ABOUT A MOMENT by Nancy Lord
Late morning, and my sister and I have arrived. She punches the code into the keypad, and I pull the door open. We’re in, the saddest place I know, the place I want to run screaming from, the place that is, now, my parents’ home.
There are, of course, many sadder places in a world of sadnesses, and a nursing home where the residents are kept clean and fed, and where a parrot chirps from its cage, is not the worst place in the world – not compared to war zones and refuge camps, prisons and mental hospitals, the streets and hovels and scorched earth where nobody lives long enough to get old.
But this – a building full of people who’ve lost their minds – is the saddest, sorriest, most heart-wrenching place of which I have personal knowledge.
My sister and I, wearing our cheerful faces, greet residents as we make our way down the hallway and they reach out to us from their chairs or walkers or their own slow pacing. My sister visits every couple of weeks and has come to know many of them. I live far away, and this is my first visit in six months. Still, I recognize the old woman who always tries to kiss me, and another woman who, on my last visit, kept wandering into my parents’ room as she tried to find a way out. And there’s the man who, last time, kept asking me about his wife, who he thought was in the hospital and who I feared was either dead or had abandoned him to this terrible place; his look of frantic worry is gone now, replaced by stillness.
And there’s my father, sitting alone at the corner table in the dining area, lingering over a plate of breakfast eggs although it’s almost time for lunch. My sister goes to him, and I see him look up, the look he’s come to own, of delight at being the object of attention mixed with a certain blankness about whatever is about to happen and whoever the person smiling at him might be. He’s nicely dressed in a pressed shirt and a buttoned sweater-vest, and his scalp shows pinkly along the straight part of his white-feather hair.
I slow, wanting to give the two of them a moment together and looking, meanwhile, for my mother. And there she is, farther down the hallway, slumped in her wheelchair against a wall. She’s asleep, with her head fallen to one side and her mouth open, exposing teeth that seem to have gotten larger as the rest of her has shrunk. She’s always cold now, and the staff has dressed her in a bulky and unattractive yellow sweater I’ve never seen before. Her trousers are hiked up, exposing the white support stockings that cover her bird’s legs. The anklet that holds her electronic information and that would locate her if she ever, somehow, escaped the building, rests at the top of a bright white sneaker.
My sister, who always tells me the worst, had prepared me for increased frailty and absence, but, still, my chest aches at the sight of the tiny, wasted woman in the wheelchair. I’m afraid I’ll start to cry, and I fill my mind with another image – a photo I remember of my parents hiking in New Zealand, my mother in boots and shorts, with bent knee and one foot up on a rock, and leg muscles of impressive tone. I forcibly fix a smile to my face and stoop beside my mother to touch her shoulder.
“Mom?”
Her eyes flutter open, and then a huge smile takes over her face.
“It’s Nancy,” I say, because she has just woken and might not realize where and when we are, and because she often gets my sister and me confused.
“I thought you were coming yesterday,” she says. We hold hands there in the hall, and her hands are cold and boney. I reassure her that my sister and I are both here now, the day we said we were coming.
I know the pattern of my mother’s anticipation and inability to keep track of time. Despite the brightly marked calendar and the staff’s efforts to help her with days and dates and the passage of time, my mother often spends entire anxious days waiting for my sister. She works herself into a frenzied, desperate state, sure that there’s been a terrible car accident or that she’s been forgotten. Surely she was doing just this, waiting in the hall and fretting about our non-appearance, until she fell asleep. And when we leave, she’ll complain to the staff that her family never visits, hasn’t come in weeks or months. Sometimes, when my sister has driven the three hours back to her home, she’ll walk in on a ringing phone – my mother’s tearful voice asking when she’s coming, because she hasn’t seen her in such a long, long time.
But now, she’s all smiles, and I recite to myself the one essential thing I’ve learned about Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia: it’s all about the moment. You live in the moment of the smile, and you do your best with each of the moments of your visit, showing a picture you’ve brought, sharing a donut, saying something about a person or a place that your mother or father might remember if they could remember anything, straightening a collar or holding a hand, complimenting the hair or the sweater or the holiday decoration (there’s always an approaching holiday – now Halloween) on the door. You think of every possible thing you can comment upon, none of which will result in an actual conversation with someone who can’t hold a thought long enough to respond but any of which forms a moment when the person being spoken to knows that he or she is the center of attention. You cannot think about the fact that, an hour later, or even five minutes later, your mother or father won’t remember that you were even there.
I wheel my mother in her chair to the dining area to join my father and sister at the table. I give my father a kiss on the forehead and a light squeeze to his shoulder. He’s thinner and more stooped than the last time I visited, and his smell is slightly sour.
My father is a favorite at the nursing home. He’s generally agreeable and will follow directions to come to the table to eat, to return to his room, to sit, stand, walk with his cane, even if he forgets how to use the cane and drags it along beside him. He has a lovely small smile he readily turns on the young, mostly dark-skinned and lilty-voiced women who lavish their own smiles and laughter on him, who tease and praise him and fuss over him. Although he’s lost most of his ability to speak he still exchanges the pleasantries that are most hard-wired.
“I’m so happy to see you, Dad,” I say. “How are you today?”
He says, “Very well, thank you.”
I can see by his face – he doesn’t know who I am, but he knows I’m someone that he knows, or used to know.
The staff needs to set up for lunch, so we get my father to stand and then walk back to their room – my mother in the wheelchair, me helping to push and steer, my father doddering slowly along with my sister holding one arm. This takes a very long time. My father stops at each doorway, and we say, “No, not this one. Your room is down here.” And then we go a few more steps and stop and say the same thing again. The sing-songy aides in their candy-colored smocks pass by with armloads of laundry, and the sound of plastic gloves being snapped on rings in my ears.
This is not a bad place, this “home” specializing in memory loss. The level of care is high, the staff members are capable and kind, and scheduled activities fill each day. I cannot imagine a better place for my parents, in the state that they’re in.
Before they came here, we got by for over a year with round-the-clock caregivers coming to their apartment. One time when I visited we gave the regular caregiver the day off. Suffice it to say that, before the day was half over, I was on the phone to another caregiver, begging for help.
Now, when we reach my parents’ room, my father heads for the bathroom. We ring a call-bell for assistance, and an aide with plastic gloves arrives smiling and takes care of everything.
I sit with my mother and look at pictures of the three great-grandchildren. My mother can’t keep their names straight and usually thinks they’re my sister’s children – but close enough. She thinks they’re the most beautiful children in the world, and surely the smartest, and so we look at the photos and gush over the boys in their ski outfits and Ellie’s curly hair. My mother would not remember that they had visited six months before – my niece making the long trek for a “last” (my sister promised) four-generational family gathering. There had been moments of cake eating and the pinning up of crayon drawings, but what I remember most was sitting with my parents on a sunny outside bench to watch Chris, Alex, and little Ellie running and jumping and chasing a ball across the lawn until my father, with a hunted look, said, “Get those kids away from me.”
My father never was much drawn to children, never really got too involved with his own children or grandchildren, and in his demented state couldn’t have been expected to kindle a fresh interest. This I had noticed about both my parents: that as their minds deteriorated, they retained their essential selves, only more so, or more frankly so. What they might have thought but masked with convention and politeness now emerged.
In the nursing home, one of the other old-woman residents greeted my mother, and my mother turned to me and said, in an audible and uncensored voice, “I don’t like her.”
My mother, her whole life, worried about every danger, every possible thing that might go wrong. In one of my earliest memories, I was with her in our backyard as she hung clothes on a line and told me – a preschooler – how terribly dangerous knives were and that she knew a boy who was using a knife to cut an apple and when he swung his hand at a fly he poked out his eye. To this day, I remember not the context – because I don’t think either of us had a knife at the time – but the clothespins snapping onto the line and the ants coming up through the cracks in the pavement and the feeling of terror as I imagined a sliced-open eyeball and blindness forever. To this day, I have a phobia about my eyes – an inability to bring anything close to my eyes without them clamping shut.
Today, in her demented state, my mother has become the champion worrier, the mother of all worriers, the seer of disaster. If I’m traveling, she knows I’ll be killed in a plane crash. She knows boats will sink, and I’ll drown. Cars will run off the road. If I don’t lock the car door when I drive away, a bad person will jump in and kill me. What mind she has left has retained, through the strength of those overworked neurons and their pathways, every fear she’s ever had, and multiplied them. She is the boiled-down essence of the fearful self she always was and now will be.
I try to remember my mother in happier contexts. To be honest, my childhood memories are slight, unmemorable. Mostly I remember my life as being one of quiet resistance. I felt apart, different from the rest of my family; I didn’t want to be “ordinary.” My mother, I felt, prized the predictable and popular. I abhorred the same. I was often embarrassed by her; she had a habit of talking about me in public, when I was with her, and completely misrepresenting me. “Nancy’s looking forward to the hayride.” I am? I’m not! I hate that kind of thing! Later, she would embarrass me with undue praise. “This is my daughter who writes for the New York Times.” No, actually not. Just once I had something in the op-ed section. She easily got confused about such details, something that seemed simply annoying for years but perhaps, I realize now, was a function of not just her wishfulness for me, but a loosening of connections in her brain. The experts say that Alzheimer’s may develop over a lifetime, manifesting itself in subtler brain and behavior changes long before it becomes recognized as memory loss.
It’s time for lunch, and we begin the long walk back to the dining area, where it takes a longer time to get my father close to the chair, then to sit, then to lift his legs so we can push the chair up to the table. My mother, all the time, is telling us to get my father a glass of milk and to put butter on a roll for him and to cut his meat. Besides warning us all of imminent dangers, my mother’s life has always, forever, revolved around my father. She has always deferred to him, always said she has no opinions or desires except to support or do whatever he wishes. Her care for my father – for our family – has always had a lot to do with loading plates with food and then offering more. Now, when meals are so central to their existence, my mother has become fixated on my father’s eating. She’s not hungry herself, she insists, poking a trembling fork at her creamed chicken and peas.
My sister and I attach clothing protectors (a.k.a. bibs), get the milk, butter the roll, cut the meat. We say how lovely the meal is, and that they both must eat what they can, even if they’re not hungry. We’re going to do errands, we say, and will be back after lunch. We place a fork on the edge of my father’s plate, to help him remember what it is.
My sister and I on occasion have sat with my parents while they eat, or even eaten with them, but the experience is excruciating. Neither of them eat very much, and both of them take hours to do so. My mother pushes food from her plate to my father’s and tells him to eat; he pushes food around his plate and ignores her, and my mother eventually complains that the food is cold.
It’s a relief to escape the building to the Target store next door, where my sister and I get salads in the little café and talk of other things.
When my sister and I talk, I’m aware as I have never been before just how often I say, “I don’t remember” or “I can’t remember,” related to almost anything. I don’t remember when my spring break is, or the title of the book I want to recommend to my sister, or the name of the family that lived on the corner of the street where we grew up. I don’t have a good memory, I know. Do I have a terrible memory? A failing memory?
I remember once reading an interview with the writer Raymond Carver, who said he had a terrible memory and that’s why he wrote fiction. If I remember correctly, he even claimed that a poor memory was an asset for a writer, because you could be wholly inventive and imaginative, unbound by factual history. He died at fifty, too young to worry about becoming like Iris Murdock, a writer who passed from brilliance to an addled Alzheimer’s silence.
I must have had an OK memory when I was young, because I always did well in school.
I remember once seeing a program about Mount Everest and later mentioning to my mother that Mount Everest was 29,000 feet high. She was amazed that I had remembered such a fact, and I was amazed that she was amazed; it seemed like a rather simple thing to remember, at the time.
Memory for such facts is, perhaps, less important today, when anything can be looked up in an instant. In fact, writing this, I no longer was sure of Everest’s height and needed to take two seconds to “google.” I do remember the approximate height (6,000 feet) of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, a mountain I climbed several times with my family and then later with high school and college friends. I’d like to remember that fact, as I’d like to remember my experience (vague, except for one very cold night in an inadequate sleeping bag) on the mountain. I would like to remember that I once lived in New Hampshire, and that I have a sister named Kathy and a brother named Rob.
We remember the things that are important to us, or at least the things that we think about most often and, thus, reinforce the neural pathways, by repetition, in our brains. We modern people are so overwhelmed with information, no wonder so little of it “sticks.” When I was, recently (so that it’s fresh in my mind as I write this), reading Gretel Erhlich’s book, This Cold Heaven, about her journeys in Greenland, I marked the page where someone told her about the amazing memories Inuit have for details of their landscape and for the tools they use. The man said, “I met a ninety-year-old hunter who said, ‘I haven’t really forgotten anything in my whole life. I remember everything I’ve learned. That’s because we didn’t read or write. We had no choice but to remember.’”
One man said it, another man remembered it to tell Erhlich, Erhlich presumably wrote it down in her reporter’s notebook and then typed it into her manuscript for me to read in her book and to remember long enough to look for it again and retype the quotation.
These days I try to write down things I want to remember in a journal. Too often, when I return to the journal, I find I haven’t set down enough detail to capture whatever it was I intended to – or, often, even to remind myself what was so important that I wanted to remember it.
My sister is eight years my senior, and our childhood memories tend not to overlap very much. She remembers teaching me to walk, holding out her hands as I toddled across the living room. I, of course, don’t remember that. I remember that my sister once lifted me onto a high swing in a neighbor’s yard and then left me there, for hours. She denies this. She remembers with great fondness summers at the lake, when my father’s parents would join us, and we’d visit the penny candy store. She remembers all the different kinds of penny candy. In the café at Target, she says, “Remember when I caught the turtle and Grandpa made a hole in the shell so I could walk it on a leash?”
Of course I remember the turtle. I caught the turtle. I was the one who sat on the dock for hours, fishing for sunfish. I remember with absolute clarity sitting that day inside the boathouse with my line and hook (with worm) in the water, and seeing that turtle swim up out of the murk and bite the hook. I remember the green smell of the water, and the pimpled neck of the turtle, and the weight of it against my bent pole.
“I caught the turtle,” I say.
“You did?” My sister looks doubtful. “I thought I caught it.”
My sister and I are both well-aware that Alzheimer’s has a genetic component, and with two parents with the disease (or related dementias – Alzheimer’s is tough to diagnose in the living) we are certainly candidates ourselves.
We swear to one another that we will never allow ourselves to become like our parents.
Easily said, now, but how does a person know when she’s reached the dementia point of action? Because, clearly, people slip past that point and then can no longer rescue themselves.
I tend to think that suicide is a reasonable way to bring a life to its end, but I’m troubled by the fact that so few people stop their slides into dementia. The slope must be very slippery, indeed.
I have read, the more intelligent a person is, the better he or she is able to disguise his or her forgetfulness and confusion. That is, the person compensates. I think of my father. He never much dealt with money – he depended on my mother to keep the checkbook and do the banking – but when he could no longer manage basic math, he always bought exactly twenty dollars worth of gas, paid for with a twenty-dollar bill. He never, to my knowledge, admitted that he had a problem with his memory. I remember him in a doctor’s office, when he was already nearly aphasic, speaking right up: “There’s nothing the matter with my memory.”
For years before that, though, when I’d go anywhere with my father, he’d say to me, “If I don’t introduce you, it’s because I can’t remember people’s names.”
My mother pretended not to notice, or perhaps didn’t notice, my father’s lapses and decline.
There was just one time.
I came to visit, and my parents insisted on meeting me at the airport, only a few miles from their home. It was after dark, and as we drove up the highway, my father became confused. He drove by the exit, and then the next exit, and the next, while I tried to convince him that we needed to leave the highway and my mother sat frozen in the back seat. My father drove in the passing lane, well under the speed limit, and cars began zooming past us on all sides with horns blaring. I was certain we were going to be killed. It was a long, harrowing trip before I could convince my father to steer the car into the right lane and finally to turn off the highway and stop. It was longer before I could get him to give up the driver’s seat and allow me to take us home on a back road. Hours later, when we got to the apartment, my mother whispered to me, “I’ve never been so afraid.” But the next day, she was full of excuses. “Your father’s a very good driver, you know. He’s a very safe driver.”
After our lunch, my sister and I buy a new supply of Depends (a.k.a. adult diapers) and a bag of birdseed for the feeder outside my parents’ window. Some routines, some adherence to the old life, seem important to maintain, even if neither parent seems able to observe anything beyond the window anymore, as they’re also not able to make sense of the pictures on the television or the voices and music that come from the radio and CD player. We still have the local newspaper delivered each day, something – like the sweepstakes offers that come in the mail – to arrive, to be, to establish the days, even if black marks on paper are now as indecipherable as Chinese characters.
When we return, my parents are back in their room, asleep in their easy chairs. I’m glad to have the birdfeeder to fill. I take my time walking back through the building and then around the outside of it, through the clear air and first fallen leaves. My mother’s awake now, and my sister opens the window so we can make a big deal out of filling the feeder and including my mother, as though she’s directing the effort. “Look at these yummy sunflower seeds,” I say. “These are for the chickadees. Your little birds are going to be happy birds.” I’m babbling.
Inside, my sister reorganizes closets and sews on a button. My father sleeps in his chair with his head back and his hands resting on his thighs, not so much as twitching. I watch to see if his eyeballs will move under his closed, paper-thin eyelids. I wonder if even dreaming has escaped him now, if his brain at rest is a mass of disconnected wiring. I pick up the newspaper and look at an unflattering photo of Hillary Clinton. I tell my mother about the fields of candidates and ask her if she ever thought she’d live to see a woman running for president. She tells me the price of stamps is going up again.
Just when I think my mother is completely clueless, she’ll do this – come up with some new fact she’s learned. She’s right; I read about a stamp increase in the paper a couple days before. I can see from her face that she’s worrying about this; will she have the right stamps when the time comes, for the cards my sister helps her send out?
“That’s right,” I say, “but that won’t happen until next year.” I’m remembering how, well before my mother’s mind unraveled, she would typically take great leaps in conversation. When we spoke on the phone, she’d say something about church and then, in the same breath, something about a grandchild’s report card and a new building at my old school, and I would feel like I was caught in a whirlwind, surrounded by flying debris and unable to quite get a hold of any of it. I imagined my mother’s brain, then, as a bunch of wild sparking or maybe electrical arcing, that tripped one thought into another, almost randomly. Now I wonder if there’s a pathway from president to stamp, or one newspaper to another, or if perhaps my mother’s mind has been stuck on the price of stamps for a while, the way she doggedly obsesses about things that trouble her.
I get out the cardboard display that my sister made for my parents’ last anniversary, with photos of all the family and from the many trips my parents took over the years – adventures my father enjoyed and my mother tolerated, for his sake. I sit with my mother, and we look at the pictures and the captions my sister adhered to them. I find myself saying, “Remember (this)” and “remember (that),” but she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember skiing in Switzerland or walking on hot lava in Hawaii. I’m trying not to say “remember,” but I’m having a hard time not saying it, when what we’re looking at is all about the past and remembering what was there. “Here’s our old house,” I say. “Remember those two big blue spruce in the front yard, and there were always robins’ nests in them?”
My sister adds, “And Dandy used to sleep in the middle of the road, and cars would drive around him.”
I can’t tell if my mother remembers Dandy, our old dog, or Buddy or Shadow, the dogs that came later. There was another dog between Buddy and Shadow, a terrier that didn’t last long and whose name I can’t recall. (Suddenly, reviewing this in a later draft – the name pops, unbidden, into my mind. Molly.)
We look at the picture of my mother’s wedding party in the garden of her parents’ home. Her sister the bridesmaid, her brother in a military uniform, her other brother: all of them dead. The parents of the bride and groom: smiling so expectantly into the future, so long dead.
“You were so beautiful,” my mother says to me. “All the boys were after you.”
That stops me just for a second, until I realize she’s talking about my sister.
“Yes,” I say, “Kathy was always very popular.” I point out the picture of my sister’s wedding. “Here’s Kathy and Phil riding away in the horse buggy from Brookside Church.”
“You had a beautiful wedding.”
My sister’s checking drawers for underwear and socks. She and I, the weddingless one, shrug at one another.
My mother is twisting her engagement ring around and around on her chicken-bone finger. The real diamond is now in a safe-deposit box, replaced in the setting with worthless glass. She doesn’t know this. The ring had been cut off during one of her hospitalizations, but she’d never forgotten that she wanted it back. I don’t wear rings or jewelry in general, but I want her to know that I treasure the bracelet that came to me from her mother. I say, “I don’t wear it very often, but I love the bracelet that was Nanny’s. Do you remember” – I kick myself for using that word again – “the bracelet that your father gave your mother when Uncle Bill was born?” She looks at me blankly. “The two diamonds represent you and Aunt Kay and the emerald is for Uncle Bill.”
Her look is still blank, and cold. “I don’t know anything about that.”
She had been the one to tell me about the bracelet and its family history, and now the meaning is gone from her and from every living person except me. So much more is gone from us all; I asked so little and know much less about anything in my mother’s life, any of the past that’s now forgotten, beyond retrieval. My chest hurts again, as though a hole in my heart is tearing larger.
Oh, but it’s time for the ice cream social! A staff member comes around to invite us to the common room, and we rouse my father for the long walk. This is a moment, surely, when all the residents gather to gorge on the several flavors of ice cream, the toppings of sprinkles and cherries and sauces. My father is grinning like a little kid. My mother fusses to make sure he gets served, then attacks her own parfait cup. Someone plays the piano, and one of the aides dances with a resident, a woman of surprising grace. It’s all very festive, and for a few minutes I admire the bravery of those whose imaginations are large enough to create this semblance of happy socializing and to honor what dignity remains. I am not among them – neither brave nor imaginative, or perhaps only imaginative enough to think of minds that have been emptied of all they once knew, and to fear a future in which, I too, might be so lost.
It’s a beautiful, sun-streaked day – perfect for an outing. When the ice cream dishes have been cleared and chins wiped, my sister and I bundle my parents into warm jackets, awkwardly stuffing arms into sleeves. My sister, placing my father’s plaid woolen cap on his head, smiles into his face and says, “Who’s this handsome man?”
My father answers, “It’s me.”
He looks like he’s maybe not too sure either that we know who he is or that he wants to go anywhere with us, but we assure and coax him, and, finally, all four of us have made it through the doors, into the sunlight that falls upon a bench where my father can sit. My sister and I admire the weather, the potted mums and pumpkins, the straw scarecrows, the sugar maple with bright-red leaves. I talk about how, in Girl Scouts, when my mother was the leader, we collected leaves and ironed them between waxed paper, as work for a badge in plant identification. I still remember that red pines have three needles and white pines five, to match the letters in their names. My sister takes pictures of us sitting together, and then we ask a departing employee to take a picture of us all. My mother tilts her face into the sunlight and begins to doze. My father studies his cane.
After a while we head back in, wrestle the outdoor clothes off, head for my parents’ room. My father needs the restroom, and an aide helps him use the one near the dining area. When he comes out, my mother rolls her chair to him and says, with a look of pure adoration, “I love you, darling.”
My father furrows his brows. He leans towards her. “Pardon?”
“I love you, darling,” she repeats and begins to reach for his arm.
My father straightens and shuffles by her. He looks like he’s trying to get away.
I can tell, from my father’s face, that he hasn’t recognized my mother, that he doesn’t know her from any of the other old women in the place. I see just a corner of my mother’s face – what looks like a sag of hurt, then a mask coming down, hard.
I turn away and take a very big breath. I don’t know if my mother realizes that my father didn’t recognize her. I also don’t know if he doesn’t recognize her at all, anymore, or just sometimes, and I don’t know if she knows whether he sometimes or always doesn’t recognize her, or what it means to her if she does know this. My sister has told me that, sometimes, my mother has temper tantrums (nothing we’ve ever seen, in her life before or here) and throws things around their room, and that the staff told her my father once asked them who the crazy lady was and seemed puzzled by having to share a room with her.
Is it worst to lose your mind, or is it worst to keep enough of your mind to realize that you’re forgotten by the person who means the most to you in all the world, the person whose happiness you’ve devoted yourself to forever? Or might it be the very worst not to understand that you’re forgotten, and that the forgetting is not by intent but by disintegration, and to think instead that you’re ignored, unloved, abandoned?
How long will my mother remember that moment in the hall when she professed her love and was left alone, with a hand holding nothing but air?
I think of that moment as I write this, each detail of what I saw and heard – my mother’s upraised face, my father’s bent back, the words, the looks, the walking away, the blue-veined hand of my mother returning to the arm of her wheelchair. I feel the choke in my throat, the deep breath that pushes back tears. These are not details I needed to set down in notes.
These are things I’m not likely to forget, not at least until I forget very much more.
Nancy Lord is the author of three collections of short fiction and four books of literary nonfiction: Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore; Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast; Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths and a collection of essays/memoir, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, (University of Nebraska Press in 2009). She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.