I am in the airport in Anchorage, Alaska, with a bleeding heart.

The airport here is named the Ted Stevens International Airport. Ted Stevens was a long-serving US Senator from Alaska who died in a plane crash in 2010. It seems kind of odd to name an airport after a guy who died in a plane crash, but apparently living in a place where it never gets dark half the year and never gets light the other half gives you a macabre sense of humor.

From what I can tell, the Alaskans are leaning into it. I've seen dozens of businesses with "Midnight Sun" in their names. (I have also seen the actual midnight sun.) And the streets all have names like "Northern Lights Boulevard" and "Arctic Circle" and "Holy Shit A Grizzly Bear Is Eating My Leg Help Help Arrgghhh Crescent." There is an actual diorama of a grizzly bear attacking a deer right next to the United Airlines ticket counter in the airport. There is also a stuffed grizzly in the mall. And the hotel lobby. And the laundromat. The person in charge of setting up new accounts at the utility company told us a truly horrifying story of getting a fish hook stuck in her eye while salmon fishing and the guy who cast the line not noticing what was happening. I could have eaten reindeer sausages with my eggs at breakfast this morning, but having been raised on Rankin-Bass animated Christmas specials about Rudolf, I opted for bacon instead. Apparently, Charlotte's Web did not drill as deeply into my subconscious as I would have thought. It is clear that my compassion towards our anthropomorphized friends only goes so far and I will cross the line of heartlessness for two strips of thick-cut bacon. Self-knowledge is a terrible thing.

And so I am leaving Alaska now and leaving my littlest boy (all grown up now, they say) behind and my heart feels like it is being cut with jagged glass.

I have two small tattoos on my right ankle -- silhouettes of seagulls in flight, spreading their wings. I got one in honor of each of my boys when they left for college. One day, standing around the coffee maker in the Sociology Department with a bunch of students, the talk turned to tattoos and I showed mine and said, "They are to commemorate the most painful thing I have ever done." A student gasped and asked, "Give birth?" because when you are 19, you are likely to think that the pain of childbirth is real pain. I scoffed.

For all of the intense bloody physical agony of having my internal organs literally rip themselves open in order to bring those boys into the world, it was laughably easy compared to the pain of saying goodbye to them.