Los Angeles got an all day rainstorm on Sunday, which is unusual for summer. It felt more like an east coast day: hot and soupy, thunder, lightning, air that retains all the moisture from the rain and intensifies the heat instead of cooling everything down.

Climatologist Edgar McGregor said, “Is this going to be a theme all winter? The rules are changing, after all. The Earth is not the same planet we modeled anymore. The excessive amount of heat in the east Pacific this year will play tricks on us. This isn’t “like the tropics.” The tropics are here. They have paid us a visit, and in the tropics, thunderstorms can happen spontaneously without much synoptic help aloft. As I finish writing this sentence, I hear more thunder. I am just shaking my head. I am just shaking my head.”

Because I miss East Coast summer rainstorms, Sunday’s all-day thunderstorm felt like a treat. But there’s also something unnerving about it all. The seasons are no longer reliable. People ask what L.A. seasons are typically like and I no longer have an answer for them. Certainty is being stripped away. I’m reminded of a speculative fiction novel my dad loved, called The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, in which the Earth slows its rotation, at first only by a few milliseconds, and then eventually by days and weeks, until half the Earth is fried under 24/7 sunlight while the other half freezes under constant darkness. Crops die and novel sicknesses emerge. Disoriented whales beach themselves and rot on the shore after the collapse of the magnetic poles that guide their migration. A portion of humanity forms a cult called “Real Timers,” who, unlike “Clock Timers,” live their lives according to the sun, sleeping in bunkers for weeks at a time during the days of darkness, and only emerging for work or socializing when the sun rises again.

The novel is the story of two teenagers trying to live through the end of the world, and it makes the reader confront the absurd tension of dreaming of a future while the world collapses and dies.

There’s a person I follow on YouTube who makes insightful videos about attachment styles, healing from heartbreak, developing a sense of agency, making difficult changes in life, etc. In one of her videos, she describes grief as the process of repairing your relationship to reality. She says that though grief involves many different feelings, it itself isn’t a feeling but a process. So when we lose something or someone, that process involves acknowledging what is true now, mourning what we wish were true—- the lost fantasy, and “readapting to reality as it is without losing sight of the needs that we once had fulfilled inside of the scenario that has now changed.” It’s most applicable to personal losses but I think it can also be relevant to the more global loss of certainty I’m talking about here.

I tend to think of mourning as the feeling of sadness, loss, deep melancholy, but it’s more accurately described as the expression of those feelings. The public display. The ritual. If mourning is either the feeling of loss or the public ritualized expression of it, and grief is the process of repairing our relationship to reality after a loss, then our society at large is not doing the best job of either climate grief OR climate mourning. And COVID grief and mourning seem non-existent.

I read several grief books after my dad died. The Grieving Brain talked about how your brain has to rewrite its neural pathways to adjust to the shocking absence of the person you lost. The author, Mary-Frances O’Connor, compares this to suddenly finding all of the furniture in your house rearranged or removed so that you can no longer navigate the rooms on autopilot.

I followed grief-themed accounts on Instagram. I joined a grief support group called Our House. I read a book called Self-Care For Grief, which a friend had given me. Each of these resources spoke of the danger of thinking of grief as work, or as a test you can excel at. You’re grieving no matter how much work you’re doing at it. I’m trying to square that with this understanding of grief as a process of repair. Maybe the process is happening whether or not we are expending any effort.

When it comes to the unfolding climate collapse and rising fascism, I don’t know if I’m doing a very good “job” of grieving. I feel the mourning all the time - for dying species of birds and trees, for collapsing ocean currents and the loss of rain. I mourn what seems like a fraying social fabric as more and more people gleefully embrace ChatGPT and other LLMs to write for them, think for them, therapize them, comfort them, research for them, make art for them, and even be their friends. I’m mourning the thousands of rare books shredded and fed to LLMs, the neighborhoods polluted by data centers, the Weelaunee Forest slashed to build Cop City. I mourn Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez and all immigrants killed by DHS or left to die in treacherous journeys across the desert at the southern border. As Ayesha A. Siddiqi says, “Every border implies the violence of its maintenance” and I mourn the people killed in that violence. I mourn the time that was stolen from Leqaa Kordia and Mahmoud Khalil, the time stolen from the Prairieland Defendants, the Minnesota 15, and all political prisoners, which really means all prisoners. I mourn Refaat Alareer, Hossam Shabbat, Anas Al-Sharif, Mariam Abu Dagga, Hind Rajab, and all the victims of U.S. imperialist /zionist massacres in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.

But grief? The repair process? The recognizing that this is reality now, and I need to rewrite my neural pathways to change my understanding of the world? That’s harder. I still want to believe that we aren’t losing everything, that the summers won’t keep getting hotter and species won’t keep dying and people won’t keep getting ground down by the machinery of racial capitalism. But I know that this desire means denying or delaying the repair of grief. Worse, it is a rejection of solidarity with the people who have been moving through that grief for decades, the peoples who have been moving through it for centuries. Black and Indigenous peoples have already experienced the violent, catastrophic end of the world that white people speculate about in sci-fi novels and films. They have had to live through the apocalypse that is commonly referred to as the founding of the United States.

We’ve heard about channeling grief into action. “Channel your climate grief into climate action.” Or, “Feel your grief and then fight for liberation.” But if grief is less of a feeling and more of a process of repair, maybe the grief is the action. In that sense, repairing our understanding of reality means choosing to act in a way that acknowledges what has happened, without denial or fantasy indulgence. One of the stages of grief, according to Elizabeth Kubler Ross, is acceptance. While acceptance can mean a lot of things that I wouldn’t want to encourage as a response to fascism — like “to endure without protest or reaction” or “to regard as proper, normal or inevitable”— the word also means “to recognize as true.”

If we recognize all of these alarming and heartbreaking changes to our world to be true, and we also recognize that these changes are contrary to our values, our grief over these changes, as a process of repair, can mean living our values, preparing for the coming disasters, helping people.

I read this essay, Indifference Engines, last week by Artie Vierkant of the Death Panel podcast. In his concluding paragraph, he says, “AI’s defenders likely believe they can weather the storm of public opinion, as capital is so used to doing, but we should expect and intend opposition to grow much more extreme as the negative impacts of AI become more clear to more of us. The fact that massive opposition has emerged to these indifference engines should not surprise us, but it should also motivate us to focus that energy in liberatory directions. As a novel productive capacity growing at an alarming rate despite immense public disdain for the technology, part of the lesson here is how we are all forced over and over again to accept new conditions of death and immiseration as they emerge until such a time as that immiseration can be made to seemingly fade into the background noise of polite society. While our society may contain a vast concatenation of death machines of varying intensities, that does not mean we should oblige another death machine being turned on. We can dream instead of a world where the datacenters are torn down and forests grow in their wake.”

In a moment of synchronicity, I read this essay this week: “We made a COVID-19 Memorial in the ashes of a Joshua Tree forest.” In the essay, Miles W. Griffis says, “In planting the yuccas, I have a way to address both my climate and COVID-19 grief. The massive burn scar, like many other climate-driven disasters around the world, is an unintentional memorial to climate change, made by the phenomenon itself. And by naming our saplings after people we’d lost to Long COVID and related diseases, the memorial became a living remembrance of our polycrisis. I hoped the yuccas would grow tall and wild-armed.”