I came to Alaska for the very first time just over 8 years ago. I had accepted a job at a small non-profit in Anchorage and flew in on a snowy red eye in February. I had two suitcases. One filled with ties, dress shirts and pants. The other was filled with snowpants, hats and gloves.

Onya and I were engaged at the time. Since our wedding was just 3 months later, she stayed behind, continuing to work at her job and preparing for the wedding. I joked I would just Skype in. She wasn’t amused. We drove to Alaska together after the ceremony. But when I first moved to Alaska, Onya stayed behind.

At first, everything felt exotic. It was like a vacation. But it wasn’t home. We anticipated there would come a time when we’d say, “That was a fun adventure. Now it’s time to go back.”

Then the years started passing. We merged into a couple, not just on taxes and marriage certificates, but in routines and mannerisms. We’ve only owned one car, because we always did everything together. The entirety of our marriage, the entirety of our lives as parents, had been in Alaska. Many years ago we commented how we used to say, “If we’re here next year, we should do this.” We weren’t sure when it happened, but we eventually found ourselves saying, “Next year, when we do this.”

Alaska became “home”. A few months after Onya’s diagnosis, I was struggling with what “home” meant. Calvin would ask to go “Ohm” and I wouldn’t know where he meant. He had bounced around so many places in such a short time, it became meaningless. It felt like I was desecrating a sacred word. I said I was going “home”; but we weren’t. And I didn’t even know what “home” was supposed to mean.

Now I think I understand. Home isn’t necessarily where you live. Home is where you belong. Right now we belong in Alaska.

The last time we were home, it was the summer of 2019. Anchorage was covered in smoke from a wildfire. On top of that, we were experiencing a record heat wave. Worse, most residences in Alaska don’t have air conditioners. It was miserable. After we first moved up, we asked about AC in a unit we were looking at. The landlord laughed and said, “Open a window.” We often said that sarcastically to each other in 2019. “Sure. Just open a window. Problem solved.” It was awful inside. It was awful outside. There were newspaper stories about how you couldn’t buy a box fan anywhere because the entire city was sold out. (Although I admit, the “records” were temps in the 80s, which only sounds bad after being in Alaska for years.) It was during this spell that we took a long weekend to get out of the city. We looked at the smoke coverage forecast and cross-matched it with temperature forecasts. We found a single spot we could drive to with cooler temperatures and clean air. We packed our bags and went to Valdez.

It was a typical weekend road trip. We watched salmon get eaten by sea lions, glacier-fed waterfalls fall from mountains into the ocean, and a bear stole the peanut butter sandwiches from our cooler. (Actually he stole the whole cooler, but we’re pretty sure he was only after the sandwiches.) We didn’t really care about any of that. We were just glad the temps were in the low 70s and you could breathe the air.

Driving back from that trip, we talked about how perfect our lives were. (Although Onya added that she could do with fewer bears.) Maybe it wasn’t quite perfect. The temps were a little too warm, and there was sometimes a little too much smoke and bears. But we were happy. We talked about how we thought we’d stay in Alaska forever. The next day, we were on a plane wondering if we’d ever get back again. That’s how fast our lives changed.

When Onya was diagnosed, the day after we returned from Valdez, the doctor wanted her to take a medevac to Seattle. We wanted to go to Minnesota for treatment. Insurance would only cover the 6-figure trip for treatment in Seattle. In the end, the doctors agreed to let us take a commercial flight if we could get to Minnesota immediately. There was only one flight available that fast. It left in 2 hours. We hadn’t even been discharged from the hospital in Anchorage yet. We booked the flight at the hospital, and sped home.

We had 10 minutes to pack. When we opened the doors to our apartment, it was a disaster. Our bags from Valdez were strewn all over the apartment. Onya typically likes to unpack right when we get home, but I said, “Let’s do it tomorrow. What’s the rush?”

(What she should have told me was, “Because you never know when you’re going to get a life-changing diagnosis and need to pack in 10 minutes to spend more than a year and a half in a new city 3,000 miles away.” Of course, she didn’t say that. Instead she said, “All right,” and we laid down on the couch. Although she did remind me that after telling her not to unpack when we got back, I did in fact start to do so, at which point she said, “Hey, I thought we agreed to lay on the couch!”)

I remember a lot from the hospital in Anchorage, and I remember the flight down. I can replay those moments in my head. But I remember very little in between. I know the apartment was messy. I know that we drove from the hospital to the apartment, packed in 10 minutes, and drove to the airport. I know they were already boarding our flight when we got to the gate. I know I packed a yo-yo. (I only know that because we had two yo-yos, and when I got to Minnesota, I found Onya had packed the other. We never used them, but in the rush of packing, we both independently thought it was something I could do in a hospital for – I guess – “fun”.) I know those things are true, but there are no memories in my head of those moments. It was all too frantic.

But there was one moment in between the hospital and the airplane that I remember like a picture frozen in time. As we closed the door of our apartment, I paused to look back. I thought, “Onya may never see Alaska again.”

I hadn’t told Onya that thought. Months later, after her first transplant, Onya told me how she also paused at the door that day and thought the same thing.

After the first transplant, we had started feeling optimistic again. We were making plans to return to Alaska. We arranged for my sister to fly down our camping gear for the drive up. Onya and I talked about how we felt that, knock on wood, she wasn’t going to relapse. She was going to make it. It felt right. Perhaps this was a part of some grand plan. We were supposed to learn some life lessons about resiliency and finding peace in a storm. We learned those and now, we could move on.

My sister flew down with our camping gear on the day we learned Onya relapsed. The gear has been sitting in Minnesota for over a year.

That moment in the door, frozen in time. “Onya may never see Alaska again.”

I knew I would go back eventually, if nothing else to sort through the dusty stuff we left behind. And I thought how when I first moved to Alaska all those years ago, Onya stayed behind. It started to seem like this time, Onya would be staying behind, too.

Before moving to Alaska, I spent many weekends volunteering at a Catholic retreat program in central Minnesota called Together Encountering Christ. (It’s also where Onya and I met, where I proposed to her, and where we held our wedding reception.) During those weekends, I’ve heard people tell stories about how in their darkest moments, they shouted nasty, horrible things at God. I never understood it. I always told myself I would never do that. It wasn’t that I never wanted to; it was more of a Pascal’s Wager. If God doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter; otherwise, why take the chance the words will be used against you?

The day we learned Onya relapsed, I got in the car– the only place I could go where no one could hear me – and I screamed and shouted and cried until my voice was hoarse. In the car that day I told God to go fuck himself. I remembered Pascal’s Wager, but what mattered had changed. If God doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t matter. If he does exist, then this was his fault, and I wanted him to know how I felt. I thought, “Go ahead and smite me.” I was already living in Hell, anyway.

Had I really thought I learned to find peace in a storm? In the car that day, I was the storm.

As the days passed, I found I still had hope, but it was a dim candle in a cave. Onya and I had started making sure we were ready for her to die. We had found peace with that, too. At least sometimes.

I’m not being dramatic when I say the odds were stacked against her making it to 2021. With her mutations, and how quickly she relapsed, the median life expectancy was measured in months. That landed somewhere around October 2020. She often told me she just wanted to make it to Calvin’s 3rd birthday.

There were many days we doubted she would make it that far. The leukemia had spread to her brain and spinal fluid, which is an uncommon complication (it happens in around 5% of AML patients). Her counts weren’t recovering. She had infections she couldn’t beat and unexplained fevers. There were no full transplant matches. I wasn’t naïve at this point. These complications killed people all the time.

Early on after the relapse, I kept looking at research papers, trying to be realistic but also brighten that candle of hope. Perhaps her odds were okay. She was young, after all. Instead, I kept reading that with her mutations and the speed of relapse, “age didn’t matter”. Her prognosis was “dismal”. Long-term survival was “extremely uncommon”. I found a paper that would have put her odds of survival somewhere around 2%-4%.

Back before Onya’s first transplant, I was asking the hematologist questions about the transplant. The doctors rarely spoke of odds, and certainly didn’t “personalize” them, and I think it’s because that’s not what we’re really trying to learn. The question I wanted the answer to – what I still want to know – is, “Will my wife survive?”

So the hematologist didn’t answer the question I asked. He told me he didn’t know what was going to happen. He said, “I’ve seen 75-year-old men survive against the odds, and otherwise healthy 19-year-olds die days after a transplant. No one knows how the dice are going to roll.”

I found myself in our apartment after the relapse, many months later, trying to quantify these new odds of 2-4%. There were dice nearby, and I thought, “That’s in the ballpark of rolling snake eyes. You get one chance for your life.”

I picked up the dice. If there was ever a moment I had an angel on one should and a devil on another, this was it. Part of me – the angel on the shoulder – pleaded that I should put them away. “You won’t like what you learn.” But another part – the devil on the shoulder – smiled and said, “Do it. Let’s see what happens.”

The devil wasn’t trying to bring hope. It was trying to prove how this story would end. It was time for the candle to go out and for the darkness to consume whatever remained.

The devil convinced me. I threw the dice on the table.

Snake eyes.

The angel smiled. But the devil on my shoulder was furious. “Do it again. Anyone can get lucky once.”

I threw the dice again. It was a six and a four. But it didn’t matter. I already rolled snake eyes. Anyone can get lucky once. That moment certainly didn’t make me think she was going to live. But the candle got just a little brighter. It’s been about a year since that moment, and I never forgot it in those darkest moments. It might not be likely, but snake eyes happens.

Yesterday we flew to Alaska.

Our new address is 3404 Richmond Avenue, Anchorage AK 99508. I wrote last time about how cancer was “the long night”. But as I was looking back at our pictures over the last 20 months, I told Onya, “We did a lot of stuff. These pictures sure make it look like we were having fun.”

It wasn’t fun. But there was light in the darkness. There was always a candle in the cave.

Our flight was a snowy red eye in February. Just like my first flight to Alaska 8 years ago. Only this time, Onya was with. Somewhere over the Yukon, amid all the darkness, we saw the northern lights shine a bright green from the plane window. It felt like a “Welcome Home”. More than that, it reminded me that there is beauty in the long night.