Floods, Tumors, and The Cat
I found out Fran had cancer the day after the floods, on the morning wildfire smoke settled in the Champlain valley and tinted gray clouds orange. The day that the changing climate finally lost any remaining abstraction and mourning for the world as I knew it began. Fran’s cancer and climate collapse became one Apocalypse. Everything ended at once. Suddenly it didn’t matter if I went to work, what I had for lunch, whether or not the beetles ate my sunflowers.
When I first heard that Fran had cancer, I thought it was selfish to be so sad. Fran wasn’t even my best friend, and I wasn’t hers. I thought hard and counted the number of times we had hung out; it wasn’t that many. The amount of sadness you can feel when someone’s sick is directly proportional to how well you know them or the number of times you were together, I figured, and my ratio was off.
Yet it seemed like I had been her friend for years since Alice, my roommate in Brooklyn and Fran’s roommate from college, told stories about Fran and told me what happened with the guy she was seeing and showed me Fran’s Twitter videos and we laughed together on the couch and we both talked about how proud we were of her and how extraordinary she is and Alice told me where Fran went to trivia on our cold walk back to the train from a screening of Little Women and suggested that we should start going too. Alice invited me to Fran’s improv show in Midtown and I decided to go last-minute, jogged to make the train on time so I’d get there when the theater’s doors opened; Fran’s so funny that I figured there would be a line. There wasn’t, and so I had time to stop at concessions for a drink and peanut M&Ms which Alice and I shared while we watched Fran steal the show. We all rode the M back to Brooklyn. Fran got off at Hewes Street and Alice and I stayed on until Central Ave. The whole walk home we talked about the scenes we liked best, repeating one of Fran’s lines over and over again, laughing more every time and passing what was left of the bag of M&Ms between us. Alice and Fran went to parties together and I put flowers in a vase for them to bring as a housewarming gift while Alice got ready and Fran sat on the couch. I joined in on their conversations as if I knew who they were talking about. Fran came with us to the dark and sticky bar around the corner after I sent in my grad school applications, and she told me about what Colorado was like since she was from Wyoming, about the bears that came to her back door, about the time the cat slipped out, and about the weird motel she and Alice stayed in in Boulder when they were driving to Fran’s parents’ house.
When I explained all this to Sharon the Therapist, she told me I had a fucked up and incorrect definition of selfishness; she said it’s compassionate to feel so deeply for other humans. When you get to know somebody through the eyes of the people who love them, you skip over everything else and land right at love, too, which evidently sets you up for more grief later.
In the Last of Us, which I had watched the night before I found out, Pedro Pascal’s daughter gets shot by a jumpy officer the night the world starts to end. She dies for no good reason in the first episode just as the panic of infections, crashing planes, blockaded highways, and collective desperation sets in, the collective heart pounding loud enough to suppress the panic and claustrophobia while Pedro Pascal and his brother argue about where they could possibly drive to escape what landed like a fishing net over the whole world all at once. Devastation becomes all-consuming. Grief, like tree roots growing deep within mycelial networks, compels us toward connection. And yet at our most ravaged, when the personal collapse is nested in the collapse of everything we took for granted, grief swells and distorts. Somehow all you want is the plate of scrambled eggs and buttered toast your mom made when you were a kid, or for a friend to take you to the shitty bar around the corner for a beer, to laugh while someone recites bad jokes then fall asleep on the porch, to check on the tomatoes growing in your backyard when you wake up.
At the same time, everything that used to soothe you becomes shaky and unreliable at best, deceptive and hostile at worst. Eggs are hard to come by, the bar is flooded, you evacuate your house and the tomatoes are ruined by hailstorms. They spent the whole summer growing but were still green when the end came. There was no time for red - it wasn’t fair. The flood comes after you’ve finally bought the velvet couch that’s big enough to hold a friend staying the night. It was expensive and FEMA won’t cover the cost of replacing it. In some ways one rope tugs the other; I always expected the personal to steady me as the world ended on a geologic scale. And if my own personal world ended, the world outside would anchor me.
In another way altogether it doesn’t even matter. It’s no use making sense of ropes and anchors; it’s just a fucking metaphor. The actual question is why does Fran have cancer while flood waters crash through and claim the places I love? Why does the smoke from Western wildfires choke out the air in Vermont while Fran’s in surgery? How did the floods give Fran inoperable eye cancer? Why did Fran’s inoperable eye cancer cause the floods? Why does Fatuma farm in a respirator in Denver? Why does Betsy hold her breath to see if the rains will come on time in Umarkhed? How many times can one body endure the end of worlds? That’s what I mean.
And yet.
And yet, amidst the molding apartments and spoiled crops, as you go in for surgery on a tumor that’s inoperable, all I can think about is how I want to watch your cat while you’re at the hospital. She’s small, old, silky, black, and completely deaf, and you named her after the patron saint of eye diseases because it was funny but also because it might help. Who are you to say it won’t? She’ll sit on the couch because that’s as far as you can make it when you come back home, and a cat’s instinct is, despite everything, to stay close to their person. I want to insist you don’t push it. Lay down. I want to be gentle and bring you something plain to eat - a plate of scrambled eggs and buttered toast. I want to fill the ice pack. I want to keep the apartment quiet, pull the curtains halfway so the light isn’t so bright. Brush the cat, trim her claws, refill her water bowl.
Because despite everything, Lucy the cat suddenly matters more than anything in the world. I need Lucy the cat to matter. Because if she doesn’t, then why bother mourning the climate crisis at all? When we mourn the climate crisis, when we remove abstraction and think about what it really means for the climate to change, I suspect we’re actually mourning Lucy the cat. We’re mourning her mattering.
Because while the two types of grief are nested - the personal exists within the context of the climate - they aren’t the same thing. True, Fran’s cancer is technically inoperable, and so is the climate crisis. Life has never lasted. Sure. But people got cancer before the fires and floods. And the fires and floods had started before Fran got cancer. The truth is that they’re different. One slow, sustained, and geologic, the other swift, immediate, and intimate. Pedro Pascal endures two separate forms of grief whether he realizes it or not. The Apocalypse Grief demands he put the Human Grief aside; there’s no time. Keep running. And so they blur, they start to look like the same thing until you realize at the end that they’ve been getting hopelessly tangled this whole time.
So what happens when we finally parse the grief? When we hold in each hand the separate spaces that make us human? When we stop fussing with the mathematics of grief and let ourselves love harder that which is falling apart right in front of us? When we mourn fully the world as we knew it and the mattering of Lucy the cat? When both matter, it seems, the world changes.
In the context of a collapsing climate, it’s not important how my tomatoes are doing; they’ll do as the weather tells them. But I look outside every day and for now they’re still growing, still ripening, nearly red. Volunteer coneflowers grow by the garage. A bumblebee nestles itself deep in the foxglove blooms. I cry on the porch because if I don’t do it now it will just come harder later, and as I pull myself together my partner comes home holding a couple of still-cold beers from the grocery store. The orange jumpsuit on the small bird in the lilac bush regains its ability to restore me. The cat meows in the window, waiting for me to come inside.
