Specimens, Days

It is curious, how death can articulate a distance that life, in its fragile hope, can only intimate. For the living, there is tomorrow, next year, the expectation, however tenuously constructed, of continuum. & now there is only a stark rupture, an irrevocable goodbye. My grandmother is simply gone.   & from this distance, it is not the finality of the funeral that would compel me there, or saying goodbye to her corporeal form. Her absence is absolute, & no formality of parting would do anything to contradict that passing. Instead, it is the draw of those surrounding her now, those in whom there is still the opportunity for communion, my family, their hearts & their love & their enduring life. The death of a loved one reminds us of the basic irreversible fact that loved ones die, without exception. & from this distance, it is the longing for family’s presence that I feel keenly. Longing, because desire is drawn over distances we sometimes can’t traverse.

I didn't know her well, or at all, really. Her ex-husband is our  neighbor & our friend, & together they raised four incredibly capable & self-possessed boys out in the bush, up-river from Ambler, in a sod home of their own construction. They have lived a version of a life's dream very close to the one we are pursuing, & they have done so humbly & deliberately & in a manner deserving more respect than I am capable of articulating. I have thought of them, in their separate spheres, as heroes of mine for that very reason. & when I met her, she had such a rootedness, a grounded kind of radiance that made her seem conduit of something you couldn't see but that the earth could. She had a strength that was unlike that of any other, a kind of knowing derived from purposive living, maybe. & so when she was struck & killed by a drunk driver in a hit & run while riding her bicycle to work on a back street of Healy last week, our collective h