being an asshole. I want my parents to apologize for not having their affairs in order. I want them to apologize for dying on me.

Johnson

I spent a few hours with my dad last night. He was in bed, lying on his side. He wasn't able to talk but he did hold my hand with a grip as strong as his silence was loud. His hand, his fingers were so thin - but I remembered what they felt like when I was seven, when I held his too-large hand on the keyboard to try and teach him my first piano piece. His thumbs were wider than the keys and he didn't learn it but he laughed.

I don't know if he really recognized me last night, but I want to think he did, or at least I think he knew me as someone who loves him. I stuck a hearing aid in his available ear and we listened to music that I hoped he could hear, favorites of his that I remember from childhood: Vera Lynn, Phil Harris, Harry Lauder. (Oh, how my mother despised the Harry Lauder CD that we always brought out and blasted on my dad's birthday. For 100+ year old Scottish vaudeville music, it's not bad. And it still amuses me that we can tease my mom from beyond the grave - or ashes urn, whatever.)

I finished with Kenneth McKellar's "Songs of Ireland," which is what we used to listen to on tape in the GMC Jimmy on our way up to ski at Eaglecrest. My father had a beautiful baritone voice but couldn't carry a tune to save his life. I remember him singing to this album even though I know he probably never actually did, but there is a trueness to this false memory I will polish until it shines: the warbling of the tape, wet Juneau alpine snow, my father, the consummate gentleman skier cutting a dashing figure in his woolen ski sweater. I have saved all his ski sweaters.

When I left his bedside, his eyes were closed and his grip relaxed. He was sleeping, or slipping away. I was called back just a couple hours later. He died early this morning.

I think of the obituary that I will write, and how much of my father's narrative remains mythic in its grandiosity and mystery. Butcher, soldier, adventurer, laborer, scholar, drinker, geologist, skier, catskinner, union man, tennis player, reader - these are just some of his occupations and identities. When I was a kid, he seemed to know everyone in the state. He had built every road. He could walk into a restaurant and know ten tables full of politicians, academics, construction stiffs, miners, and artists. He was a part of the old pre-Pipeline Alaska that I'll never be able to describe. And now he's gone and I can never ask him about the abandoned Tamarack Inn, the DEW Line, how to get to Üllerhaven, or skiing in races with a wine skin strapped to his back. Or the time he foolishly risked his life by saving a shelf full of liquor bottles at some construction camp during the big earthquake (probably with a twinkling smile on his face because he was always smiling).

There was a fire at the Mendeltna Roadhouse near Glennallen a few days ago. It burned to the ground. I think of these historic roadhouses and my father - these pieces of old Alaska that are disappearing - by fire, by progress, by neglect, or old age. The old Alaska is slipping away one fire, one old man at a time. It's hard to remember the heyday when I'm looking at a picture of roadside charred timber. It's hard to remember the father and the man when my most recent memories of him are all skin, bone, and milky-eyed stare. But that hand, almost claw-like, was holding on so tightly. I think I'll remember his hands.

It's Going to Be Okay, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Entropy (This is a Lie I Tell Myself)

It is difficult for me to clean up after death.

Obviously, I'm not talking about the body. That was summarily handled by the caregivers at the assisted living home, and the cremation arranged by me in a brief visit to the funeral home the following day with Theo in tow (now there was a fun mother-son outing).

The conference room-cum-coffin display area was warmly lit like a mall jewelry store, with glossy and shiny mini-casket samples jutting out of the walls and gold-rimmed (and cheap-looking, I'm pretty sure my mom would agree) ceramic jars glittering on the shelves. "I like this one, Mama, the one with the American eagle!" Theo announced, surveying the atrocity of urns. I was giddy and tearful at the same time, and felt like a character actor reenacting outtakes from a morbid black comedy. I even laughed out loud and explained to the funeral home director how surreal everything seemed, just like on Six Feet Under. She told me deadpan she had never watched that show.

I both relished and cringed at the fact that I was selecting the cheapest option for my mother – cremation, per her wishes, and a cardboard box in the interim before we could commission a ceramic urn from one of our potter friends. "For the box, beach or cloud motif – which do you prefer?" I guess my mom would prefer clouds? The $60 cardboard box was ready the next day. I half expected to find the gold tooth crowns and the metal pieces from my mom's hip replacement inside the zip-tied bag of ashes. I didn't realize that they sift out stuff like that.

After I brought home my mom's ashes and placed her box on the piano, I discovered my Uncle Art's ashes (same box, different motif) had been unceremoniously stored on top of a grimy cabinet in the garage by my father. Fun fact: according to the sticker on Art's box (Times New Roman font; I imagine the routine office task of someone creating this Microsoft Word template to identify the eternal litany of cremains), Art and my mom were cremated on the same day, exactly seven years apart.

The real difficulty in clean-up is everything my mother left behind. Her quilting supplies, a decade untouched, are meticulously labeled and organized in her closet, ready for seamstress hands. She was supposed to teach me. Her makeup drawer is organized exactly as she had left it, in tidy square compartments of Merle Norman lipsticks, tweezers, and hair clips. There is even a small bag of her hair, that she had been collecting for a bizarre (to me) plan to have a "wiglet" made to cover up the sparse and thin hair on her scalp. I don't know what I'm going to do with this bag, but I'm not going to deal with that choice right now.

There is still food in the fridge that was here before she left the condo to live at Hope Haven. I've been good about getting rid of the gross kinds of leftovers, but those jars of pickles and olives that she once touched – it's hard not to imagine her fingerprints, her touch, still there. Her books are still arranged in the order in which she placed them, even though she hadn't read a novel, or picked up a magazine to more than glance through its photos, in over a year.

My mother's handwriting is everywhere: on post-it notes cluttering the kitchen counter, on boxes in the garage still left unpacked from the move to the condo nine years ago (the box labeled "Dad's Sconces" is in her handwriting from the move from Juneau c. 1991, and it tugs at my heart when I realize the Dad in question is my grandfather). It's on the application she left half-finished 20 years ago for admittance to the Pioneer Home. Her tidy and clear signature inscribes her ownership on every one of her music books. I look through these keepsakes and photos, hoping to find the letter to me that would explain it all, her last goodbye, but how could she write such a thing when she didn't even realize what was happening to her.

One of the perks of accumulated clutter is that I can excavate archeological treasures, even digital, in the layers of my laziness and inaction. Last week on a night when John was out and the kids were in bed, I reread two years' worth of text conversations between me and my mom. I can trace the first instances of her forgetfulness, the familiar names she misspelled, the planned morning outings with the kids she slept through, her questions repeated and repeated again. I see the record of my worry. I know the date when she stopped writing to me. I now see that the sudden onset of her normal pressure hydrocephaly only seemed sudden at the time. The clues were there, but camouflaged by her diabetes diagnosis and our blind trust that, with medication and proper diet, she was on the mend and things would return to normal.

Things weren't normal for the last year or more. Once occasional peccadilloes of late-rising, pajama-wearing, and fruit juice-bingeing became the norm, were then arrested by medical intervention, and then she somehow was always in her robe, sitting at the table waiting for a meal, squinting through her glasses through the patio door to the brightness outside, hands fidgeting. Her bedroom became a convalescent room: bedside grab-bar, incontinence pads. The counters drowned under the rising tide of empty pharmacy bags, Medicare paperwork, and junk mail that she no longer went through and discarded. One year, my mother still made applesauce for the kids, still sewed the hem of my dress, still played Satie at the piano; the next, everything was forgotten or abandoned: favorite recipes for kale potato soufflé, how to thread a needle, her own singing. One morning in January 2017, as I was helping her in the bathroom with her toileting and showering (a daily event that I resented at the time but had the prescience of mind to know I would someday miss), she started singing a melody and lyrics that sounded like something from post-war 1940s. "I dreamt of this song, and I can't stop singing it!" She smiled wistfully. She didn't know the name of the tune. That was the last time I heard my mother sing.

It's only now after her death that I'm able to start grieving for the normal Mary Ann that she used to be. I miss her voice. I miss her playing the piano. Oh, how I despised her habitually wonky and rubato tempos and her heavy pedal when she accompanied me at the piano, but of course I crave them now. When she had been well, she asked us over to dinner at the condo almost every night. Seeing these invitations – and my frequent refusals – in the text record was heartbreaking.

Before the grandchildren, for the decade I lived in Seattle, we would talk on the phone almost every day. She would tell me about who they sat with at the Elks or on Friday night at the Big I, or what she was singing in chorus, or what she was making my father for dinner. I would rave or complain about all the small, swaggering victories or desperate tragedies of my young adult life. She was my soundboard, my coach, my eternal cheerleader.

When Theo was an older infant and toddler, she used to babysit for us every weekend – not at our request, but her pleasure. She would hand me a wad of cash on Friday or Saturday night ("Get a nice dinner out, just the two of you!") and I would hand over the baby. She would literally rock with him in the chair for hours until John and I returned, rejuvenated by her generosity. That was a golden year. When the girls arrived, her stamina was quickly depleted (and neither one of the twins was ever amenable to being gently rocked to sleep by a stationary Mormor), but sometimes her waiting arms were just what was needed.

Summer 2011

Even in the last few months of her life, she would still ask me if she could help, if she could pick up groceries for dinner (though she didn't drive or go shopping anymore), if she could watch the kids for me (she stopped babysitting in 2015). "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" she would call to me from her place in the living room, nearly immobile in her chair, smiling hopefully as she watched me chop vegetables in the kitchen for her dinner. It was that hopeful eagerness that really got me.

In the last few months of her life, if I started to cry in front of her, out of sadness or frustration or worry, she would always say, "It's going to be okay." And her voice would sound like the normal Mary Ann again – the mother whose first impulse was always to comfort me, even if she was oblivious about her illness. It didn't matter that she didn't really understand what was going on – all she wanted was to protect me, to soothe me, to make things better, to do something for me. It's going to be okay, she promised me.

And it will be, someday. Clothes and shoes will go to Goodwill; to my own shelves will go the quilting fabric I am hopeful will someday see the business end of a sewing machine needle. I'll be able to bleach and mop the kitchen floor and not think of her footsteps, and dust the shelves without wondering if any of her DNA remains in the flecks of microscopic skin and hair fragments she's left behind. I'll excavate through the clutter of dying flower arrangements and opera CDs, medical paperwork and prescription bottles, old appointment calendars and loose photographs without thinking of each as sacred relics containing a memory magic of her touch. A lifetime's worth of accumulation will be pared down into something manageable for me, and for my dad, and if I'm realistic enough, manageable enough for my children to someday deal with.

But I haven't started cleaning yet.

Anxiety

Anxiety has sunk in like a cold front. The stars are out tonight, but somehow malevolently bright against the blackness. Our thermometer reads -20F, but I worry that it's broken. I worry. I worry about my mother, lying down in her bed at her condo, with her swollen feet propped up, maybe asleep, maybe eyes open, unseeing in the dark. She asked me if Aunt Betty's son Neil had seen me today. Neil lives in Ohio and we've never met. This type of confusion is new. I worry about that. I worry about finding an assisted living situation for her - imminently. All I can really think about is the way she patted Bruce on the muzzle as he begged for food at the table. He made her smile. She is still kind to animals and chides them like a mother would her toddler.

I worry about the deep cold settling in, and how I'm getting to the airport tomorrow night, how I'm going to fall asleep tonight, still running on the frayed wire electricity of this afternoon's cold brew. I imagine the disaster scenario of an airplane crash in ten different ways, and the broken, empty rod of a screw sticking out of our nightstand resulting in tragedy. I am being ridiculous. I know this. I imagine asking around at the airport terminal for a xanax and then getting arrested by the TSA. The switch to the star light in our dining room has a short and will result in an electrical fire. The chickens are going to freeze to death. The neighbor's cat that we're cat sitting will run away and freeze to death. The Subaru will have engine failure and my children will freeze to death on the side of Goldstream Road. This is insanity.

I spent most of the day at my parents'. My mom's marked decline since we came back from Anchorage leaves me emotionally ragged, that frayed wire again, sparking in anger. The kids are their usual selves, but I don't respond with the usual attempt at patience. I feel like I just came out of a natural disaster - everything is an emergency. Cello practice for Theo and building a fire in the wood stove become monumental and stressful tasks instead of the happy routine they should be.

John put on Frankie Valli and made me dance with him in the kitchen tonight in my pajamas. It felt like a scene from a movie. The song faded out and I didn't know what to do (how does one end a dance routine when the music disappears on you?) so I went back to making the kids' sandwiches for their lunches tomorrow. But I felt better. Even though I worry about the burden of life's routines, and parents, and dangerous cold, and the kids and their incessant needs that I leave him with for the rest of the week. I worry.