Long Shadows

I’ve been grieving. It’s all around and I can’t stop it. I don’t know when it started, maybe shortly after we had all the kids together on an idyllic, insulated trip that was in stark contrast to what came later.

Later, my college roommate lost her middle child to a car accident, killed on route to her junior year of college. Later, my own middle child had another mental breakdown, feeling things so deeply that the pain was visible, the crisis real. Later, I traveled back in time to relive what it means to be Armenian, for my grandfather to have survived the eradication of Armenians from Western Armenia by the Turks.

And there’s more. I don’t know how we go forth at times, unphased by the massive amounts of death and decline around us. Sure, we are coming out of a global pandemic that killed 7 million people with 1.1 million dead here in the U.S., haunting the air we’re left to breathe, filling the extra spaces we leave between us. Maybe that’s when it started.

During this time, friends share how they’ve been touched by it too. Rheumatoid Arthritis, ‘I can’t predict what’s happening to me – sometimes it’s my ankle, others it’s my sleep…’ she says. Or, ‘he was in his 70s, like a father to me, taken too soon,’ from another. And yet another month where we found reason to mutter ‘fuck cancer.’  Is midlife when death, diagnosis and decline hit us from all sides? Or is our own brightness falling as we move past high noon, as we lower in the sky, and cast long, distorted shadows of what once was.  

During this time, I watched one fourth of a coastal city consumed by storm waters. Over 4k confirmed dead and over 8k missing and thought to have been swept out to sea. Over 8k swept out to sea like ants washed from a flooded anthill. Only we are the ants. We are the ants being washed out. If it had been anywhere besides Libya, maybe more would have been said. And that was right after the Moroccan earthquake, 3k killed with 5k injured, a province outside of Marrakesh turned to rubble. Then the storm Otis picking up speed over the hot Pacific to surprise Acapulco. 

During this time, I don’t want to think about the wars raging. Ukraine is still fighting a year later with stories of people trying to hold their ground, hold their town, hold their skin. Gaza is awash in blood, escalating atrocities, words as weapons across a global stage, where the only thing clear is that it can’t go on as it is. And Artsakh’s Armenians under attack, on a much smaller stage, with Azerbaijan working hard to keep it that way, to get away with it, to avoid being held to account. We are so busy endlessly fighting each other for a small piece of this dying planet, for a scrap of resources to fuel our unsustainable ways.

During this time, I read stats about the state of human life*: 60% of mammals on earth are raised for food, 80% of deforestation is to clear land for livestock crops or grazing, 59% of all the land capable of growing crops is used for livestock, one third of all the fresh water that humans use goes to livestock, 70% of all antibiotics produced are used for livestock, weakening human effectiveness. We have turned our wild and wonderful planet into a supersized animal farm. Some say that the sooner we realize we can’t go on as we always have, the sooner we can dramatically adapt to ensure survival of the most people, plants, species of animals, and to conserve some livable planet for the future. Do we have it in us to dramatically adapt?

This grief is deep. Things I used to take for granted slip away – like air that was once safe to breathe, phrases like if you work hard, you will be rewarded, or even that this busy grind is what life is all about. Things ingrained, expectations I had for my life, things I thought mattered, no longer take hold. And during this time, I let them go, let them slip through my fingers, let them burn in the wildfires, let them blow in the hurricane winds.

During this time, somehow, miraculously, I am still an optimist. I haven’t lost that. I still love my big maple, still refill my bird feeder before the October snow. I still love my favorite humans fiercely, I still get up and write. Despite this season of decline, these long and distorted shadows, I still believe in humanity, that our species is worth saving.

I’ve been grieving, and maybe it’s the only way to survive during this time.