The Shape of Us

Making memories and meaning in Alaska

“Whoa!” a woman cried as massive chunks of ice cleaved from the Margerie Glacier, crumbling into the turquoise water below. “That was a big one!”

I swiveled my head toward the port side of our cruise ship, catching the last splashes through the window before turning back to my nine-year-old daughter. Evie was busy with her new friends at the indoor pool, having briefly glanced at the massive ice formation before resuming work on her cannonball form.

My stepfather, Don, talked for years about taking Evie to see Alaska’s glaciers before they disappear for good. He wanted to cruise from Seattle’s Pier 91, a 45-minute drive from our Eastside suburb, to explore the Inside Passage, a coastal route that stretches from the serene waters of Puget Sound into the greater Salish Sea and up the Pacific Ocean to southeastern Alaska.

The logistics would be easy. The trick was in the timing.

It was impossible to take my mother with us. A cruise would be too loud and crowded and disorienting for her as a person living with Alzheimer’s, too stressful and overwhelming for us as caregivers. But we felt guilty vacationing without her, even though she’s lived in a memory care facility since 2021. It made sense to delay the trip until after she died.

When my mother stopped eating and began hospice care in July 2023, it seemed that would happen sooner rather than later. When she resumed eating, gained weight, and was discharged from hospice six months later, our expectations flipped, the timeline stretched indefinitely. Would we see Alaska in two years or ten? Would Don still be able to travel by then, potentially in his eighties? Would the glaciers still be there?

We decided to go ahead and plan the trip with the hope my mother’s health would still be stable by the time we set sail. We weren’t going to risk being trapped on a boat hundreds of miles away if it seemed like she was going to take a turn for the worse. I’d never forgive myself if she died alone while we were stuffing our faces with pasta and cake at the Lido Market buffet.

We chose a cruise date, noted the cancellation deadline, and held our breath as we read reports from her doctor month after month that said the same thing: Stable. Stable. Stable.

The cancellation deadline passed and my mother thrived as much as someone can in the end stage of Alzheimer’s. She continued to eat well and even gained half a pound. Don visited her the day before we left and told her we were going to Alaska. “Okay,” she said, maybe reflexively, maybe understanding.

I was thrilled for Don to finally go on a vacation. The last time he traveled was in February 2016, when he and my mother went to New Orleans for the second half of their honeymoon. They sipped cold beers in jazz clubs and devoured fluffy beignets at Café Du Monde, each bite sending cascades of powdered sugar sailing off the fried dough, fingertips coated in white. They brought back a newborn onesie adorned with a pink fleur-de-lis and a canvas tote embroidered Evelyn for their granddaughter, still in utero.

That was life before Alzheimer’s, before I became a mother. They are one and the same. I have been losing my mother for my daughter’s entire life.

I planned another vacation for us all in 2020, a thoroughly doomed year. My mother had been diagnosed in November 2019 and I sensed the window for her to take one last family trip was rapidly closing. I chose Sun Mountain Lodge, a peaceful getaway perched in the North Cascades with sweeping views of the Methow Valley. My family vacationed there when I was a kid, my father and brother mountain biking on dusty trails while my mother and I rode horses through meadows bursting with wildflowers. We’d all come together in the evening for a chuck-wagon dinner: barbecued chicken, baked beans, buttered cornbread, homemade peach pie. My memories are filled with the lilt of cowboys, the smells of leather saddles and campfire smoke, the feeling of togetherness, warm mountain air holding us all like a big hug.

The lodge was open during the pandemic with reduced capacity and limited amenities, so I booked three nights at the end of August for my little family, my mother and Don, and my brother and his fiancée. What killed the trip was not the virus, but Alzheimer’s, which had triggered an odd side effect in my mother: tailbone pain, ostensibly from a fall she’d suffered in the ’90s. She’d become so thin from forgetting to eat that she’d lost all the fat that previously padded the area. It was so bad she could hardly sit for five minutes at a time before needing to stand up and walk around. The drive to Winthrop—more than four hours—was out of the question. I cancelled their room 10 days before the trip.

The rest of us still went, desperate to break free of the homes we’d been isolated in for nearly six months. Our rooms were on the bottom level of the Mt. Gardner building, separate from the main lodge, where we could maintain our distance from other guests and fling open the back doors to increase airflow and take in the mountain views. We sat on wrought-iron chairs in the grass, pouring red wine into plastic cups, eating Styrofoam-encased meals from the dining room, which was open for takeout only. The outdoor pool was closed. Horseback rides were on, but Evie, freshly four, was far too young. We brought our mountain bikes and explored the trails on our own. There was no chuck-wagon dinner. We spent time with my brother and his fiancée, but not too close, because togetherness had become a threat.

It was not the same in so many ways, but mostly because I missed my mother.

There were so many losses that year, summed up in numbers that would be hard to believe if we hadn’t seen the tallies on the nightly news: Covid cases, deaths, bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks. Other losses are harder to quantify. There is no mathematical way to express the feeling of chasing a butterfly with both arms outstretched and clasping your palms loosely around it, desperate to hold onto something magical for just a little longer, only to peek inside your hands and find them empty.

Since it was never feasible for my mother to join us on the cruise, I knew I wouldn’t feel the same type of disappointment, but a different kind of missing. It popped up on occasion with no warning.

In Juneau, after we visited the Mendenhall Glacier, our tour bus dropped us off at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake, an efficient outdoor all-you-can-eat operation. We filled our plates with barbecued ribs, wild rice pilaf, and alder-wood grilled salmon before claiming space at one of the long picnic benches topped with translucent roofing and twinkling string lights. A live guitarist we could hear but not see strummed amiably nearby.

Within the first few chords of a new song, I identified it as one of my mother’s favorites. The guitarist launched into his best James Taylor impression, coming very close. My eyes welled up as I recalled driving my mother back to memory care one afternoon, clutching her hand and singing along to the song as we both cried:

You just call out my name
And you know, wherever I am
I'll come runnin'
To see you again.

“Mom loves this one,” I said to Don as he nodded, but the words felt wrong in my mouth. Present tense was too present for the version of my mother I meant to invoke. Still, the current version of my mother would probably hear these chords and get the same warm feeling I did, though she may not know why. Recognition runs deep.

Evie finished her plate first and was eager to move on to dessert. I helped her choose a slender stick from the charred ones lined up next to a jar of marshmallows, showed her how to hold it low over a pile of burning wood and carefully rotate it. She preferred her marshmallow torched, while I roasted mine over several minutes into the size and deep brown color of a Hostess cupcake. I hope her memory will hold onto the way we jumped to avoid sparks that shot out from the crackling flames; the feeling of sticky marshmallow remnants in the corners of our mouths; the scent of campfire smoke settling gently into our hair. Even without trying so hard to recreate my childhood experiences, her summers still smell like mine.

In Ketchikan, Evie and Aaron split off for a UTV excursion while Don and I opted for a bottomless crab feast. We shared a gingham-checked table with a retired couple from Ohio who showed us lots of pictures of Mt. Rainier they took on their flight into Seattle. As we cracked through dozens of crab legs, filling a stainless-steel bowl with obscene piles of decimated shell, I said to Don, “Mom would have loved this.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied. “Right about now she’d say, ‘Now I’m just eating for taste.’”

It felt good to insert my mother into the scene, to imagine what she would have felt, done, and said had she been there, had a terrible disease not overtaken her. It’s important to keep the way she was alive in our minds, to talk about her little quirks so we don’t forget them.

But the past conditional tense, would have, also felt wrong in my mouth, the edges too sharp. It sounded like my mother had died, and I wondered if that’s what the Ohioans assumed. They were too polite to poke further into her whereabouts or offer their condolences. More likely, they were too busy getting their money’s worth of crab to give it a second thought. My words rolled right into the stainless-steel bowl, promptly buried under more bits of shell.

Later, Ketchikan’s mellow drizzle opened up into a downpour. As we hurried along the pier clutching our bright orange Holland America umbrellas, Don stopped dead in his tracks and pointed to a humble fishing vessel that was dwarfed by the cruise ship behind it: Saint Janet. She was small but mighty, floating proudly in the rain.

It turns out I needn’t worry so much about finding the right words to talk about my mother, or trying so hard to revive her from the past or insert her into the present. I can chase her all I want, but Janet will always find her own way to show up.

I Googled Saint Janet to see if I could find out more, and wouldn’t you know, she was built in Seattle by the Harold Hansen Boat Company in 1952. There are sun-drenched photos of her chugging along in Salmon Bay, not far from the Ballard townhouse where I lived with two roommates after moving out of my mother’s house, where I frequently ran along the waterfront, where I told my now-husband I loved him for the first time. It’s comforting to think even after I left the nest, Saint Janet cruised watchfully nearby.

An artist drew a portrait of the boat and created 500 numbered and signed prints. One website even shows her current location. Maybe I’ll buy a print or frame the photo I took to remember the way she showed up for us, but I’ll resist the urge to continue tracking her, which would mark my descent into complete madness.

Back to the glaciers we went to Alaska to see. We cruised through Glacier Bay National Park to the northernmost reach of Tarr Inlet to see the Margerie Glacier, a mile-wide remnant of the Little Ice Age that began about 4,000 years ago. This glacier is particularly known for dramatically dropping those huge chunks of ice I mentioned earlier, called calving, which is a natural part of a glacier’s life cycle and how icebergs are created. I found the name of this phenomenon particularly interesting, given that calving is also the word used to describe cows and some other animals giving birth.

As I simultaneously watched the Margerie Glacier calve and my daughter cannonball into the pool, I thought about how giving birth is indeed like breaking off a piece of yourself, watching it become something entirely new apart from you, and enduring it gradually drifting away. No matter how far it travels or how much its shape changes—softened by heat, built up by cold, marred by impact—it will always be a fragment of a whole, a puzzle piece shaken loose from the box. Somewhere within it lies the memory of its origin. Recognition runs deep.

I am part of my mother. My daughter is part of me. Evie inherited qualities from us both: my mother’s love of dancing, shopping, and all things fancy; my delusional optimism and sometimes painful empathy. I’m observing her shape change as she moves through the world away from me—slowly at first, more quickly later. And as my mother nears the end of her life cycle, I feel the pull to look back and decipher how she got her shape. What came from birth and what came from heat, cold, impact? From her shape came mine and my daughter’s. It helps, in the process of losing my mother, to understand how we all fit together.

Our final stop on the cruise was Victoria, British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada’s Pacific coast. We had only three hours to spend ashore, but squeezed in a unique nighttime tea experience at the luxurious Fairmont Empress hotel, where Don and my mother spent the first half of their honeymoon ten years ago.

Back then, they stayed at the hotel and enjoyed the traditional afternoon tea. Day and night. Before and after. Don pointed out where they sat as the hostess led us to our table. Rather than the flaky scones and finger sandwiches on the daytime menu, we chose from savory items like chicken samosas and shiitake mushroom bao buns along with indulgent chocolates and tarts. I hoped it was different enough to distract Don from comparing it to before, but I’m sure it was still difficult.

What I know is this: Evie loved it. I loved it. We clinked our teacups together with our pinkies held high and schemed to return for afternoon tea, just us girls.

When I’m with my daughter, nothing is missing. Her love smooths my jagged edges and makes me feel whole again. Someday, as we walk into the Empress wearing our fanciest clothes, I’ll do a quick scan of the Inner Harbour across the way and imagine Saint Janet voyaging steadily someplace where the sun is shining.