To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

Why, in our efforts to understand and observe life, must we so often snuff it out?

Makes me see that there might be some sense to having children after all, just so your entire life and all your family’s contributions aren’t relegated to Goodwill in the end.

There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear, and guilt. With the passing of the years, however, those memories become distant and malleable, and we shape them into the stories of who we are. We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel.

Does not love depend on some belief in the future, some expectation beyond the delight of the moment? We fall in love because we imagine a certain life together. We will marry. We will laugh and dance together. We will have children. When expectation falls to ruins, what is there left for love?

“All that matters is how a man lives in this world.”

There are some important and hard questions to be asked of history in Alaska. Native children were abused for many years by missionaries and teachers at territorial government schools. How do those effects trickle down through generations? How do we help families get out of patterns of alcoholism and addiction and domestic violence? These are real problems. But when we use terms like subjugation and loss and the desire to “preserve culture,” it devalues and limits people in a way that I don’t think is accurate.

I think there’s this tendency to lump people together, to think that all people who look like this or come from this background must think the same.

All of these opinions are packed into one small town, even one family. You can see how complicated it is, even if you just scratch the surface. It’s humanity. We’re complicated and messy and beautiful.

I can find no means to account for all that we have witnessed, except to say that I am no longer certain of the boundaries between man & beast, of the living & the dead. All that I have taken for granted, what I have known as real & true, has been called into question. I am certain only of this—I come home to you in love.

—I would be careful, then. It is all too easy to love a thing you’ve never had to live with.

I wish I could see the things you have seen. Surely you’ve learned so much from your journey. —Nothing I didn’t already suspect, I said. —What is that? What did you already know? —That it’s a d——d hard life. —For the Wolverine Indians? —For any of us.