Fire Bodies was written in response to the death of my partner and the embodied experience of climate catastrophic events. Conceived in the wake of Bart’s death and the 2023 Quebec wildfires, Fire Bodies is trying to find a language that is not sentimental about grief and death, but capable of communicating the concrete experience of their presence. While in my habitual anthropology training I was schooled in using a more analytical language, the writing of Fire Bodies is based on my belief that we need to find a more poetic, boundary-crossing, and collaborative language if we are to step out of the destructive logics that have contributed to the destruction of this planet. Incidentally, Fire Bodies is also part of a book-length project on depression, grief, writing, and art that I hope to finish soon.
On June 8 2023, around four in the afternoon, a few feet away from the house at the lake, Bart fell to the ground and died. I did not see him fall, but I heard him gurgle and rasp. When I ran towards him, I could see that his face had already started to turn blue and swell. I kneeled down beside him, called 911, and performed CPP while kissing him at the same time. When I heard the ambulance racing as fast as it could along the steep rocky road that leads to the lake, I was still hoping that Bart would make it. Paramedics ripped open white sterile packages of medical tubing, but nothing took. Bart was lifted onto a stretcher and the ambulance speeded us to the next hospital, where Bart was immediately put on life support. I was not allowed into the emergency room, but two minutes later I saw a doctor walking towards me, and I knew. Bart’s death had been caused by an aneurism and blood hemorrhage in the brain, and he was declared dead in the hospital, but I am convinced that he died at the lake.
A few days before Bart died, Canadian and international media had started to report on the off-the-charts wildfires that then ripped through northern Quebec. At the lake the fires never came close enough as to pose a real threat, but two days before Bart died an eerie haze had started to hang over the water, chocking the air and blotting out the sun. Until then I had mostly thought of fires in terms of thick walls of smoke and scorched forests and homes, less in terms of aerosol emissions and smoke pollution that lingers in the air long after a fire is visibly gone. I do not think that toxic smoke caused Bart’s death, but neither do I think it unlikely that it has been accelerated by breathing in pollutants that emanated from the fires.
The zero point of a death is hard to approach, even when it does not involve immeasurable suffering, but I’ve found the hours that followed Bart’s death almost harder to describe. There were many frantic phone calls, because decisions had to be made. Bart had gifted his organs and eyes for research to medical institutions he trusted and liked, and the removal had to be done quickly so that his organs and eyes could still be of medical value. Since Bart’s death had been so rapid and I could not bring his body back to the lake, still in the hospital I arranged for his body to be cremated. Friends from Hamilton made the seven-hour drive from the city to be with me, and told me how impressed they were by the way in which I handled it all. This was good to hear, but part of me thinks that I only had the capacity to do this because I did not really have the capacity to comprehend Bart’s death. A fire flare may just be the right image. It can go from nothing to all-consuming in a matter of moments, and all it leaves behind is parched ground.
After Bart’s death I spent some time in the city with friends, but then I drove up to the lake again. There was a house to be maintained, legal matters to be taken care of, and my sister and friends from Germany were poised to arrive. I was grateful for the company, but we spent many hours in silence. I could barely speak because there was a rope around my throat. I felt like throwing up all the time, but never did. I wrote letters to Bart and called out his name, and lay down on the ground where he had died as if to cover his body with mine. All I wanted to do was stay there and never get up again. I had no idea that grief could be so deep.
When we loose the ground of life itself, we also loose the ground of our being.
*
It took me some time, but one day I just got into the car and picked up Bart’s ashes. He came in a plastic bag tastefully wrapped in cotton cloth. Back at the lake I spread much of his ashes along some of the places he had liked best, and exhausted to the point of folding fell asleep on the deck. When I woke up a deer was standing nearby, calmly looking at me. Even when I propped myself up on my elbows, it did not skittishly run away. I am trying not to anthropomorphize here, but this is hard because we humans have taken all the words to describe beauty and love. And here it was: presence. Soothing. For a while we just looked at each other. And then the deer calmly walked away.
Bart loved animals, even the geese that nobody at the lake really liked. After his death I retrieved from his computer and phone the video clips on which he had recorded the many sounds and sights of life at the lake. In winter the bellowing of the lake, and in spring the honking of geese and calling of frogs. The squawking roh of the blue heron that every morning would stand for hours on our dock. The tremulous cries of loons, and later the whirring propeller sound of the wings of baby loons learning to fly. Then the porcupines that in the late afternoon trundled down the steep road to the house, the flocks of wild turkey that picked their way around the house, and the turtles who in the morning laid their eggs in the sand, and the racoons who in the evening would madly dig for them. Some of this recording did take Bart straight down into the mud, as when he followed garter snakes making their way between rocks and stalks of grass.
The enormity of loss from fire zones is mostly tabulated in human lives. The way in which fire creates charcoal fields hold the bodies of dead caribou, black bears, moose, geese, turkey vultures, hawks, eagles, foxes, ducks, muskrats, snakes, dragonflies, butterflies, moths, porcupines, chipmonks, and trees, plants, microbes, ferns, fungi, and moss and other species who flourished there are rarely mentioned. Realizing that for many humans these species do not figure in the enormity of loss, it may be strange to bring this up here. Depending on where you stand, these plants and animals are not life that was lost, just an unfortunate effect of the fire. But such neglect is one outcome of human exceptionalism – the idea that only we matter. When we loose the ground of life itself, we also loose the ground of our being.
*
A few months later, I began to sort through Bart’s stuff. Bart did not fetishize objects – in many ways, he was the most minimalist person I have ever known – but he loved some enough to keep them in his orbit, where they had little meaning outside of what they meant to him. As somebody who had worked for a long time in an archive and documentary film, Bart was keenly aware of the ways in which personal, political, and cultural histories are embedded in these objects, reflecting an array of friendships, commitments, and learnings over lifetimes. I sent some to family and friends in the Netherlands where Bart was born and lived before he moved to Canada. Freed from the tentacles of his memories, they will assume other lives, new lives. In different rooms and houses, but also waste disposal sites or dumps.
In sorting through all of this stuff, I began to think about the boundaries of a single lifetime. Not in terms of karma or rebirth, but in the sense of an ethics, a kind of doing that might benefit those who arrive long after you are gone. It may initially sound like a romantic idea, but when you actually start going about working towards it, you begin to understand the enormity of the task – to orient yourself and to start acting in ways that are given by your care for future lives whose shape will always remain opaque to you because your time will not be their time. It means not only imagining what those lives might look like, but what care and nourishment they might need. This imagining, this imagining of care, raises thorny questions about paths taken and not taken, and about new paths we will have to make. It requires us to keep at least one foot in the humus of the forest, hang out with different animals (humans and more), and notice, listen, and speak attentively and with care.
As I am writing this at the lake, the fire has calmed down, and so has the torrential rain that in the weeks following the fire had washed out roads. The world’s eyes have long since shifted from the fires in Quebec to another place and its fires; then to another and its floods; then to another and its ruined ecosystem, and then to another and its extinctions. There is no premium on catastrophes these days, and I know that among the many shapes catastrophe takes, my own personal one is small. I am also not immune to staving of grief, and there may be a point at which the body cannot hold it anymore. But my once-belief that there is stability in this world, or that there is a place where we can be “safe” has been one of the casualties of last summer. This belief now seems nothing more than a psychic buffer against the instabilities of life. We simply have a hard time imagining that there can be changes so wild as to undo it.
Neither do I feel particularly hopeful or morbid in writing this. Both words now feel far too abstract and remote as to mean anything. Still, Bart’s death has altered the quality of my relationship with life. But that’s something else altogether.
