Excerpt: The Antarctican Revisited

For a while I simply held her silently while her friends stood, silent and cautious, at the threshold of the galley, and then all at once they ran in, prying me away from her. I didn't protest. They didn't allow me back in the kitchen but I knew they were cleaning up the pools of blood and inspecting my mother's body for signs of life. It takes a lot of blood to bleed to death.

I took a hot shower that night and knew I would not sleep.

Kat and the other women were cautious around me now. There was really no way to know what to say. I had just been covered in my own mother's blood and been too stupid and slow to get the help she needed to live. They knew I felt guilty and that I mourned incredibly and that my mother's body was wrapped up in sheets and plastic and propped up in the storage freezer off the galley and would be until this storm stopped, at which point a few of us would take a helicopter out to McMurdo with my mom's body not even trying to thaw itself out, and later I would fly home alone while her empty corpse sat in the cargo hold of an enormous plane.