I will offer the surgeon general warning that this post was difficult to write. It will not be easy to read.

I want to share it to honor the bravery of my boss, who is called Boss, and the integrity of her grief. I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone else but me. I also want to be discreet about her pain (which seems oxymoronic given that I am sharing it on my blog. Maybe it’s just moronic). But, I signed up to write down and share 50 conversations in Alaska. It will cheapen the other 49 if I omit this because it’s sad.

I have grown attached to Boss in these last five months. Wow, it’s interesting to say these last five months about Alaska, about living here. It’s been a long time and has felt just exactly as long as that: 5 Fat Months. I will be writing more about “roots” and how that relates to my experience here, BUT FOR NOW, let’s focus on my relationship with Boss.

HOW I FELL FOR BOSS:

I knew that Boss was the love-of-my-dock-life when I met her during training in April.

She had a smile as big as Christmas morning. She laughs easily and often, and even though she gets annoyed about little officey things “Who left this is in the fridge like this?” “Who is leaving out all these water cups?” “Who took my green pencil?” we all adore her. I joke that we’ve all been hired to keep her happy, and it’s half true.

She has been working this damn dock before they poured concrete on Dock One and it was laid with plywood. “The concrete is less slippery but the pavement just KILLS my back.” She turned 76 this summer. She refers to Ketchikan as home. She and her husband have been coming up here every summer for 13 years. She and her husband and her bird. She’s been working with my company for 9 of those years. 

“She be little, but she be fierce.” She prefers to be ticket taker, that role is the lynchpin of loading tours and has authority over all the dock reps and the time our tour departs. She has leaned over the pacific ocean to rescue tickets before. The Shorexs all love her, except for one who shall not be named, and how could you not? She is a little lady from Cape Cod who has more time on this dock than 85% of us.

She rides the scooters back to the office and jokes that they are having races. People on the dock see her in the scooter and assume it’s hers. Hell no, I’ll sooner see this woman stay home and knit as use a scooter.

We did the play together. She plays the oldest hooker in the bunch, and she loves it. She does it every year. She was more excited about me being in the show than I was, and that is saying something.

We’ve always gotten along, made jokes and gotten through any rough patches. She is good to me and I try to be good to her. I like to think we understand each other.

Some of our friendship has been encouraged by my love for my Nana. So many things about Boss remind me of Nana. They are different ladies, to be sure, but that same fighter is in both of them. When Boss gets confused, I try to ease off and wait until she straightens things out. It can be frustrating because we can sometimes be two steps ahead of her. But she always gets there, and she knows how to do her job well. And she does.

But it’s the end of season, Dude. I am not enamored with anything anymore. I’m not mailing it in, but I’m making end of season mistakes just like the rest of us.

SO, ON THIS PARTICULAR MORNING:

I hurried into the office, I was late. I’m usually 5 minutes late.

She’s gotten used to it but she’s never thrilled, of course.

“I’m here, boss!” (I’m expecting the usual underwhelmed: “Okay.”)

She turned and said: “Well I got here this morning and someone had left out their dishes from yesterday!”

This is normal discourse from Boss, she gets her feathers ruffled when a piece of paper is sitting in the wrong spot. “Well who put that there?” You should see how she is with email.

I tried to dodge: “Oh the boss is all ready and primed to go this morning!” (which was not very nice of me, I should have just said “Okay” back).

“Well listen, if I am short it’s because my brother died last night” and then I saw that her eyes were shining with new tears all the way on the other side of the office. All the oxygen in the room left.

We all nearly booked it to her side. I folded myself into a seat on the floor and Merek sat with me, next to her office chair.

Gentleness had already replaced the usual morning edge, instantly, when we heard her voice crack and the words spill out of her mouth.

“When did he die? Was he with family? How is everyone doing?”

The usual questions that you ask: paltry offerings of our concern, our sympathy, but they are the best we have.

After the details are shared, we sit in silence, stare into space the way you do when there’s nothing you can do.

One of the first things she said was “Well, you just went through this yourself.”

It was very selfless of her to see past her own loss and into mine, but the two situations were so different.

The loss of Nana in my life is a hulk-like chasm, Costco-sized sadness in bulk. I will never use up all my sadness before the “best by” date. But Nana had used up all of her body in 88 years. She didn’t die from cancer or one overpowering condition, she had a fall and the problems rushed to the surface like hungry fish just after food is scattered over the tank, floating on surface tension. Her health problems teemed from behind rocks and through undercurrents; we had seen all the issues before and had tried to keep them at bay, but we were powerless against them when they arrived in tandem. With all the other issues weighing on her precious frame like uneven panniers, Nana was pulled down by the weight. That was the only way she would go, if she was slowly defeated. Eventually, she was.

But my boss’s brother was younger than Nana. He had a disease and decided not to suffer, so he opted to take medications that quietly broke his body down at his silent invitation.

By my understanding, this was, resoundingly, his choice and his demand. He wanted not to wither and fade over several years and drag his family through it. He was afraid to die, and the prospect of slowly perishing, neuron by neuron, was too terrifying a departure. Instead he chose a gentle euthanasia. So you can understand, for her to compare her tragic loss to the death of my sweet Grandmother’s was perhaps too generous a gesture (if that makes sense). The tragedy of this loss had a deeper element of peril by virtue of the word “euthanasia.”

I don’t know about you but this is not a medical possibility I was familiar with: a medicine that can gently, graciously, deliver you to death by taking pills over several weeks? I had first heard about the situation through our supervisor, who shared with me that my boss may be struggling over the next few months as her brother was in this situation, fizzing out like an alka selzer tablet.

I kept waiting for my boss to mention it after I heard about the situation. I thought in all my mentioning of Nana, that she would say “I know what you mean: I am going through it with my brother.” But she never did. I just assumed she would. I waited, I was ready. I thought she would confide in me, trust me, if for no other reason to warrant an extra heaping spoonful of grace, room for error, at the end of an exhausting season. Not to mention she is not 25 anymore and has been doing this job for so long. No matter how much she loves it, it must make her tired. It makes me tired and I have no osteo-flavored excuses.

The main reason, however, why I wanted her to tell me is because I wanted to shoulder her sadness: her brother is dying. When your siblings begin to die, it must, must, do something very different to you than any other loss. It has to add a weight of reality, recognition, mortality, that a person shouldn’t have to absorb alone. I know that she has support, but I still waited. Maybe I assume that we are closer than we are, but I think of her as my honorary grandmother now. That is quick for 5 months I guess.

I just assumed that after I complained flippantly some day about my eggs drying up, she would pipe up with: “Hey, kid, my brother is dying so how do you think I feel?” So that I could sink into apology and regret and comfort her from under the awning of my 30-ness. That’s what we should do, right? Use our strength to hold up the tired? Maybe I could ameloriate her sadness, distract her with annoyance at my own idiocy. I’m not above it..

I know that people avoid sad discussions at work because they don’t want to fall apart and not be able to recuperate. I know. But we spend 6 days together, every week. I expected to eventually hear mention of her brother.

But she never mentioned it to me. I thought I would have heard that he was dying. Last I knew, it wasn’t going to be any time soon.

So it was the biggest shock of all to know he had already passed.

We sat, so we stared at Honey’s half-filled water bowl next to us on the floor.

We asked which hospital in Vermont he was in.

What difference does it make?

But what else can we ask?

She told us if she was short with us, that was why.

She dabbed at her face with a tissue. We sat.

We did not talk very much.

This was a conversation without many words at all.

We gave Boss flowers. I found flowers oddly comforting when Nana died. It clicked for the first time, why people send flowers.

I love Boss and I am amazed at her strength. I hope to cherish her in my life for a long time.