This week, I lost my grandmother. My idol. The woman whose hands moved like poetry in the kitchen, whose words stitched strength into the lining of my life. Her absence is an ache that echoes across continents.
Distance is a cruel mirror. Living far from family, I have learned that time zones can stretch grief into something slow and silent. So I am making a pilgrimage — not just to honor her, but to return to something elemental. I’m traveling north, to the edge of the world, to the Arctic Ocean.
The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth. Four times faster! A world unraveling in real time, which is how I truly feel right now. It is a place both disappearing and fighting to be seen. In that way, it reminds me of grief. Of love. Of memory.
This journey is my altar.
I will sit with the cold. I will let the wind carry my grandmother’s name. I will remember that the only thing more unbearable than mourning is having nothing beautiful to mourn.
Let us honor our loved ones while they are still here — before time and tide carry them too far. Let us melt for one another before the ice is gone.
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