My very limited time with Jenae Larson makes me think she was gifted a rare acceptance of the world. I was at her mom Kim’s house, writing a story about invasive plants and wanted to photograph her with her damnable hawkweed. “Use Jenae as your model,” Kim told me.
Jenae, like no other teen-ager, agreed without a word to be photographed sitting in a clump of weeds. We ran the color picture on the front page of the newspaper.
The day I met him, David Simmons had nothing but good things to say about our town, his plans and all the things that might happen. He was brimming with positivity, so optimistic that it made my teeth hurt.
David and Jenae were treasures stolen from us for no good reason.
That’s why I won’t be among the folks who go Saturday to commemorate the event of their horrific and tragic deaths. If you go and that brings you some peace, I am glad for that. I’ll give to any effort to honor their lives but remembering their deaths, no thanks.
A person reaches a point in their life – perhaps several points in their life – after they’ve witnessed or endured enough sadness and tragedy and death that they’re no longer willing, or perhaps able, to visit a place of sorrow.
I was at a social event years ago where a very earnest young woman approached Norm Blank, who was then around 70. Norm asked how she was, and she replied that she was not doing well. “Then I don’t want to hear it,” Norm said.
Maybe it was a joke or maybe Norm had just seen enough of life’s battles and was tired of the carnage and wanted no more of it, at least not at a party where people were having fun.
Heather Lende wrote about a Blessing of the Fleet where a local mom who’d lost two children walked away from the event, a morbid affair where a bell is rung for everyone who died in the past year. It was too much.
I’ve come to believe our town has a preoccupation with death and grief, a tendency to dwell there too long that’s amplified when a person dies young or accidentally. Services for them so often strike me as verging on a kind of masochistic communion.
Alaska is full of death and loss. Crazy people come here and kill themselves. Sane people die doing crazy things. Friends move away and we never see them again. Or they go away for winter, like so many bright leaves that fall and go missing during the long dark months.
Three years ago, my father and two of my three brothers died in the span of three months. My brothers, grieving my father’s death, each died by suicide in March 2019. Suicide, of course, can be contagious. But so can sorrow, and there’s no vaccine.
What a person can do is social distance themselves from grief. Walk the hell away from it.
When I started writing this essay at about midnight, a feathery snow was falling. I clicked into my skis and headed into town, past the glowing blue “vacancy” sign at the motel, past the old inn where 30 years ago slumbered a beautiful girl I was crazy about. I kissed her once and I would pay cash money to have that moment again.
The bars were closed and a north wind was whipping, so I turned south toward the harbor and skied down the middle of Main Street just because you can’t do that every day. The clerk at the mini-mart was closing up but left on the Christmas lights that glowed over the shelves of pretzels and chips.
Near the post office, a rider on a fat-tire bike overcame me at a close distance without saying a word. Maybe he was enjoying a reverie amid the swirling snow. Maybe he was just trying to keep warm and get home.
Returning up Second Avenue, a white coupe approached going too fast, fishtailing in the snow. Some young people out on a lark, perhaps, leap-frogging Friday and barreling right into the weekend. I was happy for them and whatever party they were coming from or heading to.
In winter, there is a long, white scar on the side of Mount Riley where David and Jenae died. It’s such a long gash breaking up the green, forested hillside that it catches your eye. But downtown at night, when streetlights dim your night vision, you don’t see it at all.