I was on a cross-country flight from Seattle to Portland, Maine when, thousands of miles away and deep in the Alaskan wilderness, my grandmother passed away. The plane, full of passengers wearing face masks and eyeing each other like their neighbor might secretly be a parasite bounced a few times before we rolled into the gate and the pilot turned off the glowing seatbelt sign. I switched my phone back on. Placing it in my pocket, I sat up and stumbled into an elderly man struggling to pull his brown, tattered suitcase out of storage. We exchanged the typical apologies and I reached to help with his bag. As my hands made contact with his luggage, the phone deep in the pocket of my college sweats — a chasm — started to violently buzz.
“Thank you, son,” the man said as I handed him his things.
I nodded and reached for my phone.
“I was afraid that they would fall out and kill me if I tried to get them! You can’t ever be too careful at my age you know,” he added with a chuckle.
Each of his half-hearted laughs fell melodically in time with the consistent vibrations in of my phone — becoming at odds with the Amy Winehouse playlist I had put on repeat before I fell asleep over Michigan. I struggled to connect my hand with buzzing before finally deciding to use the cord attached to my headphones to tug my phone back into existence.
The flight attendant came over the intercom, interrupting me but informing us that there was a delay with our gate, something was wrong with the bridge. I scanned the notifications on my phone. There were things I was expecting: two texts from a friend picking me up from the airport, four notifications about a photo I had posted to social media before I left Alaska, and some boy I had given my number to was asking if I could meet up at a bar in Anchorage. But as I continued to look, unexpected things flashed on my screen: extended family members had been contacting me — including ones I no longer talked to — someone from my hometown had sent me a message that read “I’m so sorry,” and there was a text from my mom telling me to call her urgently.
This is how I learned that my grandmother, Maryanna Jurasek, had died. She was 81 and, although I’ve seen what time does to a human body, I expected her to be immortal. It would be impossible for me to explain the intricacies of why I felt this way because it was not born from any typical young person’s reaction to someone in their life dying. My grandmother really was unlike any other grandmother that I knew — she was unlike any person I knew.
Maryanna Jurasek was a sturdy Catholic woman who fell in love with an entrepreneurial Czech man. Together, they fled the comforts of Indiana for the adventure that Alaska promised. In 1959, with the same tight helmet of curls that stayed with her to death, my grandparents settled at the base of Denali — before a store, a school, or even roads. Her hands cleared acres of thick spruce in the mornings, cooked a hot dinner every day on a woodstove for a husband and five children, and planted potatoes at night. When I was young, I would marvel at these hands: the permanently disfigured and brown fingernail on her thumb — crushed by an oil drum, the deep cracks from years of wrestling glacial rock, and the familiar freckles of age that mark countless days spent under the sun. And yet, even as she neared her centennial, those same aged hands held me with such unique grace and power — as if they could keep us both from harm.
Maryanna was never a woman to back down, whether that be her unflinching resolve to paint the Catholic church a gut-wrenching seafoam green or, after divorcing my abusive grandfather, refusing to leave the homestead. And so, with her husband still residing on the farm, she stayed. She continued to work the fields. She painted siding and trimmed roses, she built garages and demolished greenhouses, and she helped raise me. Until her last day, my grandmother watched as the sun rose and fell on the gleaming white mountain beyond the house she helped build.
She would say that all her life — her move to the wilderness, the divorce, and even the mountain — was “God willing.” This phrase of hers, I’ve come to understand, has multiple meanings. There is the past use of it, as in that God willed all these things to be. Whenever something happened, from terminal cancer to the lottery, my grandmother would say that it “was God willing.” Then, there is the present use of the phrase. If you were trying to accomplish something, she split the credit of the effort in two: there was the work you did and there was the fact that “God was willing it.” As if He were currently doing something. Finally, there is the future tense, the use of “God willing” as a petition, a prayer — something that will happen, “God willing” that is. The summer before she passed, my grandmother became obsessed with plans to self-renovate her home. When she spoke of them, she would always finish with this phrase. In the last conversation I had with her, she said, “I’ll get to the kitchen cabinets by September, God willing.” She never stopped to pause when she said it, she did not look at the sky contemplatively, it wasn’t voiced with any sort of intonation but matter-of-factly. My grandmother’s use of this phrase exemplifies the mantra she came to live by in her later years: acceptance. Through the phrase, she accepted the world, let it flow over her body and experiences. For her, believing that things were “God willing” was the pathway to peace.
This subtle complexity in my grandmother’s casual expressions was lost on me as a child. In fact, it took me meditating on our intertwined lives after her death — something made possible by the physical distance from both her body and my homophobic relatives — for me to fully appreciate the impact of her life. My period of mourning was atypical from the rest of my family because it did not include them. I was in Maine and they were preparing a funeral in Alaska. Due to planning difficulties around quarantining and the general expense of plane tickets that take you across the continent, I would not be at the funeral — something my bigoted family members will never let me forget. So instead of the usual convivial experience of death, the celebrations and collective rivers of tears, I thought and felt alone. I secretly took my emotions north to a cabin some friends and I had rented on a lake. I told myself that I shouldn’t tell them about her death because I didn’t want to dampen the mood. In truth, I think I really just didn’t know what to say about it, yet.
***
My grandmother’s presence in my immediate family’s life was unlike that of any of our other relatives. Like her children, my siblings and I were raised on the farm. Living both in a one-room cabin on the property and then later tucked into one bedroom in the main house, we saw her nearly every day. My own mother, who had moved to Alaska from Alabama and married my grandmother’s son at the age of 19, stepped up to help manage the fields into profit — digging trees, clearing land, and planting potatoes. My biological father, who followed in my grandfather’s footsteps of abusing those around him, did not work. When my grandmother was out in the scorching sun cutting the hay down in the front yard and my mother was in the back tilling the strawberry fields, my father sat in a ripped lazy-boy recliner watching anything on the TV. This was his superpower: inaction but dominance. It’s a power that is at once terrifying and pathetic, a paradox born from some mixture of toxic masculinity and substantial inadequacy.
The deliberate ignorance of my father’s faults remains the aspect of my grandmother that I struggle with most. In the graciousness of retrospect, I try to see a mother that must have been so defeated see her son broken, a son she couldn’t save from her husband’s worst tendencies, that it was impossible for her to fix him. And to her credit, she worked to fill the void in my life caused by the absent father she gave birth to. In this absence, I came to not only have one strong female figure in my mother but another with my grandmother — a feminist force despite the circumstances. The two of them became inseparable both in my community’s mind and nearly in their physical form. The bond they shared as mother and daughter was not made by blood but was somehow more natural. Even after my mother called the police on an episode of my father’s abuse and we fled the farm, my grandmother supported my mom and stayed a constant existence in our lives.
Our extended relatives refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of the union between my mom and my grandmother — even despite that my grandmother wrote my mother into her will as her own child. Most of the thirty-six relatives spawned by my grandmother would also rather ignore my existence than confess that I was perhaps the next closest person to my grandmother. Our unworthiness to this title made clear to them by my mother’s lack of blood relation and my queerness.
Unlike my other relatives, when I came out to my grandmother as gay, she did not tell me that it was wrong. Others, like my Uncle Tom, told me that I was “a scar on the family — an abomination in the eyes of God.” I’ve not spoken to him for five years.
Although she took it better than most, my grandmother still didn’t necessarily want to talk about my sexuality. I came out to her after finishing a late-night dinner at a diner in the city during my senior year of high school. We had promised to get dinner after I “finished my chemistry homework” — though I was really spending time with my boyfriend, Hugo. As I set down the spoon from my soup, the residual ecstasy of happiness from seeing Hugo came over me and I said, “Grandma, I’m dating a boy.” She peered into me with a stare that I have never since seen — though people attest that I, too, have a proclivity for looking deeply, with almost psychic intent. I felt her green eyes wash over my body, dart from my face to the snow to my lips and finally back to my own eyes — mirrors of hers.
“In my day,” she paused. “We did not talk about such things. We knew they existed but we did not speak of them… I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
For a moment, I was afraid it was all over, that our eternal bond was broken. I started to cry as she fumbled for her wallet in her purse. When she looked up, I saw something happen beneath her eyes, like she was reliving an entire life and coming to some extraordinary conclusion. She dropped her bag, grabbed my hands, and called the waiter over.
“We’ll have two slices of cherry pie please.”
***
Over time, she became more open to my life and eventually embraced it — maybe a bit too much.
“How’s Hugo doing,” she once asked. Followed by, “is he going to go to Bowdoin with you?”
She was heartbroken for me when I explained that because Hugo was a junior, he would be staying in school while I left. We would have to break up.
“That’s such a shame,” she said. “You said you loved him, I thought he might follow you there. I thought you might propose. In my day, when you said you loved someone and were with them for nearly a year you got married.”
Then asking, “you people can do that now, right?”
I’m sure that getting comfortable with a new perspective on queer love was difficult for her. But I think she made that effort, an effort not made by my father or relatives, because during my lifetime with her we spent more time getting to know each other than anyone else. She was willing to push her boundaries for me because our happiness with invested in each other — and at this point in her life happiness was the only thing that mattered.
My grandmother never called me by my real name, choosing instead to believe me worthy of the title “Angel.” Every Sunday, from age five until the divorce, my grandmother and I would rise early and head to the local diner. As a matriarch of not just my family but our small town, she had a booth reserved for her by the woodstove in the diner. The staff had learned that she would “raise hell” if she wasn’t warm enough.
“Now don’t go raisin’ hell Maryanna,” they would say whenever an out-of-town traveler unknowingly took her coveted seat.
“No, no,” she would say. “It’s too cold in here to do that anyways.”
We would order a Denver Omelet, two orders of hash-browns, and four pieces of toast. The staff knew to split the omelet and would bring it out on two separate plates. She would drink coffee and I would run to the drink cooler and find a bottle of orange juice. Out of her large black purse would come a pen and three quarters, which I used for the dispensary outside for that day’s paper.
On those mornings I learned not only about my grandmother but, at least partially, about the world. I would sit and read the comics as she went over the news, giving me periodical lessons on how she thought things should be done.
“Lots of people are bad in the world, lots of people are mean, but lots of people are worth loving.”
“Who cares what this critic thinks. If people watch something and it brings them joy that should be what matters. Never trust one person’s opinion on what’s good on life — unless that person is me, your mom, or God.”
I also got glimpses into how she felt about her age. Watching someone so eccentric contemplate the end of their life at such an old age gave me a special perception on death.
“When I die don’t put me in a box — I don’t want that. No one should want to be trapped underground like that. When I die spread my ashes on the mountain, I want to wisp away into the wind.”
At moments like these, Red Cooney, the local Irish potato farmer who always sat across the diner and was in an unending flirtatious battle with my grandmother would chime up. With his snorty laugh he would say something like: “Maryanna, you won’t have any easier of a time getting to heaven just because you’re up on a mountain higher than everyone else.”
“I just have to make sure I get there and lock the gates before you can, Red.”
Once we were both done with our food, she would get one more cup of coffee and then it was time for the main event: the crossword.
My grandmother never went to college. She was raised in a conservative, Catholic household and went to a conservative, Catholic all-girls school. In most regards, she was uneducated and unworldly. However, she had a passion for reading — and through reading, she became both very knowing and very adventurous. It was for both of these reasons that she was also an excellent crossword-puzzler.
“Polynesian ritual with coals.”
“Firewalking.”
My grandmother became so much more in these mornings than just an old woman who spent her days in a garden. As she spelled out her answer in the blanks on the paper, each letter capitalized and clearly written, she would begin my lesson. This was my early education: waking early, diner, omelet, coffee, crossword, new fact. As if on cue, she would delve into talking about why and how she knew about something I did not — and I would happily sit, drink my orange juice, and listen. In one of the most memorable cases, she informed me of something I had never heard about her before, that she, herself, had taken part in firewalking once.
***
The story, as she put it, starts deep within the Alaskan “tulliberries” — her term for anything beyond the homestead. Or at least that was where the thought of firewalking seemed to have crept up on her from. One might be skeptical of a landscape’s ability to convince someone to potentially burn their feet for spirituality, but they probably don’t live in the Alaskan wilderness. That person doesn’t know what it’s like to look up at the majesty of Denali during a sunset, when you are transfixed by the glowing beams of light dancing across glaciers that hang in the distance, etched deep into the canvas of a mountainside.
This being said, I’m fairly certain that idea was previously put into her head by something she read — but the conscious mind often takes credit for the archival work done by the unconscious. And then there is the chance that her friends helped conceive such an idea. My grandmother, while definitely a one-of-a-kind woman, had some friends who’d give her a run for her money. She was part of a rare crowd of rural women with some of the most eccentric qualities I know, many of which choosing to have rainbow hair in defiance of their generation’s beauty standards. No matter the original birth of this experience though, my grandmother did her homework. She poured over texts on how to perform the ritual properly, ordering them as fast as she could to the local library — though “local” was across a quarter-mile-wide river. After careful study by this gaggle of women, they decided to start the fire in the front field, alongside rows of freshly planted Yukon Gold potatoes.
“We did it at night,” she said to me. “Well, as much of night as it gets in Alaska. But that was nice, it meant we still got to see the mountain.”
To this day, picturing this group of middle-aged women climbing over fiery coals during the midnight sun of the north while under the breathtaking splendor of Denali brings a smile to my face.
“It was a hoot and a holler but, even more so, it was important. We really had to trust in the power of ourselves, we had to trust in God and his will.”
Although I was only eight years old, I knew my grandmother well enough that I was not entirely surprised by this divulgence. She was a woman of many beliefs, all complex and convoluted, born from her desire to explore multiple paths of spiritualism. She praised Deepak Chopra with the same zeal that she did the Pope. She practiced Tai Chi each morning after she finished saying her Rosary. And now, I learned, she went firewalking on a Sunday.
I’m sure she was not successful in all her spiritual endeavors. My grandmother wasn’t successful at many things, one of which I presume to be parenting. There’s no doubt that my grandfather’s propensity for belligerent tirades against his children other are the primary reason for their issues as adults — and they all have issues. Drugs, alcohol, depression, abuse, neglect, manic episodes: my relatives contain multitudes of it all. However, even though she was constantly working for her family, my grandmother was absent even in her presence. She made sure everyone had a warm meal, a place to sleep, and he never ran away — but neither was she was ever fully reachable. There was an emotional distance always present between my grandmother and her children.
I think it was this special kind of a lack of love that led her to turn towards spiritualism with such vigorous devotion later in life. And I’m somewhat certain that at the age of sixty, she saw a newborn baby on her farm — me — as a second chance at the connection she failed to have and sustain with her own children.
“All things come from Him,” she would say. “You come from him. You are beautiful, my angel.”
“Really? Even firewalking?” I’d ask.
“Yes, especially firewalking.”
She believed that all spiritual roads led to God and, as such, one could — and even should — diversify the roads on which they traveled. She did these things to jolt her senses; to keep her exploring what she saw as God’s splendor, something God wanted you to do. Rather than distancing herself from her God, she felt evermore close to Him through spiritual experimentation.
***
In the days following my flight, while I was deep in Maine’s wilderness and swimming in a wide-open lake, the lesson on firewalking came back to me. There is a tendency I have, a dangerous tendency one might say, to want to skinny dip in lakes after having a few beers. My friends and I had just arrived at the cabin we rented near Machias and decided to start out our week in the wilderness by having a campfire. We had originally decided that we wouldn’t actually open the Titos we brought with us yet because we all were either jetlagged or exhausted from driving — but this decision was short-lived. Soon enough we were madly dancing around a fire to a playlist titled “The Best of Prince.” In the break between two songs and while my friends were momentarily distracted, I stripped my clothes off and started for the water.
They protested some when they saw me but they’ve come to accept my erratic tendency for things like jumping into freezing bodies of water after a few too many mind-altering beverages.
“Mitch!”
“There he goes.”
“Damn, isn’t that water cold?”
I think my friends often write off my flirtation with extreme experiences as the normal eccentricities of a typical Alaskan wild child. And, in many ways, they are right — Alaskans are known for our daredevil behaviors. But it wasn’t just that I thought jumping in the water would be exciting, something pulled me into it. I still hadn’t told my friends about my grandmother’s death. While on the bank of that lake in Maine’s nowhere land, my head was wrapped up in a million questions but something seemed to whisper an answer deep within the water.
When I had swam a few hundred yards out into the lake and looked back at my friends, I finally understood the mystical murmur that had lured me away. Below the glowing lights of our cabin on the hill, my friends danced around red embers and gold flames. In that cold water that licked at my bare skin with an icy tongue, I watched as it looked like my friends danced on the fire. Even though I had only ever seen one photo of the occasion, pictures of my grandmother laughing and walking over glowing coals raced through my mind. Through my drunken attempt at feeling something, I had sparked some connection to her. Even if I was thousands of miles away from the remains of her physical body, she was with me.
Now, with the sad wisdom that only comes with remembrance, I see my grandmother as an instigator not only for the spiritualism I often find myself looking for but for how I live my life. I believe, like my grandmother, that all things are connected. And I believe, like my grandmother, that when I follow many roads, I feel most spiritual — though perhaps not as close to God. In any case, I have a deep and unrelenting feeling that my isolation from extended family members following my grandmother’s death was meant to be. That her timing for passing was a cosmic way of shielding me from some of her own children, people she knew did not accept me for the person I was and who I had purposefully avoided for my own mental health. I’m not so selfish to think that my grandmother’s departure was timed purely for my benefit, but I do believe that the complexity of her own spirituality — a spirituality that may well take me my entire life to attempt to understand — is mirrored in the complexity surrounding her death. I am convinced that I was her second chance, that like a baptism she was reborn with my birth. If I close my eyes and remember the feel of that cold plunge in Maine, I hear again the uncanny voice in my head telling me that all of this was meant to happen — that it was orchestrated by something truly spiritual. If I close my eyes and listen, I hear my grandmother telling me it was “God willing.”