Byl: You end Into Great Silence with a prayer “that what’s broken can be mended. That what’s shattered can be made whole. That what’s damaged can be repaired.” Throughout your work, there’s a palpable hopefulness, even in the face of extinction. How do you think about hope, or the lack of it?

Saulitis: I think about it all the time. It’s so fraught and so tricky. In Buddhist thought hope is considered dangerous because it’s not about what’s happening right now; it’s about the desire for some future outcome. And with metastatic cancer there’s a strange culture of hope that’s extremely difficult to navigate. On my most recent visit to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance a nurse tried to explain to my sister and me why my oncologist was resistant to answering questions about prognosis. Part of that is because no one knows. Cancer turns out to be as individual as the human body. Maybe there’s some statistical trend, but cancer has a measure of complete unpredictability, even to an oncologist. But my doctor wasn’t going to give out survival graphs or statistics, the nurse said, because she “didn’t want her patients to lose hope.”

In that moment at the doctor’s office, my sister said, “I’m sick of that kind of hope! I don’t believe in that anymore at all.” After my first treatment she’d been the one to tell me to stop being negative: “You’re cured, you’re cured!” But now she said that when you focus on the hope for a cure, you’re cheating yourself of a million smaller hopes that are actually attainable.

That’s the crux of it for me. Now, when I pray, it is for what I know is attainable. And my prayers are answered. [Laughs.] Whether I’ll be healed of this cancer feels out of my hands, almost irrelevant, in a strange way. I have to focus on what is right in front of me. What do I hope for today, for the next month? In this reprieve that I have now, when the chemotherapy seems to be working, I experience periods of well-being, but if I project too far into the future, it has no reality. And I refuse to live a tragic cancer story. Everyone’s lifetime is limited.

There’s stubbornness in that prayer that you read from the end of the book. The Chugach transients will be lost to this earth, and yet the Sound is a place where healing continually occurs. Yes, it’s a threatened place. Climate change and ocean acidification and loss of salmon are all grave threats. And yet at the center of that place is a palpable force of healing that is unstoppable. It just is.

The Eyak are a people of Prince William Sound whose language is now extinct in native speakers. Some of the last speakers of Eyak insisted that their language was embedded in the place, and as long as the place remained, their language would come back. [Voice breaks.] These people, whose language is gone, whose culture is gone, who have lived in that place for ten thousand years or more — they know what they are talking about. I believe there’s a truth in what they’re saying, something we don’t understand about how the earth heals, what losses mean to a place, how it’s all entwined. The Eyak fiercely believe that there will be people in the future who will come to know the land in such a way that they will re-create the Eyak language. It will arise again. Maybe it won’t be exactly the same. Maybe it will be in another form. But the land, the earth is the center.

The idea that Eyak can come back ties into what I said about cancer. I hate reading obituaries that say, “She died after a long battle with breast cancer.” So she lost her battle? No. I refuse that narrative. She died fully alive. That’s the idea behind “brokenness can be mended”: we are fully alive even in that moment when we die.