… to arrive at hope, you must pass through the fear that hope will not arrive. You must get lost in the dark wood, because when and if you come out the other side, only then will you emerge with the will to act.
– Elizabeth Rush
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
– Fredrick Nietzsche
Attempt to Comfort My Children, Part I
As I was tucking him into bed one night, my son asked, “If a tsunami came to the Back Cove, would it reach our house?”
“I don’t think so.”
And then, “How hot will the sun get with climate change?”
I paused, unprepared. This was the first time I’d faced these questions as a mother. My son was eight. On instinct I snuggled into bed next to him to tell him what my parents would have told me. “The sun won’t get too hot. The water won’t reach our house.” I reassured him we were safe and we would survive.
I didn’t know if it was true, but back then we were reading books about other worlds—Harry Potter, The Lifters, The Mysterious Benedict Society. Magic was always a possibility. I scratched his back and kissed him goodnight.
Two years later, when he was in fourth grade, my son went to a birthday party where the boys had a massive Nerf war, ate pizza and cake, and then watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He came home exhausted and weary. Every time he tried to sleep, the movie replayed in his mind. Was it the children stolen from their families? The cult that believed in human sacrifice? The missing stone that was supposed to save humanity? He couldn’t tell me what frightened him most, but it went on for months. The promises, books, and back scratches didn’t work. He’d close his eyes and imagine catastrophe.
During his yearly check up with the pediatrician, I brought up the movie and the sleep and the fear. Our doctor was a wise woman who had three children of her own. She taught my son a soothing meditation. It had something to do with color and light and the movie screen inside his head. She instructed him to do the meditation each night before bed.
Fight to Save the World
Around the time of my son’s sleeplessness, I read a quote by nature writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore. She said, “The fact that we are losing songbirds for something I don’t care about like running shoes makes me sick. And yet I still go to the store and buy running shoes.” I contemplated this idea for several semesters with my students: if we all know how horrible climate change is, why aren’t we doing anything about it? I had been composting and recycling for years. I shopped at consignment stores. We had a vegetable garden and a pollinator-friendly yard. But none of it seemed like enough. I was on a track I couldn’t get off—filling the minivan with gas; driving to soccer, to lacrosse, to school; buying plastic lunch baggies and filling them with snacks; paying the oil bill, the gas bill, the electric bill. What choice did I have?
As a mother, I wanted to fix the world for my three children. I wanted the carbon sequestered and the parts per billion to be back down to 350. But I also knew that I couldn’t ride my bicycle everywhere without making myself and my family crazy. I didn’t have enough land or knowledge to grow all our own food. I couldn’t afford to buy only local. I was caught inside knowing what was right, but having to do things I knew were wrong.
Desperate to make a difference for my children, I started a Green Club at the elementary school. My son and my daughter and six other kids met on Wednesday afternoons to tromp through the woods, make art from the contents of the recycling bins, and write poems about trees. I wrote letters to congress, brought the kids to protests. The group wanted to replace the plastic spork packets in their school cafeteria with reusable metal silverware. They wanted to save the dolphins and the turtles. I helped them raise money and present their idea to the parent-teacher organization. When the PTO agreed to donate money, I worked with Food Services to purchase the metal silverware, leaving enough in the budget for staff to be paid for washing and sorting. I trained cafeteria aids to help students put their silverware into soapy buckets instead of trash cans. I was exhausted, but didn’t know how to stop.
Getting Lost
Then the pandemic swallowed us. And grief swallowed me. As schools and businesses closed, melanoma spread into my father’s spinal cord and brain. He was dying, and the old version of life—the one where I thought I could save the world—slipped from my fingers. I traveled from Maine to my family home in Buffalo to cook my dad’s favorite foods and drive him to radiation. My parents, my sisters, our husbands, and the children were all together under one roof. I knew but did not understand these would be the last days my family felt whole. My children had been sent home from school indefinitely and we were losing my father, but we were somehow able to laugh, to drink wine, to sing Kenny Rogers as we did the dishes. Every gambler knows that that secret to survivin’ is knowin’ what to throw away and knowin’ what to keep.
When my father was gone, my husband and I brought our children back to Maine, to the shreds of our life: working remotely, cooking, going on long walks, following Covid cases, learning how to zoom, and helping the kids with homework. I could have planned to meet the Green Club outdoors in a nearby park. I could have continued the fight to save the world, but I was too exhausted and sad to get up and inspire children. What did it matter about the planet if we were all going to lose each other in the end? I couldn’t quite name what I was experiencing—grief, for sure, but it also felt like there was an amorphous tumor made of air and anxiety and fear blooming on top of my heart.
Attempt to Comfort My Children, Part II
In the winter of 2021, my daughter told me she was scared every night before bed. She was 12 and I didn’t think she was afraid of anything.
“What are you scared of?” I asked.
She hid her face in pillows. “That movie,” she explained. “The one about space and climate change.”
A year before, we had watched The Midnight Sky, a futuristic film where Earth becomes unlivable and everyone leaves for space. One man and one child are left behind. When it was over, my daughter was devastated. “Please don’t ever let me watch a movie like that again,” she begged.
“You still think about that movie?”
“Every night.”
I sat on the edge of her bed, remembering when my own parents sat on my bed. What did they say when I was scared? “What’s the scariest thing about that movie?” I asked. “Is it the little girl left behind without her family?”
“No,” she said. “It’s the fact that there’s nothing left. That Earth is changed so much we can’t live here and we have to go to Mars.” A wobbly layer of tears formed over her blue eyes.
“I don’t want to go to Mars, either,” I told her. “Do you know what kind of movie that is?”
The tears broke from their holding pattern and slid down her freckled cheeks.
“It’s called an apocalyptic movie.” I explained that the apocalypse is the end of the world. I told her that not having an earth is probably the scariest thing a human could imagine. “This is what we do when we’re scared; we make stories.”
“But it’s not just a story,” she said.
I opened my mouth to say something soothing. Don’t be silly. You’re safe. Everything will be just fine. But the scripts my parents used to quell my fears about killer bees from Africa or the Cranberry Lady hiding in our crawlspace didn’t apply. Even the script I used with my son when he was in second grade didn’t seem to apply anymore. It was the middle of a pandemic. Schools were operating on hybrid schedules. Masks were covering faces in public. My daughter was already living through something we never thought was possible.
“This could happen,” she continued. “I don’t want to go to space. I want to stay here. Earth is beautiful, and no one is doing anything about it.”
There it was. The same refrain I had asked my students about for years. If we know better, why don’t we act?
Soon my son, now 14, wandered into my daughter’s room. “I used to worry about climate change all the time,” he admitted. He’d come a long way since his second-grade tsunami fears. “But now I just look at it this way: we’re born to die. I may as well have as much fun as I can while I’m here.” He shrugged and plopped down on his sister’s bean bag.
This is exactly what my father would have said. One of his mantras was: “We’re not here for a long time. We’re here for a good time.” It used to make me laugh, but thinking of those words after he was gone only reminded me that he died too soon and that we never have enough time with each other.
My daughter rolled her eyes, disregarding her brother. She explained that she wanted to do something and not just stand and scream at protests. “I want to plant trees or make something happen. I just don’t know what,” she said.
I held my daughter in my arms. The tumor of fear pulsed inside my chest. I didn’t know what to say or do or if any of it mattered. Before the pandemic and my father’s death, I thought Bill McKibben was right: that finding others who care and working together was the way to fight hopelessness. But now it seemed like everyone was alone inside their houses, inside their fear. Eventually the words swam to me from another realm, maybe straight from my father beyond us. I told my daughter that she didn’t know what to do yet. I explained that what she was feeling might be something like a pot getting ready to boil. There’s discomfort and sometimes darkness as the pressure builds, but as soon as it breaks, the water bubbles, change happens.
There was remote learning and virtual reality and pandemic and endemic and fear of parties and gatherings and hugs. Is this still planet Earth I’m standing on? I wondered.
Hope
After The Midnight Sky and holding my 12-year-old daughter in her bedroom, my husband and I took our three kids to a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. There was an exhibit by the light sculptor James Turrell. We had seen his work before. When the kids were small, on a visit to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, we each put booties over our shoes and held hands inside a room that was full of white light and no boundaries. There were no visible walls or ceilings, no corners or shadows. It was the closest thing I’d ever felt to being inside a cloud. With cushioning and protection from the sharp edges of the world, we all needed that cloud again.
We made museum reservations months in advance, booked rooms at a nearby hotel, stored images of our vaccine cards on our phones, and arrived after lunch in the converted textile mill that was now MASS MoCA. I worried briefly that our youngest child, only seven, would be rejected at the door since she was not yet fully vaccinated. But they let us all inside, exposed ceilings and stacked brick walls. We signed up for a timeslot to see the Turrell exhibit and had an hour to kill in the museum before it was our turn.
While roaming around the second floor, my daughter and I heard voices unexpectedly coming through an invisible corner speaker. One wobbly voice—I couldn’t tell at first if it was a man or a woman or all of us—said, “My own feelings of powerlessness.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” The other voice responded in a computerized calm like Siri or Alexa.
“I know that we can do better than we have, but I don’t know that we will. I know that we can be better human beings…” the wobbly voice continued.
“Is there something I can help you with?” the bot asked.
But it was clear the person, the everyone, was struggling with something more than Siri could help with. The person was struggling with humanity, with darkness and powerlessness, with questions that couldn’t be answered by a robot. I stopped inside of this exchange and closed my eyes.
“It’s a matter of behaving as though the world were a little bit more the way you wish it were in some way.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Siri responded. “If you like, I can search the web for ‘behaving as though the world were a little bit more as you wish.’”
As I stood inside the familiar heaviness, I could hear my daughter in the background, “Mom,” she said. “Look at this.”
Even though she was right next to me, she seemed miles away. I was inside of the conversation coming from the speaker. This, I thought, This is how I feel. This person, grappling with questions of humanity, was in the same world as me, the one where the pandemic had rearranged my life, where the planet was heating out of control, where my father was gone.
My daughter gave up on getting my attention. I cared only about the person in the speaker, the wobbly voice, and their questions. Where would the conversation go? How would it end?
It ended without answers. It ended with the dull white noise of an empty recording, but I felt strangely satisfied having listened to it. When I finally turned toward my daughter, she pointed, “Look at these weavings.”
Hanging on the wall and dangling from the ceiling, were square and circular shapes I assumed were made from wood or bamboo.
“They’re Amazon boxes,” she explained.
And then I saw the surreal black smile behind the woven cardboard discs. The familiar image—all over trucks on the highway, in neighborhoods, on boxes waiting on doorsteps—I realized could be a metaphor for the condescendingly smooth voice of Siri. When I stopped to read the notes on the exhibit, I found out the bot was Siri having a conversation with Octavia Butler’s voice recorded from an interview she once did with Charlie Rose. The Amazon smile is not a smile at all. It simply suggests the shape of a smile.
How did we land here? I wondered, standing inside a museum with my 12-year-old daughter. Siri was not the only robot we were interacting with. There was the one who answered the Walgreens phone when I called to see if they had Covid tests in stock. There was the one who called our house with verification codes from the bank. The one who tried to get me to consolidate my student loans. There were virtual meeting spaces called Zoom and FaceTime and Skype. There were “likes” and “friends” and “snaps” and “tweets” and “tick-toks.” There was remote learning and virtual reality and pandemic and endemic and fear of parties and gatherings and hugs. Is this still planet Earth I’m standing on? I wondered.
The recording started again. “Feelings of powerlessness…” I realized that the same technology that removes our humanity was also what brought us Octavia Butler’s voice in the middle of a museum in Massachusetts in 2021. I wanted to stay for hours, to swim in the comfort of her voice asking the very same questions that lived in the amorphous tumor on my chest. But there stood my daughter. There, in the next room over, stood my husband and my son and my youngest, waiting.
The Future You Cannot See
In the museum in North Adams, there were things I didn’t know yet. I didn’t know that my children would return to school every day. I didn’t know that people would take off their masks and share meals and hug each other again. I didn’t know that my grief would change, the tumor would lose some of its weight. I didn’t know that I would resurrect the Green Club with my youngest child and her friends and that my 12-year-old daughter would form her own Eco Team in middle school to fight for a dishwasher and reusable utensils on her own. She and her classmates would get a grant from a local company, one who cares about the future of the earth, to pay for this. She would meet with Food Services and ask questions until she found answers that made sense. And when she is 13, I will take her shopping for business casual clothing so she can travel to Washington, D.C. to lobby for a carbon tax.
Survival happens in strange ways. Hope can be passed down. When my youngest couldn’t sleep one night years after her older brother couldn’t sleep, I gave up trying to comfort her because she had come downstairs too many times. But her older sister, who was once scared of The Midnight Sky, was now 13 and brought her younger sister back upstairs to her bed. Minutes ticked by while I did dishes, waiting for the two of them to inevitably return, looking for my comfort. But they didn’t. I tiptoed up the stairs, stood outside my youngest’s bedroom door, eavesdropping. I expected to hear something like, Mom has had enough. You need to just stay in your room now. But instead I heard my 13-year-old’s voice sharing a meditation about color and light and the movie screen inside her head: “Imagine the scary thing on a big movie screen inside your brain. Take the image and shrink it smaller and smaller and smaller until it can fit into the palm of your hand. Now lock that tiny, scary thing inside a small box and take it to the ocean. Throw the box into the waves and let the water carry it further and further away. The ocean knows with to do with it. Now fill your giant movie screen with your favorite color. Let it spread all over the screen. Let it wrap you up in a warm blanket.”
I held my breath, realizing that this was the meditation our wise pediatrician had shared with my son over five years before after the Indiana Jones birthday party. I hadn’t thought much about it after we left the doctor’s office that day other than the fact that he’d finally slept. But there in the dark, I realized the meditation had done more than help him sleep. I realized that on some other dark night, probably back when they shared a room, my son had comforted his sister with these same words about color and light and the movie screen inside her head. And now she was passing it on.
Attempt to Comfort My Children, Part III
When it was our turn to see the James Turrell light sculpture, I walked with my family out of the main building of the museum and onto a patio, under a footbridge and past a row of silos, reminded that this museum was once a textile mill that employed thousands of people, reminded that things change and become something else. We reached Building Six, where the sculpture was, the cloud I’d been waiting for. The five of us and several others walked into a room with white walls and a set of stairs leading to a hot pink screen. We were all given blue hospital booties to cover our shoes. We were told to hold our youngest’s hand. A man led us up the stairs and surprised me by walking directly through the hot pink screen that I realized was not a screen at all, but an entryway into a hot pink room with no boundaries. Just like the exhibit we once saw in Buffalo, this room had no corners or shadows or indications of a floor or ceiling. But this time it felt as if we were all floating, unhinged, inside pink light. Then the light changed to blue and tricked my eyes into only seeing the outlines of people. My husband and son and daughter were in front of me. My youngest was next to me holding my hand. I gazed at them all, a green energy field around their bodies. I wondered if this is what it felt like to be in heaven or on Mars, inside of nothing, inside of everything, the whole universe holding us in space. My heart suddenly pulsed with love. There was a raging pandemic. There was a burning planet. There was grief and despair and powerlessness. There were children who needed saving. There were scripts we didn’t yet have. And there we were, together in light. I realized in that moment that maybe this is all we can do for our children. Like the wobbly voice of Octavia Butler sharing her deepest fears, we can stand with them and tell them the truth: I am scared and confused, too. But I am right here beside you.
Note
The exhibit at Mass MoCA, You Got to Make Your Own Worlds (for when Siri is long gone), is by Clarissa Tossin. View the recording.
Amy Amoroso’s essays “Cut Wide Open” (2014) and “Your American Dream” (2020) were selected as Notable Essays in the Best American Essays anthologies. Her work has been published in The Sun, Mount Hope, Upstreet, The Maine Review, HerStry, and others. She lives in Portland, Maine with her family and teaches writing at the University of Southern Maine.
Header photo of James Turrell’s The Light Inside by Miguel Da Silva, courtesy Wikimedia.
