A brutal cleansing

On election morning, the first snow showed on the dry hills above town. Snow line is stark in the mountains, whiteness meets the dark forest head on. Here, this fresh dusting swept fall’s yellow brown with a quietude that felt insidious. 

I’m telling you: It’s been a year of hard grief. My younger brother, an evolutionary biologist and spider researcher died suddenly in June. A wildfire forced my wife and me to evacuate our cabin in July. My mother decided to quit dialysis in August. I stayed to walk the last rocky weeks of hospice with her. She died in September. I returned home to my teaching job the next week: three sections of English comp, seventy-two students. Now this.

Are you okay? people ask. I am not.

Loss brings a brutal cleansing. Objects you cherished or took for granted vanish, a half century of knick knacks tossed in a dumpster in the driveway; fir trees burned to stump holes on the trail by the lake. You’re left with a strange, singed kind of clarity.

Eight years ago, I was asked to write in response to a shocking election result. I decided to write about patriotism, despite fuck all. I had just written a book about the Civil Rights Movement. I’d met John Lewis and marched with heroes and she-roes of a mighty generation. I was heady with defiance. I quoted Woody Guthrie—my land, your land—and my faith in America felt powerful, nearly desperate. 

In his own response to the same election, one of my writing heroes, Kim Stafford, gently rebuffed me. He opposed patriotism, he said, and pledged himself to the matriarch. Mother Earth, not father country. At the time, I thought: Why not both? Now I know: Kim was right.

This land is not your land, not my land. This land was most assuredly not made for you and me. 

We are part of a larger whole, a complicated fabric. A web, you might say.

If you are a writer in proximity to death, you’ll be asked to write obituaries, and I’ve written my share. It’s a small contribution, something I can do better than prepare a casserole or sing in a choir or design a photo tribute or, god help me, organize finances. In June, I sat with my brother’s wife and kids in a New Jersey coffee shop, and we brainstormed what should be included: all that he’d accomplished, all that he cared about, his family, of course, his advanced degrees, his high school football championship. He’d published important papers and edited a prestigious journal. He’d contributed in small ways to the world’s understanding of spiders. He also managed his kids’ swim team and acted in community theater and played Santa each Christmas for disabled adults. He was easy-going, we wrote, humbly intelligent, a committed citizen, a devoted father. His was an everyday life, a deeply connected life. 

Spider webs seem so fragile—any reckless toddler can tear one down—but they are made of the strongest fibers on earth. 

Grief can paralyze you. All you can do is go through the motions. The day after the election, I couldn’t face the classroom. The writers we’ve been discussing—Martin Luther King Jr., Rachel Carson, Francisco Cantu, Elizabeth Rush—offer words of witness, warning, and wisdom. They will be comfort and inspiration in the days and months to come, but in the moment, I did not want inspiration, only connection.

I met with the students one-on-one, all seventy-two of them. I passed out Halloween candy and asked about their classes. They are so uncertain right now. I just wanted to look them in the eye and say this: You’re doing fine. Trust your voice. You’ll be okay.   

I don’t have the certainty I had eight years ago. I don’t have the same faith in ideas. I am sadder and more scared. But I am more grateful for connections, and I intend to nurture them. 

We’ll be okay. 

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ANA MARIA SPAGNA is the author of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (maybe) a Massacre, The Luckiest Scar on Earth, and other books. She lives in Stehekin, Washington.

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