The view from the King Kam, looking toward the Royal Kona. June 2026.
This is my second time here. The last time I was here, we arrived the last day of the worst year of my life, in which I lost my son Owen at full term unexpectedly and still with no explanation. The day before our arrival, I learned I was newly pregnant (a little cluster of cells that would become Rosie).
And so I spent our last Hawaiian vacation abstaining from fancy cocktails, carefully monitoring my mercury intake with a handy fish chart, daydreaming, dreading.
The beauty of the place was a great distraction and made me (and my problems) feel insignificant. When I am here, I feel like a blip. I have this feeling that not only I, an especially pasty midwesterner, shouldn’t be here, but also that maybe modern civilization shouldn’t be here at all.
Kailua-Kona town feels realer than the resort towns up the coast. Both times, we’ve stayed in town for the variety and convenience, but it is not postcard Hawaii. There’s a visible unhoused presence, the buildings are weathered, it’s traffic-y, and just a bit rough around the edges in a way that I was not expecting the first time I was here.
It’s where the locals actually live, and there’s a lot to be said for immersing ourselves here rather than, say, Waikoloa. But sometimes the buildings and roads—all the things that make my own visit possible—feel like a blight on the landscape.
A family wedding has brought us back here, now with 2-year-old Rosie and 7-month-old Alec. Dan’s cousin, who lives in Hilo and was born and raised here, is getting married in Naalehu down the coast this weekend. Coming all this way with two tiny humans was really a feat, and we can’t stop patting ourselves on the back every five minutes for having pulled it off.
At the Royal Kona on my earlier trip.
I’m writing this from the balcony of the King Kam while Alec naps and Rosie resists napping. Looking out over the bay, I can see the ship-shaped Royal Kona, where we last stayed, and I imagine “past me” on that balcony opposite me, ruminating over what was fresh pain that feels like a familiar friend to me now.
In the time that spans between then and now, I lost my brother Nathan and my dad, both beloved, both suddenly and unexpectedly. Rosie was born. Alec was born. My mom’s health has deteriorated with an alarming rapidity this year, and I am nervous what may happen these next few months.
The dizzying succession of highs and lows has me anxious in general, and so I take an SSRI now, see a therapist, and acknowledge what little control any of us truly have over our own lives and the lives of those we love.
And yet, here I am back in this beautiful, complicated place that looks pretty much as I left it, which is a bit of a mind fuck, frankly. But even that’s not true, because this place is literally an active volcano and is some of the newest land on earth, and is even now ever-changing. I’ve once again got that feeling of being a blip. A speck.
My joys and my misfortunes are nothing in the grand scheme of planetary existence. It’s humbling and fills me with both loneliness and a bit of self-loathing for even trying to bring my bullshit to a place like this. But I carry my grief with me everywhere I go, even the beautiful places.
