On forethought of grief.
BUT FIRST, SOME EVENTS
Monday, September 23, 6-8:30pm, Hunter College Main Lobby (68th & Lexington), NYC: For NYC Climate Week, I’ll be staffing the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth to support a playthrough of Energetic. I think this will be fun!
Saturday, September 28, 8:45am, Rally National Land Conservation Conference, Providence: I’m sharing the stage with some incredible people. If you’re at this conference, please join us (and/or tell people you know who are going). If you’re not, but you live where some of my fellow speakers are working, please explore their work and see how you might get involved. They are stars!
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their time and attention.
*The death of someone loving and loved
*”Back-of-house” climate work, and the need for pacing and pauses between fierce encounters
*The rolling frontlines of grief and disaster
*A question and a practice to make time and space to let go
Last week, someone from my town posted a hospital and recovery fundraiser for someone else from my town: a beloved trans “mother, sister, cousin, auntie and protector” named Pepper. This week, I learned that Pepper has died, and that the fundraiser has switched over to covering the costs for her funeral.
The people who love Pepper had to shift so suddenly from fighting for her to grieving for her. Any one of us can be catapulted to the front lines of grief at any moment. I think it is right for those of us in the cities of the lost but beyond their circles to uphold and underpin those who feel their loss most deeply: covering the costs for a proper send-off, dropping off food, cutting them slack or picking up their shifts at work … all depending on how and how well we know them, as well as what we’re able to do. This in turn might be affected by whether we ourselves are grieving—for this loss or another—although I’ve found that even when I’m in a bad way myself, I can still accompany someone else in what they’re feeling, similar to how it can feel different to clean your own house, someone else’s house out of love, or someone else’s house out of obligation or for pay.
I write a lot about what I call “back-of-house” climate work—activism, organizing, action. This is partly because it’s my own inclination. (I don’t have what Sherrie Anne Andre (from Chapter 8) calls a warrior spirit—more of a potato spirit.) It’s also partly because I have seen people do the kind of organizing that’s built around an extinction burst—throwing everything they have into a big, fierce action, driving themselves hard, being cruel to one another, refusing to delegate, forgoing sleep, without all the upholding and the underpinning—and then it doesn’t get them where they need to go, and they have nothing left for the next encounter.
While no entrenched power will be dislodged without a fierce encounter, there is no one encounter that’s going to “fix it”—the situation is too big, too tangled. There are bound to be further fights, and further efforts to build something different out of the pieces we have. Here, between the lines, in the back of the house, is where we distribute tasks and nourishment.
“Am I not in a real place? Am I not on this earth?” Alicia Kennedy thought furiously between hurricanes. “To whom are the increasing number and severity of weather-related disasters simply possible and not imminent? Do they matter more than me and where I am? I refused to add the ‘context’ of my writing from the Caribbean. There is no reason to make people comfortable, to feel assured and pacified by the disaster being elsewhere. The pacification is the problem.” And Christina Sharpe writes, “When the climate is everything, and the catastrophe everywhere and also somewhere(s) very specific, there is also climate rage.” She describes the “distributed mourning” of living coincident with, affected by, embroiled in genocide and ecocide: how precision is our grievous debt to one another, whatever our degrees of proximity, responsibility, and loss.
Everywhere, and also somewhere(s) very specific. Hurricane season, fire season, rolling blackouts: the frontline moves. It moves through you, it chases you, it crosses you. In disaster conditions—fast, slow, rolling—it can happen that everybody’s grieving, that the front lines are everywhere. Caroline Contillo’s writing on living with disaster risk and repairing cultural knowledge, and the relations that make that possible, made me wonder if the same ways of being work with grief: expecting that it will come again, not pretending not to know what you know, relishing the moments between the lines. Kennedy writes about a meal she and her husband enjoyed after the hurricane; Contillo writes about raucous laughter with new friends while the ground is still shaking. The pleasures don’t make the risks or the grief go away or even hold them at bay. They simply exist in the world, in which, so far, we remain.
The places and times where we debrief and strategize; where we hold each other tight or give each other room to breathe; the quiet hours or even minutes that we fill with snorts and laughter and impressions of the dead when they were still alive; those places and times are also the world, and you belong there, too.
QUESTIONS:
When and where can you let go, whether that’s crying, resting, laughing, being fed…
Who (human and beyond) can help you make that time and place?
PRACTICE: If someone is helping you make the time and place to let go, thank them (whether that’s through a note or like… watering them). If they aren’t but you think they would or could, ask them. Also, if you’re able, send a little money to give Pepper a good farewell.
SHORT READINGS: Distributed throughout the newsletter!
LONG READING: Casey Plett, On Community
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.