What Just Happened? November 2024
Shadows of grief, hope and survival | What I’m writing | What I’m “reading”
November is the kind of month that smiles, punches you in the face, and leaves you for dead.
The world is grey, dark, and wet, the glory of summer now turned to nature’s refuse, which fills the yard, the gutters, and the streets with leaves that demand raking, but instead sit, soaking up the rain. November comes to remind us that winter is coming (or here), and spring is a very long way away, nature’s most sincere invitation to longing and grief.
In my life, I’ve been fortunate to attend only six funerals, at least that I can recall (my condolences to those passed who may go unnamed). When I was 9 and away at summer camp, my great aunt Alice (Marjorie’s sister-in-law) died foraging for mushrooms – and not by poisoning! We always assumed she had one too many gin martinis at lunch. Her autopsy suggested she had bent over to pick a particularly lush chanterelle and tumbled head-first down a 60-foot slope. Her lifeless body was discovered a few days later. The next summer, the family gathered for a memorial service, where I sang and played the lyre with her sister Eva, who played viola. Her death was sad, but in her 80s, not altogether unexpected.
When I was 11, my kindergarten teacher, Astrid Barnes, died suddenly of a heart attack. She was an institution within my small Waldorf school in Harlemville, NY, known for picking disobedient children up by their ears to put them on shelves for timeouts, allegations that were feared, though never confirmed. She had cared for nearly three decades of kindergarteners and preschool children, and the school’s auditorium was standing room only. I can still remember the smell of incense wafting from the censers.
So this is what death smells like, I thought.
At 17, I lost my grandmother, Marjorie (link). At her memorial service, I gave my first informal eulogy as I remembered to the community that survived her how much she had meant to me. Again, at 92 years old, we mourned her death. But my mother had been warning me that “this Christmas could be grandma’s last” for nearly a decade. I couldn’t very well be surprised.
My grandmother's death
I wrote my college application essay about what my relationship with my grandmother meant to me and what it was like to spend time caring for her in the last days of her life. I sat for hours in the school library typing this essay, tears streaming down my face as I tried to describe what it felt like to be so grateful and so grief-stricken at the same …
At 20, my Aunt Linda was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which turned out to be stage 4 brain cancer. Despite attempts to treat her, she ultimately died as a result of a series of small accidents and failures to resuscitate her in time — a broken rib punctured a lung, which stopped her heart.
Our close family gathered to say goodbye before taking her off life support. I remember so vividly the sound of her heart rate monitor and respirator, the peaceful look on her face, knowing life was still inside her even though her essence was gone. I watched my Grandmother Eleanor, her mother, hold Linda’s hand and say goodbye. I marveled at the strength of will required to remain composed when faced with the death of your own child. Linda was just 54.
Two years later, Eleanor would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. After successfully beating back cancer in her 60s to survive another two decades, she decided ovarian cancer would be her last hurrah. She sorted her life’s possessions, making dedicated piles for each of her grandchildren, donating anything she thought someone wouldn’t want. She planned her funeral and the reception to follow — she even wrote a check to cover the cost. She checked herself into hospice and a month later, she was almost ready to go. I arrived just in time to hear her last faint murmurs to my father. I wondered at how quickly she had gone from alive to dead, how much the will to live affects a person’s quality of life. She seemed to have so much choice in the matter. I hoped I would get the chance to die like that, having done everything I felt called to do in this life with conviction, before emphatically throwing in the towel.
After a dry spell of more than a decade, death came again, more distant this time. My husband’s father’s second cousin — his third cousin once removed — died somewhat suddenly. I had only met Cousin Norton a few times at large family gatherings, but I had come to believe that invitations to weddings and funerals should be accepted whenever possible and nothing is more important than showing up. So we made the trip to Virginia for his memorial service and the burial of his cremated remains.
My husband and I had found out we were pregnant just six weeks earlier, information we chose to withhold from the family despite our proximity. Cousin Norton surely would have rejoiced at the news, but it didn’t feel right to risk diverting attention from his life’s celebration. And yet, having a new unborn life inside my body while paying our respects to one that had just ended left me with a strange, profound appreciation for the circle of life. Animals of every species are always being born and dying. As humans, we seem to suffer for our attachment to the idea that a life should go on forever when the body refuses to cooperate.
Six months ago, my father-in-law, Will, was admitted to the hospital with severe, unexplained back pain, and pain and numbness in his feet. Over the course of several weeks, doctors across three hospitals and two states tried to diagnose what ailed him as his symptoms worsened and his function decreased. After ruling out tick-borne illnesses and lymphoma, they arrived at a strange diagnosis only four other people in the world had ever received — a full-system herpes simplex infection that had invaded his central nervous system, brain, eyes, and lower digestive tract.
Watching a virus eat away at someone’s body and brain is the stuff of zombie apocalypse. To watch it happen before your eyes makes you question your own sanity. Four months after he had walked into the hospital, he was blind, unable to walk, unable to swallow, and in an almost perpetual state of hallucination or delirious confusion. Unable to swallow, he’s fed from a feeding tube to his stomach three times a day. After being on antivirals for almost five months, his liver enzymes had grown dangerously high, and he suffered from frequent UTIs, so it was impossible to know if his diminished cognitive state was the result of the virus itself, or its treatment.
I had only known Will for four years when he grew ill, but I had grown to love him as one of the kindest and gentlest souls I had ever met. He baked pies and bought great Christmas presents. He babysat our children, and knew how to put my son to bed. He took long walks in the woods to forage mushrooms, tended his garden, and was otherwise incredibly helpful and handy. When my husband and I decided we wanted to build a cordwood house, he came with us to the five-day construction workshop and immediately began stockpiling cordwood logs for our project. When we gave up on the cordwood house and bought a house instead, he single-handedly installed a new bathroom sink.
Something happens inside a family when someone grows terribly ill. Like antibodies rising to face a foreign pathogen, we surge — we are on alert, in active communication. We spend time together, both because a person who was once caring for others is no longer able to do so, and because their illness creates turbulence — anxiety, fear, grief, and complexity — that demands to be tended to. Is this person in the process of surviving their illness? Or are they dying? Sometimes there is no way to know. But we rise to meet it just the same.
When my Aunt Linda was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, we knew she was unlikely to survive the year. When she died six months later, we were surprised and saddened that the time had been so short, but we had had time to prepare ourselves emotionally for her loss. In the case of my father-in-law, his diagnosis is so unusual, there is no prognosis. It is impossible to know where he is on the spectrum of surviving and dying.
Holding this kind of uncertainty for a period of six months is unimaginably challenging, especially for his wife and children. It requires a near Buddhist state of surrender to accept simultaneously that this person you love could at some point recover and could also, slowly, over time, only get worse. There is no “hope” in it, only acceptance of what is right in front of you. By some bizarrely ordained provenance, Will’s wife is an Episcopal priest, perhaps the only vocation on earth that prepares a person for such an attitude towards life and death. Still, six months of this, even for the most spiritually astute, verges on purgatory.
Holidays take on heightened significance the first time a loved one is absent. Some years ago, a friend and coach offered me the idea that grief is love with no place to go. One way to keep grief from streaming out of your eyeballs is to bake it into a pie or smash it into a dish of mashed potatoes. In my family, food is love, especially on Thanksgiving. I spent the Thanksgiving after my Aunt Linda’s death with my uncle — her widower — and my three cousins. Linda had always been the anchor of big family celebrations, and in her absence, the extended family was too burdened by grief to gather. Unable to let myself wallow in it, I decided to fill her shoes on the smallest scale and captain my first Thanksgiving meal. Together, my cousin Jody and I cooked enough food for a dozen people while my uncle grilled the turkey and the five of us sat down to eat a meal prepared with both love and grief.
Every August, my in-laws rent a house in Rhode Island where their two children, spouses, and four grandchildren spend a week together, going to the beach, eating and playing outdoors. Will always makes a spaghetti pie for our arrival dinner, and hauls an enormous sun umbrella, beach chairs, and boogie boards in the back of his van. Despite his condition — hospital-bound and delirious — the rest of us decided we should still make the trip. We spent only a few days instead of our typical seven, but even still, Will’s absence was overwhelming. The weather seemed to reflect the mood — cloudy with a chance of rain — which made it easy to spend the days hidden away inside with a book.
I made it to the beach only once in the time we were there. The sky was dark and cloudy, threatening rain. My body was still heavy with the grief of the miscarriage I had experienced just four months before. Despite the weather, the ocean called to me. Almost ceremonially, I entered the water with a profound awareness of the vastness and volatility of the water that surrounded me. I walked until the water lapped at my chest, and then drew my knees upwards as I relaxed my head backwards into the waves. I felt the weight of my body meet the strength of the ocean as it — she? — buoyed me upwards. I felt infinitesimally small and whole at the same time. The grief in my body seemed to seep through my pores, a strange osmosis, as the waves rocked me gently to and fro.
It will be okay, I thought. Someday, you will be okay again.
This Thanksgiving, we also felt Will’s absence deeply. And yet we gathered, to hold one another steady in the storm we had weathered for the last six months. This Saturday, Will turned 78. Unable to eat, he was denied the pleasure of cake, but we sang to him anyway, in hopes that he would remember. Will is nearly twice my present age, and I wonder how I will feel about dying once I have lived my present lifespan a second time. Will I be ready to pack up my worldly possessions and march into hospice like Eleanor? Or will I hang on into my 90s, like Marjorie, in hopes of more time with my future grandchildren? Perhaps I will not be so lucky, and I will succumb suddenly to an unfortunate foraging accident, or, too young, to a heart attack or cancer. For my son’s sake, I hope that I have more than 15 years left to live.
November offers a pointed reminder that we are all somewhere between dying and surviving, though how close or how far we are away from death is ultimately unknown. Whether I embrace it like an old friend or shun it like a fearsome beast, I know it will come for me, one way or the other. And yet this is the font from which gratitude flows: that I have been granted this day under this glorious sky to feel the heat of this sun, the kiss of those lips, the taste of this rich food one more time. It’s impossible to know what tomorrow will bring. Today, the best I can do is sow love and harvest gratitude.
This month at Fetch Me Home…
Election season in America punctuates this funereal season, as American democracy confronts its own death-survival paradox. America seems to have chosen a strange course of chemotherapy that will leave it fundamentally changed. Will Donald Trump kill American democracy? Or will it survive in some transformed state?
This month, I gave voice to a deep wrenching desire for women to be granted a greater part in the shaping and making of the future, which represents my first attempt at the emo-humorism genre (h/t @Alex dobrenko).
PLEASE... let her SPEAK!
I know that there are a great many things demanding your anxiety and attention today. And it may be that today this is just Too Much™. I get it, y’all. But getting this question sorted is essential to the bigger questions we have to ask and answer to right-size our society. Regardless of what happens today, this week, next month, or next year, we’ve got…
Surrounded by so many expressions of both grief and rage, my election post-mortem took me in a different, unexpected direction. With awareness that effective democracy can take many forms, it seems important to consider whether the political technology America adopted 250 years ago can withstand the strains of the 21st century.
We need new political technology
It’s the 8-year anniversary of the day after “The Morning After” Donald Trump was elected the first time. Maybe it’s finally time to stop “fighting” and start thinking in a different direction.
In other news, the latest installment of A Family Spy Story dives into my grandfather, Gordon’s, personal history to investigate his path to Communism. This story includes somewhat salacious revelations for paid subscribers only, so consider becoming a paid subscriber to follow the full story.
Who is the real Gordon Switz?
I never knew my grandfather, Robert Gordon Switz. He died in 1951, thirty-five years before I was born, of a brain aneurysm — here one day, gone the next. My mother was only four. My grandmother, Marjorie, ever the pragmatist, greeted his death with relief and resilience. Two years later, she remarried, to a man who would accompany her into old age.
At the beginning of the month, I fully weaned my son, a heartbreaking and necessary transformation for both of us. I’m grateful to have completed this essential part of mothering and glad to have found the words to share the experience.
In Other News…
This month, I marveled at the beautiful correspondence of
and , who chose to publish their exchange on the prospects for system change in America. Elle argues for capitalist-based ideas of cooperatives and collective ownership while Peter argues for practical anarchy. I had always understood anarchy to mean chaos and I appreciated the provocations Peter offered in response to Elle’s honest questions, which helped me see that “anarchy” is a word that comes burdened with negative meaning, making it a struggle for it to effectively hold all the positive intentions the “anarchy movement” intends. And yet I also found myself thinking that perhaps I am more of an anarchist than I would have thought, as I appreciate the ways in which community self-determination may well be the best promise for human society on planet earth.
Reading Elle and Peter’s letters left me nostalgic for my first year of courtship with my husband and I, during which we exchanged weekly transatlantic letters as our feelings for one another deepened in the early months of knowing one another. (Perhaps those letters will one day be published here?) Is there someone in the world interested in a sustained correspondence on complex topics of public interest and concern? If you exist, please reach out!
In the days before the election, Ezra interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy about the “New Right’s” plans for America. I refused to listen before the election results were in, but after Trump’s victory, I wanted to more fully understand Ramaswamy’s strategic outlook, to appreciate the transformation facing the United States in the hands of the incoming administration. There’s a lot that Ramaswamy doesn’t say, and in some respects, he seems to be arguing for the belief that a greater degree of anarchy would outperform existing systems of institutional control. He speaks often of the need to provide greater support to “American workers,” populist rhetoric that was notably missing from the Harris campaign. But it’s rare that Democrats spend time listening to Trump’s allies, if they don’t have to, but this conversation is worth a listen.
In a similar vein, Faiz Shakir spoke with Klein about why Democrats seem to ignore the success of economic populism. Shakir is Bernie Sanders’ former campaign director and the de facto leader of the “anti-capitalist” Left. A lot of the ideas Klein and Shakir explore are ones I’ve thought a lot about, and may even write more about here in the coming weeks. But as the political manager of the OG populist, Shakir has wisdom that many of us need to hear.
Anne Applebaum, a scholar on authoritarianism, speaks with Klein to unpack the implications of an increasingly authoritarian administration. It seems important, when dealing with authoritarians to listen to what they aren’t saying (who will be harmed in the making of this new kind of government); but what they are expressing (the feeling we have that what we’re doing isn’t working). Listen to Applebaum’s interview before Ramaswamy’s for additional perspective on his rhetoric.
Side note: If you’ve experienced a Saturn Return, you might be intrigued to know that the United States marks its Pluto Return this year. Empires don’t often survive into their 250th year without undergoing profound transformation. Buckle up!
If you’re in need of a high-quality binge, listen to The Good Whale, the latest from Serial Productions.
If you’re filled with rage about Trump winning the election, consider listening to the Ramaswamy interview, above, and then reading this Open Secrets essay by Dianne Moritz.
Set aside for a moment that Trump doesn’t actually offer practical solutions to most of the problems facing many Americans, but he does come with rhetoric that drips with outrage and defiance of the status quo. Millions of people in America are suffering under the tyranny of extractive capitalism. And they will elect anyone courageous enough to vehemently promise to upend the status quo in their favor, whether that person keeps their promises or not.
We are creatures with economic incentives and vulnerable psyches making emotional choices in a political world. One thing we can do without reproach is love one another with big, wild, open hearts. We can also demand amd build systems that do a better job of supporting more people in living lives of joy and gladness, rather than stress and suffering.