The majority of her ashes arrived, sealed, in a simple utilitarian wooden box, carried in a tote bag and handed to me in the parking lot of the small cemetery where Paige was to be buried by a wonderful man from Evans Chapel on the mainland. He’d brought them over on the ferry.

In that same branded tote was a small white plastic box containing that extra bit of Paige's cremains, set aside per our wishes. I transferred these into a handmade ceramic mushroom jar that I'd bought a few weeks before Paige died.

A video I made about this process was seen by over 10 million people on social media, a fact made all the more bizarre when you consider that I fumbled the transfer and accidentally inhaled a small dust cloud of Paige. One of many bizarre experiences I've had in the past six months of grieving publicly on the internet. The teenagers on TikTok made some great memes and posted some very relevant GIFs about it.

I knew I wanted to commission something smaller, sturdier, with a tight lid, and adorned with beautiful, meaningful artwork to represent Paige and my journey to San Juan Island from Southern California. The journey Paige's ashes would take from San Juan Island back to Southern California.

So I called up Cozette Ellis. Cozette is a wonderful artist, illustrator, and ceramicist who lives and works at Alchemy Art Center here on San Juan Island. Alchemy Arts is this wonderful living, working, teaching artist community out in the woods, filled with statues and structures: hulls of old ships, tractors painted in day-glow colors, and infinite treasures to be found if you're willing to search.

After an initial meeting to discuss the design, I met Cozette at Alchemy to watch the urn take shape on the pottery wheel. I could already hear the wheel spinning as I approached the ceramics studio, but had to take a detour to greet the resident goats and head honcho boss cat Frankie.

Inside, I found Cozette deftly throwing beautiful vases and jars of many shapes. I've always enjoyed the process of watching a talented ceramicist throw on a pottery wheel. The way the globs of reclaimed clay turned to elegant, sweeping, thin-walled structures with a few gentle guiding touches is like magic to me.

The design that I asked Cozette for is a short, straight-walled jar with a tight-fitting lid and small indents for a strap I can tighten to hold the urn closed. In the first session together, Cozette threw the jar and the lid. After that dries, she will etch the design she's created for me all along the outside walls of the jar. This design will show the Joshua trees and tumbleweeds of the Southern California Desert, where Paige and I met and were married, on one side, and on the other will depict the waves and wind of San Juan Island, where we wound up and where Paige was diagnosed and died.

The outside will be dyed with earthy tones for the desert and blue tones for San Juan Island. Cozette will engrave a sunflower on the lid. Paige's favorite flower.

This is the urn in which I will carry Paige's ashes around San Juan Island, scattering careful amounts at her favorite beaches and locations here in this beautiful place that we came to just before she was diagnosed and from which we waged her entire cancer war in solitude and peace.

Then I will get on a plane with the ashes tightly secured and carry them to Southern California, where I will again scatter remnants of Paige from the orange groves of Redlands, where she grew up to Pioneertown, out on the edge of the Joshua Tree Desert, where we went to beautiful concerts under the stars at Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace and got married in the Pioneertown Barn. I remember I bought two tickets to see Tycho at Pappy and Harriet’s before I’d even met Paige, hoping I’d meet someone to take with me by the time the concert arrived. We had our first date the week before the show, and Paige took that second ticket and came to Tycho with me as our second date. I remember standing under a blanket with her in the crowd, my roommates clustered together ten feet behind us, gesturing for me to hold her closer.

I was much younger then.

After that final journey backward through time and then forward again, I will forever have this urn here with me at home. I will have this physical touchstone object to remember the journey we took together from there to here, the war we waged in the cancer trenches, this final journey that I took with her ashes and her memories, and also this era of my rebuilding and of finding meaning in the years of losing.

I should note that this custom urn from a local artist will end up costing less than most generic ones you’d check a box to select from a funeral home. To me, using this often-rushed piece of “death business” to collaborate with a local artist and design a truly meaningful keepsake that will be with me for a lifetime seems one of the best possible ways to move through the grief. Seizing ownership over these parts of the process that are often reduced to a commodity purchase in the lowest moments right after death feels like fighting a good fight, and it brings into my life connection, collaboration, creativity, closure, contemplation… and so many other things that don’t start with the letter C.

That, to me, is incredibly healing.

I’ll share the final urn soon, and the final flight plan for my final journey with Paige.

Thanks for reading.

Mark

PS: I want to keep my articles about cancer and caregiving free for anyone who needs a lifeline as they go through their own version of this story. If you’d like to support my work and writing, I will be doing a Live Q&A at the end of the month as a bonus for anyone who chooses to upgrade to a Paid Subscription here on Substack. That small monthly upgrade allows me to focus on telling this story and building visibility and resources for caregivers who feel lost in their own journey. Your time and support means the world.

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This is the story of the San Juan Angels and one of the most dynamic weeks in Paige’s cancer war.

Paige was diagnosed with terminal cholangiocarcinoma — cancer of the bile ducts of the liver — less than a year after we moved to San Juan Island, which sits in an archipelago of the same name off the coast of Washington State. Our new island home had a population of roughly 8,000 people, and boasts no physical connection to the mainland — just aging ferries.

The logistics of a cancer war are challenging enough without the added layer of being on a tiny island.

When a new tumor started pressing on Paige’s spine, her doctors ordered emergency radiation at a clinic on the mainland. These treatments were only five minutes long, but had to happen daily for five days in a row. With ferries both ways, that meant an eight to twelve hour day of travel for us, every day for five days, for twenty-five minutes of total radiation.

Enter the San Juan Angels. The Angels are a volunteer organization of retired pilots here on San Juan Island who donate their plane, their time, and their fuel to fly patients wherever they need to go. Most of them are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, but every single one sharp as hell.

I called them up, and they scrambled five days worth of pilots and planes — a different one every single day of the week. Some needed an excuse to do a Costco run on the mainland, others needed any reason to gas up the plane, but all of them were fully committed to our mission: get Paige to radiation fast and easy, on time, every day.

On that first flight day Paige and I walked down the hill from our apartment to the little air strip on San Juan Island. Our first pilot, Dennis, was in his 80s. He asked me to push the plane out onto the tarmac, which I did with surprising (and slightly disconcerting) ease.

I helped Paige get folded and stuffed into the backseat with as little pain as possible, then crammed my rather large frame into the rather tiny copilot seat up front with Dennis. In these planes there are two sets of flight controls, physically linked together so one mirrors the motions of the other. This controls on my side were so tight against my knees I had to fold them over to one side to prevent myself from blocking the controls as they mirrored Dennis’s efforts to, you know, fly the damn thing.

We got a thumbs up from Paige in the tiny backseat behind us as she moved around, doing her best to find any position that wouldn’t cause too much pain, and we were off to zap this new tumor.

Takeoff in a plane this small takes seconds, by the time you’re even rolling forward the wheels are already beginning to lift as the plane tilts in the crosswinds, bouncing on every current. You become intimately aware of the physics of flight in a plane this small, of how air is this viscous thing with body, and of how you’re riding on its currents, dipping and rising and jostling constantly.

But then we got height, and the islands spread out below, green and stunning and completely indifferent to the fact that we were in a flying go-kart on our way to cancer treatment. On an island like San Juan there are so many little pockets of nature or community that you never see as you circle the island on the main loops. From the air, we become suddenly aware of all these hidden corners of the place we’d called home for this entire cancer war.

When you’re fighting cancer, you often find yourself dealing with people who don’t quite match the severity of your new life. Paige and I had spent years on high alert, often feeling like our life was being lived in a trench during WW1, always awake and always “on.”

These pilots? They matched our energy. These were people who took things seriously, who checked every box and wasted no time. We liked these people. We needed these people. We needed their planes, yes, but we also needed that feeling of being supported by intensely capable and skilled people.

We felt that with Paige’s oncologists, we felt that with the many nurses in chemo bays and surgical pavilions and ICUs, and we felt it with these pilots. These were capable, calm people who understood how to execute an important mission under impossible conditions. In a cancer battle, that’s everything. You want people around you who know exactly what they’re doing and do it without flinching. We felt like we’d found the people we needed on our team, right when we needed them.

We’d found the focused, capable people who knew how to get things done despite hurdles and barriers.

On the fifth day, when Paige finished her final session, they had her ring the bell. They gave her a certificate. They gave her a quilt. The staff applauded. And Paige smiled, and accepted all of it, graciously.

We both knew we’d be back in the chemo bay the following week. We both knew this radiation wasn’t even targeting her primary tumors — just one small nodule that had been pressing on her spine, causing her pain. Five days of flying. Five minutes of treatment a day. One small nodule. She rang the bell anyway. She smiled anyway. She accepted the quilt.

She could have waved it off. Could have said, let’s save the bell for something bigger. Instead she just let them celebrate her. In a long cancer battle, you take every win you can get. Even the small ones. Especially the small ones.

Above all else, this week was exciting. In a cancer war full of dire and serious challenges, here we got some actual adventure for once. That was electrifying. It felt appropriate that in our time of need, facing a massive and inconvenient time sink caused by living on San Juan Island, we’d be saved by retired octogenarians in planes I had to help push onto the runway. That’s the level of community support we should all have. That’s the level of seriousness with which everyone should take the illnesses and medical crises of their community members.

San Juan Island does this because we have to. It’s a logistical necessity. But the feeling of having a volunteer Air Force show up in your time of need is something I wish every cancer patient and caregiver could feel.

Having capable people swoop in on your behalf when things get dire is an unimaginable gift during a cancer war. You might not have a plane to donate, but that doesn’t mean you can’t soar into someone’s life and solve a problem for them when they’re overwhelmed and up against the wall.

Just show up with a flight plan and get the thing done, alike the Angels did for us.

“We found him in his car by the side of the road.”

“Is he okay? Is he in the hospital?”

“He didn’t make it.”

He didn’t make it. I remember that phrase so vividly. I remember holding Rusty tightly in my arms. I didn’t want him to bark.

They had found my father — Dennis — dead in the driver’s seat of his car. He’d pulled over to the shoulder of the highway as his heart begin giving out, and in doing so had prevented any collateral damage to other cars.

I remember I set Rusty down at that point to hug my mother as we cried, and for once Rusty didn’t bark.

I met Paige ten years later, when I was 24. I remember laying my head on her lap at Coachella — a massive music festival in Southern California — and telling her that she was my protector. She’d gotten a teaching job in Los Angeles that morning, and a few months later we followed her job into the city.

Almost ten years after that, Paige was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 32, just after we moved 2,000 miles here to San Juan Island. I became her protector as she declined through more than three years of that unwinnable cancer war. The entire time we knew she would die. Every chemotherapy, surgery, and procedure was to buy time and the cost of comfort. Every painkiller was trading awareness for relief.

Protecting her tiny, weakened physical form which had grown so susceptible to so many new pains became my life. I became her protector in every way, all at once, and that protecting became my mission.

Maybe I’d already become her protector before that point. Maybe I’d let her be mine for too long. The timeline is foggy, and I can’t ask Paige about it.

I couldn’t protect Paige from the cancer, I could only keep her out of pain. That is a brutal role for a protector to have, knowing that the battle will be lost, that your loved one will die, and that your best hope is to slow the bleeding and ease the pain and sit with this person as they fade from life in front of your eyes.

At the same time, I had to begin thinking of what my life would look like when I was alone again. What an impossible balance that was.

Every day I had a finite amount of energy and life — both having been diminished to the barest embers by the cancer years — and I had to consciously decide whether to devote myself to deepening my connection with Paige, or to begin building that solitary future life for myself that would begin when she was gone.

The former would mean deepening the loss that was to come.

The latter would mean beginning to detach from this person who’s health was my entire life.

That was the hardest choice I had to make, I had to make it every single hour of every day from diagnosis to death and it never got easier.

Near the end of Paige’s life she was unconscious or asleep so much of the time. I was barely able to connect or communicate with her. This was the time to look forward, to begin to armor myself for the loss. But the weaker Paige grew, the more it hurt to look forward to my own life after her death. I wanted to protect her more intensely than ever, even if that just meant sitting there by her side, holding her hand and waiting for the end to come.

Paige died at 35. My father died at 50. I’m 36 now.

I feel like I’ve completed a 20 year arc of loss. From my father’s death at 50 when I was 14, to Paige’s death at 35 when I was 36… from losing a paternal protector, to finding a partner protector, to becoming her protector, and now — finally — becoming my own protector.

I find myself suddenly equipped with such a perspective from the years of cancer and anticipatory grief. They forged in me a solemn resilience and an ability to ride out the waves of everyday life, because when compared to the infinite crashing waves of cancer, the waves of everyday life feel suddenly manageable. Even hopeful.

I have become my own protector. As I learn to embrace that face, I realize also that I have the stamina and capacity to protect others in my life as well. That is a humbling and empowering feeling. To feel it at 36 fills me with hope for the years I have left.

I’m not the one who died. I’m the one who lived. There was guilt in that at first, and a deep anxious need to live for Paige. That has faded with time and been replaced with a healthier feeling of responsibility. Responsibility to live for myself.

Responsibility to share the things I forged in these hard years with others, and not just those I found in the cancer years but those I’m recognizing all at once from that entire twenty year cycle of loss.

Loss gives you many strengths, if you are willing to recognize them, accept them, and own them. It gives you armor, you just have to wear it.

For me, the challenge is knowing when to take the armor off. When to lay it down so that I may feel things fully, the good and the bad.

When to let people in.

When to allow myself to be open and vulnerable again, so that life can slip through the cracks I allow in my armor and into those soft spaces I reveal, where it can grow.

Cancer did a hell of a job of stripping away the work I’d done on that previously, especially when so much of that work was tied to Paige and my relationship with her. The losing and the loss were a full reset to my life in almost every way, and came on the tail end of the COVID years, which were a reset of their own.

I stand here looking back at that twenty year arc of grief. Perhaps it’s just a narrative I’m applying, but sometimes finding the right narrative for the worst of my life feels empowering. It feels like ownership and agency.

I’m learning to trust my own instincts for what I need, and to believe in my ability to find it. I’m learning to trust that my heart and my nervous system and my brain can survive anything. That maybe they thrive in those intense environments, whether by nature or nurture or some combination of both.

I tell myself that losing Paige slowly over those years I have probably survived the worst thing that will happen in my life. At least I sure as hell hope so.

If not? If there is worse yet to come?

I have my armor now. I’m my own protector now. I’ll be ready for the next one. Next to that, the rest of life feels like endless, calmer waters to sail.

This is a story of diving into uncharted spiritual waters, rolling with massive changes and my first real trip since Paige’s cancer rooted me here on San Juan Island preparing for her loss.

The event that drew me to Victoria is called Across the Veil Constellations. Constellation work is a unique approach to therapy rooted in the family systems method that sees strangers role-playing within the psychodrama of one another’s grief stories to uncover hidden generational traumas, systemic entanglements, and emotional dynamics.

This Constellation work was originally created by Bert Hellinger, but Across the Veil Constellations are a unique progression of this idea created by Dr. Sarah Kerr, a sacred deathcare practitioner and teacher who runs the Centre for Sacred Deathcare.

I was introduced to Sarah by Diane Huellet, who hosts the Best Life, Best Death Podcast, after I recorded an episode of that podcast a few months ago. That was a great conversation — you can listen to it here. The three of us ended up talking, and Sarah invited me to join for this event to observe, learn, and connect with this new side of deathwork.

These seminars see a cohort of twenty people gather in a ritual circle for almost twenty hours across a single weekend. Members of the group step into the center in turn to embody pieces of one another’s traumas, literally acting out the roles of one another’s internal traumas. The goal is to provide clarity and even find resolution to the old wounds of the person sitting at the front of the circle, whose story is the subject of the constellation.

Each constellation takes almost two hours. Over the course of the weekend only a handful of people will see their story explored in the circle, but everyone in the room comes away having explored archetypes of grief and loss that feel universal and meaningful.

This work was entirely foreign to me. I consider myself firmly rooted in science, and this is deeply spiritual work. But these past years of losing and loss have left me deeply interested in exploring every facet of death work, and I think most of you reading this can agree there’s a serious lack of empathy and understanding in the way we deal with death in the modern era, treating it as something to be avoided and put off, rather than a natural conclusion to be prepared for, understood, and embraced.

But before I could explore any of this, I had to get from San Juan Island to Victoria, BC. Victoria is visible from the west side of San Juan Island, and the plan was to take a quick twenty-minute seaplane flight from Friday Harbor. By my math I would have landed in Victoria less than an hour after walking out my front door and into town to take off.

That seaplane was cancelled a few hours before takeoff due to inclement weather patterns in Victoria.

Thus began a 24-hour overland cross-border journey to make it to Victoria along the most circuitous of routes: a ferry from San Juan Island to Anacortes, a drive north to Bellingham for the night, then waking up at 3:45 a.m. to cross the border into Canada to make the 7 a.m. ferry from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, finally arriving in Victoria around noon, exhausted, too early to check into my hotel, and about to dive into the unknown.

Upon arriving in Victoria exhausted and with hours to kill before I could check into my hotel, I wandered into downtown and was immediately pelted with a literal barrage of bird poop — three direct hits in under a second. We’ll call that three good omens at once.

A quick note: This was my first time leaving the country since before Paige was diagnosed with cancer. Until three months ago I hadn’t even left tiny San Juan Island in almost two years, having been holed up in my cancer bunker. There was no reason nor room for real travel while Paige was sick and dying. After her loss, I didn’t feel that I had the stamina.

Friday night’s opening of the weekend was a shorter session, in which we gathered in an old Polish meeting hall with gorgeous hardwood floors to open the weekend with meditation, intention, and a genuine effort to charge the circle and the work with the combined power of our collected human energies. This work involves a lot of energy: spiritual, physical, and emotional. A big part of my reflection on this weekend is deciding which of those areas the power of the weekend comes from — because there was real power here.

For eight hours on two days we gathered in a circle and focused our energy into the circle, as one person would sit at the front and share their trauma and what they wanted to learn or gain in this session. Then others would be called upon to step into the circle to act as roles in that person’s story: family members, ancestors, sometimes even metaphorical roles like a psychopomp — think a mythological ferryman like Charon, the beings who usher spirits from life into death.

Over the course of two hours, the people in the circle fall into a sort of spell, acting in their role as they react to others, all directed expertly by Sarah, who clearly has an eye for guiding the natural ability of humans to empathize and embody one another’s stories. She pulls people into the circle in new roles when the work slows down, and even more impressively is willing to let silence stretch for what feels like ages as the people in the story slowly open up or lapse into challenging but potent periods of silence.

At first it feels incredibly bizarre. The people in the circle know almost nothing about the trauma of the person in the “hot seat,” so how could the actions they take or words they say hold meaning?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that the spiritual energy of the field in the room is truly piercing the veil between life and death, and those in the room are feeding off this energy and embodying the actual energy of the trauma, allowing it to be addressed and molded and perhaps brought into balance.

The second is that these events are an incredibly deft exercise in human beings’ innate gift for identifying meaning in our shared traumas, proof that so many of our stories follow overlapping and common themes. That Sarah has designed a beautiful system for allowing a group of open-hearted human beings to dive into an elaborate improv exercise, with roles carefully chosen and cast by Sarah in order to bring the proper physicality and attitude to each role. From this system flows a shared form of improv theater-as-therapy, and from that performance the person in the hot seat is able to draw exactly what they need, and leave behind the parts that don’t fit.

Where do I fall on the spectrum?

My brain tells me that the latter is the case... but there was a real power in that room, and every single person who sat at the front and had their story acted out received true, powerful value from the work. Those in the circle poured words and emotions out into the room which clearly came from far beyond their own brain and thoughts. It was truly meaningful and powerful stuff to witness.

I am not sure it matters the “source” of that power. I choose to believe there was real power in that room. In doing so, I believe the room has power. That power causes the brain to assign meaning, and Sarah has created a beautiful and challenging system of finding meaning surrounded by twenty caring and kind fellow humans who have chosen to spend an entire weekend in this grueling, tiring work.

Is that the same thing, in the end? Is it a different conclusion, or just a different understanding of how we got to the same conclusion?

I don’t know yet. But I’m curious, and I will be working with Sarah more in the future, and am eager to find out. She runs a Sacred Deathcare Certification Program focused purely on this side of caring for the dying — not practical concerns, but concerns of easing the passage of the human spirit from life into death with grace and beauty.

That program will begin in September, and underpin six months of my life and writing. I’m eager to approach it with a fully open mind and heart.

One thing worthy of note: I was one of only two men in the room that weekend. The other was in his 70s. Sarah and Diane both commented on how few men pursue this work.

Why is that? Is it societal? Biological? Why aren’t men interested in facing death openly and honestly, when so much of our culture pushes men to be stoic protectors? Isn’t facing these topics the clearest path to actual stoic strength in the face of loss?

If work like this sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to check out Sarah Kerr’s website, the page for Across the Veil Constellations, and her Centre for Sacred Deathcare.

I’ll be sharing more about my experience in her Sacred Deathcare Certification Program as I join the third cohort this Fall.

And you know what? It felt good to take a real trip, to cross a border, to explore a new city, to eat good food. It felt good to be moving through the world again.

As always you can stay in touch with me on any of these platforms.