It is a radiant eruption of sunshine here in Ketchikan. It’s not common that I’ve seen days this bright, this beaming. 

The sun is undressed and the mountains are pied: green and brown and gray, the shadows are even revealed behind the trees on the top of  Deer Mountain. 

It is a day of extreme opposites.

When Cari told me about working in Alaska, she said “Your rent will be your biggest expenditure in Alaska.  There is barely any eating out that happens because there are like 7 restaurants and there are about 3 places to buy clothes.  You will not be spending money on anything other than necessities.  No gas, no car. You are not going for the money.  You are going for the healing and the experience. And boy will it ever be an experience.”

When I read the sentence in bold, I was quizzical. I did not come to Alaska with festering wounds. And believe me, I’ve been in that place before. I used to limp to work every day and hope I’d make it through without someone seeing the tissues catching my snot and tears. Misery, it was. 

But Alaska for me was about rejoicing in the freedom of having worked through some emotional baggage. Not only that, I had looked the challenges of adulthood in the eyeballs, grieved them, and decided that I wanted to embrace this life even with it’s foibles, hurdles, curdled milk and fractious phenomena. 

When Nana died on July 19, 2016, it was easily the worst day. 

I can’t yet talk about her actual departure because it’s still being processed.

The viewing, the funeral, the burial, they paled in comparison to the woman I know my Nana to be. Still, there was softness, there was sadness, there were magnificent doves who were released by her five children and represented Nana’s flight. My cousins removed their pink pocket squares over her grave once her casket was lowered into the ground. 

It was not her time, never her time. My grandmother was never supposed to die. 

My friendship with Nana was just that, we were close the way that two very dear friends were close. Of course, she saw me through several phases of my life and forgave me for all the ugly parts. I saw her slowly lose her memory and I forgave her for all the ugly parts, albeit through occasional exasperation. 

And somehow, I am in Alaska. The most foreign, wild, brilliant and gorgeous taste of wilderness my eyes will see and the worn soles of my Skechers will tread. 

I could try to reason with the salmon swimming upstream, I could tell them that they will die when they spawn. Don’t do it, don’t wriggle out of the water and into the air to flex those new muscles that will deliver your demise. Stay in the ocean and roam free. 

I could say these things to the salmon like I could reason with Nana’s body: “don’t go, don’t expire, don’t release that final breath.” But her body was meant to give up, it’s a gracious gift that she doesn’t have to suffer anymore. 

But her spirit had to go, too? Why are these two separate forces inextricably dependent on one another: bone and spirit, muscle and person, body and soul? Couldn’t her spirit hover in a ball jar like Tinkerbell and keep me company, advise me, comfort me and kiss me on the collarbone in the way she used to do? 

Alaska is a place of inherent juxtaposition: you have the tourist trap aspect and the whole place feels like Disney Land of Alaska, and you have rugged wilderness folk who commercially dive, hunt bear and fish on seiners. The two couldn’t be further apart. The tourists come here to buy jewelry (that’s not from Alaska or sold by Alaskans) and the fishermen hope they never have to get near a tourist. Downtown is for the tourists, the mountains are for the locals and the adventurers.

And for me, I am meant to find healing and adventure. When I read the words “healing” in regards to Alaska, I did not know how true they would be. Except, I have not been able to heal because I have barely begun to accept that my grandmother has left. Her spirit was so strong, her personality so programmed into my mind and memory that I can’t begin to release her into the night. In detail, I could still imagine the shape of her hand and how she used it to break up a grilled cheese, wipe her fingertips on a napkin, wrap her hand around a cup of coffee hugged by a napkin, and to clap her hands to music in time with the beat. 

She was my grandmother and my godmother. She was uptight but she was loving and precious to all the things that I considered lovable and worthy. She wouldn’t ever knowingly do harm to me, and she hurt with my hurts and stormed with my anger. 

She listened to me and held me close and never broke from my tearful gaze. I am in awe of the woman that Myra Jean Myers was. 

When I was in Florida for the funeral, Victoria (my coworker) texted me and said: We miss you. Not easy dealing with the emotions… Kristi is working on welcome packets.. It’s finally misty so much more bearable. Be good to have you back and you can mourn then. 

“Be good to have you back and you can mourn then” 

Why would I come back here with the intent to mourn. How would I even have room to mourn? This place is full of awe, mystery and constant motion. Most of all, I work so often and am lucky to go out with friends that I don’t sit and mourn. 

But most of all, I can’t mourn because she isn’t gone. 

I’m so far from the absence of my grandmother, I am miles and miles from the room where she slept, the place on the couch where she sat, the slippers she glided in and out of and the pink bathrobes she wrapped over her PJs. I’m far from the tracks she left in the dirt. 

But mostly, I can’t comprehend that I cannot call her and tell her what is going on in my life. I can’t remind her how much I love her and hear her say “Call me again when you can Bahbeh (baby).” 

The sun is shimmering and dancing off the water, the boats relentlessly tug by my gaze, the tourists come in and they leave every day. 

Nana has left. My intravenous honey drip.

A most permanent, intransigent fact perpendicular to this revolving paradise. 

The locals call the time just before the sun sets “The Blue Hour.”

All the mountains turn blue as the sun gets sucked from the sky, the water is blue, it’s all blue.

The Blue Hour.