Before the amputation, the doctors warned me. My memory might recall my absent limb after the surgery, and I might experience these recollections as physical sensations. I pressed for more specifics and finer explanations, but the doctors hedged, as if they didn’t quite understand what they themselves were saying.
They used confusing phrases and words that painted unclear images. They said my leg’s memory might try to move itself, even though a leg doesn’t have a memory and the limb would no longer be there. They said my missing limb might attempt to figure out what had become of itself, as if emptiness can reflect on what used to occupy it. As if emptiness can wonder. As if what used to exist can recall what it is to feel, or as if things now gone from this world—discarded muscle and blood and bone—can think. Or remember. Or do anything at all.
They said my leg-now-gone might seek to assume a shape or form or position it had once known, and I would feel it move. That I might sense an itch in that absence, that place where I no longer had skin to scratch, or experience a spasm where no muscle remained. Pain might slice through my limb like it did before the surgery, even though there was nothing left there to hurt—just a foreshortened leg with a thick laceration stitched up and healing. My memory-leg might even recount its own surgical removal, reliving what anesthesia saves me from recalling but my leg experienced as cutting, sawing, sanding, and sewing. All these feelings would emanate from a part that was not a part of me anymore, just a blankness formerly inhabited by a now-partial me.
The doctors spoke of these sensations as far-off possibilities. As if they might occur for a moment or cause a mild distraction one day. As if those doctors didn’t quite believe in ghosts.
Those doctors did not realize the power of apparitions. The phantoms came quickly and fiercely, and they stayed. They are with me still. They taught me something I dared only to hope in the weeks leading to my surgery: a body never forgets what it has been.
_____
After the amputation, I completed my degrees and became a professor of environmental studies at a near-idyllic little college in southern Idaho. I teach classes, deliver lectures to the public and to colleagues, and write books and articles based on my research. I have done this work for a long time, yet in the course of my career, what it means to “teach” environmental studies has changed—so much so that I sometimes wonder if I am qualified for the job.
When I first started teaching environmental studies, the job meant educating students about how humanity had understood the natural world in the past and how those understandings led to the environmental problems we now faced. The environmental challenges were many and large, but solutions seemed attainable, if requiring concerted effort. We named the troubles—rising populations, nuclear waste, deforestation—and I lectured about limits to growth, promising technologies, and forest renewal. I explained how the rapid settlement and expansion of early America brought this land from abundance to scarcity, and we read John Muir and Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. We talked about the differences between conservation and preservation, the rise of environmental ethics, and the birth of environmental protection laws. We delved into the benefits of local food economies, organic and regenerative agriculture, preserving fisheries, and recycling. We looked at the complexities of water use, the function of aquifers, and the complications of dams. My classes centered on environmental problems alongside the potentials of sustainability and stewardship.
In those early years, my students sometimes grew forlorn or incensed. They were angry that previous generations accepted devastation and genocide as by-products of “progress.” They bemoaned the plagues of consumerism and an extractive economy. Then they met this dark history with resolve, turning their anger into energy and passion. Here’s why. First, they came to believe their environmental knowledge empowered them. Then they committed to promoting environmental values. Finally, they trusted they could help improve the situation.
At the annual graduation party, we drank beer together. As they walked off campus with their families and loved ones, caps, gowns, and tassels resting in their arms, I felt sadness at their departure but also something like pride. I knew they were off to fight the good fight and build a brighter future—mine, theirs, yours.
It’s all different now.
One day during a recent spring term, twenty-four of us sat in a classroom discussing a coastal region that provides critical habitat for certain migrating shorebirds. Students sat in groups of six around long white tables looking at two large projection screens. I displayed a map of the U.S.’s eastern seaboard. The coastal region was threatened, almost sure to succumb to rising ocean levels. The birds would lose their crucial stopover ground as the waters rose.
All of a sudden, a student I’ll call Clara interrupted the discussion. Where is this place? I gestured to the spot on the map. Another student held up his book and pointed to the region’s name in our text. Clara looked from book to map and back again, her eyes widening. Oh, my God, she whispered. Then she looked at all of us and said, That’s where I live!
That’s when I wondered what a teacher says to a student whose home is sure to drown.
In new territory, I asked her to tell us what the region was like, this place so far from our campus. As she spoke, the other students hunched down, looking up at her briefly but then returning their gazes to their pens and paper, but the pens were still. I thanked Clara for introducing us to her landscape. Sure, was her dazed reply. I guess I’d better tell my parents we should enjoy it while we still can.
At semester’s end, I sat in the campus library reading the students’ class journals. Each journal was a compilation of class notes, jottings from our field trips, reflections on our readings, information gleaned from guest speakers, and a synthesis of it all. I thumbed through the pages to gain a sense of the quality of each student’s engagement. I flipped past an empty page in one journal, only to glimpse one short line written across its top. I turned back and saw that a single sentence occupied the otherwise blank space, as if the thought commanded breathing room. As if, once written, there was nothing left to say. The page read: Clara’s home will soon be gone.
As a teacher, I felt helpless and unprepared. I have no solution for a childhood disappearing into the sea. There is no single act, no single techno-fix, no single change that will save Clara’s home. Unlike earlier in my career, when challenges seemed isolated, manageable, or reversible, now I can teach students only how to pursue the potential diminishing of all-too-certain worsenings. I proffer salves, not cures.
It happens all too often these days that my students learn something and then look at me as if I’ve given them a medical diagnosis for an incurable disease. Whereas my students once imagined themselves as part and parcel of nature’s endless regeneration, now they grow fearful because the implications of our lessons are so clear: they are losing the world before they reach their own adulthood. Sure, I still lecture on all the old topics, but I also feel obligated to address the fact that my students live in a world that is losing parts of itself each day.
On graduation day, I watched the seniors walk off campus into the future. Their caps, gowns, and tassels hung in their arms just like they always have, but my heart ached with emptiness. Later, on summer days when I crossed the campus now empty of students, their worries haunted me. I kept thinking: the oldest among them is only twenty-two years old.
If once my job was to educate students toward lives of passionate environmental advocacy, now my job feels like trying to save them from the blinding despair that comes of witnessing the world vanish.
We hadn’t drunk beer together in years.
_____
I began preparing for my own vanishing when I was ten years old. Born with a birth defect that grew slowly like a cancer but was not cancer, my childhood leg carried a massive tangle of extra veins and arteries that, through my adolescence, grew slowly until it overtook my calf and began to emerge through the skin, veins and capillaries meeting light and air. The medical diagnosis for my disease is arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, but that term covers a wide range of conditions, some easily treatable and others, like mine, life altering. For years, pain filled my days and nights, demanding doctors and treatments until eventually I knew I would lose it all: decaying skin and bursting vessels, shin, ankle, foot, five toes. As a child, I knew that part of my childhood home—my own leg—would one day disappear.
By the time I was twenty-three years old, my lower leg was a sickly jungle of vessels bleeding through rotting skin. We scheduled the surgery. At the last minute, the surgeons realized they could save my knee, and I was lucky to be able to keep it. With that crucial joint and a prosthesis, I would walk just fine. And I do walk, most days—except when a pressure sore on my remaining limb or a technical problem with my prosthesis forces me not to. Most of the time, I move through the world smoothly enough that people don’t know I am disabled.
But I know. A body never forgets what it has been.
_____
Some things about my job remain as they used to be. The students still bemoan the extractive economy, and they continue to be incensed at the systemic racism and consumerism of America. I still lecture about the connections and overlap between the complex concepts of “nature” and “culture,” how human culture sometimes considers itself distinct from nature but how everything is natural, even humanity a part of the natural world. We still analyze how landscapes have changed over time and how human beings have changed as a result. I continue to tell students that if these relationships between nature and culture—and between land and humanity—sound circular, that’s because they are: humanity and the nonhuman world are two sides of one coin. Or maybe they are just the coin itself.
I also still remind my students of what I consider the most beautiful lesson of all: that the entirety of this planet is made of stars, which we acknowledge in the words we often utter when someone dies (ashes to ashes, dust to dust). There is just one matter-energy. I still remind them that we are part of that cosmic everything, inhabiting our bodily forms and miraculous consciousnesses for just a short stint in geologic time before becoming dust once again.
I say all of this, but these old ideas impact my students differently than they used to. My students see that if there is but one matter-energy of which we are a part and Earth’s body is so broken as to throw the climate and all of life into crisis, then we are broken and failing, too. My students ask me, Why doesn’t everyone drop the bullshit and focus everything we have on healing this diseased nature that is also ourselves?
I am a respected professor of environmental studies, a “doctor” with decades of experience at the height of her career, yet I can’t answer them with clarity or confidence—because I don’t know.
When I hear myself telling them that I don’t know, I recall those doctors who, long ago, could not answer me with specifics when I asked about phantom pain. Like them, I respond in vague terms. Like them, I hedge as if I don’t quite understand what I myself am saying. Because I don’t. I have no good answer to their question.
_____
After the amputation, I remained in the hospital and struggled to describe the feelings emanating from my absent limb. The doctors used the term phantom sensation. When the sensations hurt, they called them phantom pains.
While these feelings have changed over the years, they remain a part of my life. At best, my phantom sensations mimic everyday feelings formerly known to my limb. An itch, a twinge, the feeling of a sock brushing a foot. At worst, my phantom pains are wrenching, ghastly—a knife slicing skin, a bone-saw chopping through fibula. The ghosts might materialize out of nowhere, make my body levitate off the bed at night, or send me leaping out of a chair in a meeting. Repeated, deep stabbings; penetrating, sudden electric shocks that make my whole body jolt. If I’m upright, I can rock in place or walk around on my prosthesis to dissipate the pain. But if the pains come during sleep, I have to sit up, take my stump in my hand, and rub it softly, reminding the remains of my limb who we are. That, or I don my prosthetic limb and walk around like a parent trying to settle a baby who wakes in terror.
Not that long ago, doctors believed that an amputee who felt pain in a missing limb suffered some madness. Now we know more. These sensations I feel in my nonexistent limb are not figments of my imagination. And they are not just a thing of my memory. These ghosts are more complex than that.
Phantom pains and sensations are a body knowing itself and its history. They are a body continuing to feel what it once was, how it once moved, what it once endured, what it endures still. These pains and sensations are also the body learning how to feel anew, practicing how to be in its new form, trying on a new present. They are the spinal cord, brain, and neural pathways doing their work: sending messages from the body to the body concerning what was and what is, what happened years ago, decades ago, or just a few hours earlier, today, or what might happen soon. These feelings are the ghosts whose hauntings are desperate graspings for being in the world again after being forced to vanish.
The hauntings occur in the place that once was, even though it no longer remains. They occur somewhere beyond seeing but not beyond sensing. They are apparitions I can appreciate because I know what it is to want to remember what it felt like to be undiminished and whole.
I think of phantom pain as amazing. Even beautiful—an insistence that all that once was still is. Like stardust. Through phantom pain, I know nature never forgets what it has been.
_____
In years past, my students bore down and put their noses to the grindstone when facing challenging workloads. Now they seem to collapse into a hopelessness at once physical and emotional. Many of them are quick to request extensions for assignments, to skip the reading, and to miss class, things that I and my classmates never would have thought to do.
These students are no less intelligent than students of years past, but many of them lack intellectual tenacity and emotional resiliency. They want to work toward their dreams, but they struggle, as if they cannot muster the force of will because realizing their dreams seems nearly impossible. Instead, they seem to lack trust—not in themselves or in me, exactly, but in the wider world. All of it. They act as though they are irreparably wounded, as if they have lost a part of the selves they know they should be but won’t ever get back.
This fall semester, in a first-year writing class that centers on climate change, a student said she didn’t know if she would bother getting married and having children, even though she had always wanted a family. Why bother, she asked, if my kids might starve or die in a climate war? In a class for graduating environmental studies majors, students talked about job prospects. One said she hoped to be a bird refuge manager and work outside but she doubted enough birds would be left to justify the position by the time she was qualified for the job.
Their despair might reflect the fact that their lives are increasingly complicated, that they have to hold down a job or two even as they pursue college. But it’s also that so many of them suffer debilitating anxiety or depression, or both. Through their writing, into which they pour themselves, I recently learned that a full third of one class had attempted suicide in high school. While they are grateful their attempts failed, they still experience gloom over the state of the world.
My colleagues notice the change, too. We blame the global pandemic that robbed these students of social interaction and crucial learning days, of a sense of certainty that all will be well—but we know there is more to it. These students have very good reason to look to the future with distrust and fear.
They all wonder what, in a climate-torn world, will remain possible for them. They don’t have answers to the most basic questions. Will they live full lives, or will their time be cut short by food shortages or extreme heat or war? Will the careers they hope to pursue exist in a world plagued by scarcity? Will they be able to travel and see other parts of the world? Will they have enough water to sustain themselves, their gardens, and their families? If they have children, will those children know what an elephant is—or was? Or a monarch butterfly? What about a clear blue sky?
My students know what they could have counted on in the past, and they know they can’t count on these things anymore. What they thought was normal—so much of what their parents and grandparents could count on—isn’t normal anymore. One day, a student stopped me on the campus quadrangle to tell me her family cabin had nearly burned down in yet another western wildfire brought on by lightning and magnified by excessive drought and unusually high temperatures. The cabin, she said, was saved. “I’m so glad you can still go there!” I said. “Yes,” she replied, her eyes suddenly fixed on the sidewalk, “but now all the trees are gone, just broken, burnt stumps strewn on the ground for miles.” Last autumn, another student told me that he used to swim with his brother in a certain pond, but now the water is warming and filled with bacteria dangerous to humans. On many summer days, that meant no more swimming. Yet another visited my office to share the news that she had finally achieved her dream of spending the summer lifeguarding at a nearby waterpark only to arrive there and spend weeks of her work hours breathing outdoor air that exceeded federal safety recommendations. “What happened to summer the way it’s supposed to be?” she asked.
My students miss these pieces of nature, these parts of themselves.
_____
To say that I sometimes despair understates the devastation of being disabled. As one who cannot move unassisted, I am constantly aware that I lack a part of me. This loss tugs at my heart—frustrating, maddening, permanent. I will never be finished mourning what I have lost.
Freely breaking into a run. Standing on the beach in the water while waves break over my feet. Feeling comfortable at a public beach, rather than like a mutant robot on exhibition. Dancing without feeling like I have a two-by-four tied to one foot. Wrapping two full legs around my lover’s hips. Standing up out of bed in the morning without first having to slip on a series of silicon sleeves that attach me to the titanium and carbon tool we call an artificial limb. Leaping in the air to catch the frisbee thrown by my daughter—and then chasing her through the yard and tumbling into the grass gracefully, naturally, in a heap, without worrying that my prosthesis may thump against her, bruise or injure her, limit my movement, or make her frustrated at all her mother cannot do.
Still, my disability does not mean I bear a constant sadness. It does not define my life, yet this ghostly presence that is absence likely leaves me more susceptible to other ghosts, too.
This past summer, I was haunted when I walked, and not only by my despairing students. Other ghosts appeared: winged, desiccated, and small enough to fit in my hand. I kept reading in the news of heat-consumed birds falling dead from the skies, and they seemed to be all around me.
I felt their collapsed bodies as if they had plummeted into my palms. I saw them on sizzling sidewalks, along the path by the river, in newly mown fields, their necks impossibly torqued. Sometimes their beaks lay open and they grimaced still, desperately seeking water even in their final sleep. Bugs feasted on their eyes, taking sustenance in any moisture that remained in their near-weightless, sunken forms. I could not escape the hauntings.
One evening, I tried to comfort myself by walking in a meadow. I found myself listening for the meadowlark and woodcock I used to hear there but that haven’t returned for three summers. I imagined the meadowlark’s babbling songs in the breeze and the woodcock’s chittering spiral-dance in the evening sky. They didn’t come.
As I walked, I remembered a text that I often share with students—a section of Henry David Thoreau’s 1856 journal where he, too, imagines walking amid the ghosts of vanishing things. As he walked through meadows and forests near his home in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau felt the haunting presence of animals exterminated by growing settlement. He recalled cougar, panther, and lynx, wolverine and wolf, bear and moose, all animals driven out of the region by expanding agriculture and overzealous hunting. He knew that plants, fish, and birds—even the water of creeks—had been ravaged, too: All the great trees—& beasts—fishes & fowl are gone. He names beaver, turkey, deer, all extirpated from the area. Yet he writes about them as if he senses them in the spaces they once occupied.
He hears them, too, as if absent birds or shrunken streams leave holes in the music that makes a place what it is: I listen to [a] concert—in which so many parts are wanting. He says he craves wholeness and fullness, and I realized that his words predict my students’ longings: I wish to know an entire heaven & an entire earth. The landscape, he says, is maimed, like a disabled body.
I didn’t have a chance to wish the meadowlark and woodcock of that meadow goodbye, but one summer evening when I was in my early twenties, I sat on the mustard-yellow carpet of my living-room floor, cradled my left calf in my arms, and said farewell. The next morning—humid, July’s crickets still rubbing, chirping—my limb was amputated.
These many years later, my goodbye goes on, because the ghost-limb speaks to me every moment. With each movement, I feel my body doing the work of propelling me on a partial leg. My ghost-limb accompanies me like an eradicated mammal might accompany a nineteenth-century man walking through a landscape severed of parts of its own being. Or like a vanished birdsong might sing to a woman wandering in a meadow. Or like a home might beckon a college student, filling her young heart with the hope of a future return to that place she knows she once was, where she always thought she was meant to be.
_____
These losses—my limb, my students’ hopes, Thoreau’s mammals, the wings falling from our skies—they are not all that distinct from one another. They can’t be, because all of us, all of the material world, we are one and the same thing. Part and parcel of the whole. All from stardust and becoming stardust still.
Amputation and ecological collapse both invite their victims to face that they live in a maimed place, whether that place is an amputated body or our diminished world. Just as I feel the ghost of my absent limb through phantom pains, my students feel the ghosts of their ecologically handicapped planet through their despair. They know that not long ago, the world was a much healthier place—more complete, more resilient, more capable of self-renewal. Just as my phantom pains are my limb recalling what it has known and what it could have been if not for my disease, my students’ despair is part of the world recalling what it could have been were it not for its own disabling.
It’s a bit of a commonplace to say that grief doesn’t die but, eventually, can transform into an appreciation for what once was. Grief thereby evolves into love, and love can nourish us. That’s the healthy path through. This process allows us to feel happiness again and get back to caring for others and the larger world.
The same can be said of pain. Ignoring phantom pain, like ignoring grief, damages its victim. It can break the spirit. Exploring it enables not only physical healing but also emotional well-being. And when an exploration of pain or grief can mature beyond mere recognition to acceptance or, better, an embracing—even an appreciation—of its source, then its victim can begin to realize the power to move beyond its grip. Appreciating pain doesn’t mean it goes away. It means that its victim accepts it as an integral, even valuable, part of themselves. Once I learned to see my phantom pain as a part of my past that is still a part of me today, I could appreciate it, value it, even love it. It is a part of who I have been, who I long to be again, and who I am in spite of that loss—all at once.
Just as my body longs for its fullness, my students long for a full, resilient world. Working through that grief allows them to move beyond it—which doesn’t mean they no longer hope for a healthier global ecology. It means they might understand their despair as a route to personal and global healing.
_____
Following an amputation, a nub of bone typically remains. The medical world calls this a stump or, more formally, a “residual limb.” My dictionary tells me that residual means an amount still remaining after the main part is subtracted or accounted for; a remainder. It is what is left behind after something has gone, a remnant. I know my residual limb as the part that was most wounded but healed and now endures.
My residual limb is what endures, but it is also something more than this—something complex and difficult to explain. My residual limb is what endures but also what’s gone. This is partly because my stump is a tangible reminder of the missing part. I can hold my stump in my hands, caress it with fingertips outstretched, and relish that I am touching the ruins of what once was. In this way, through what is residual, I am never truly without what is absent. My residual limb is remnant but also reminder.
But it is even more than the remnant that endures and the reminder of what’s gone. Through the nerves I have left and the neural pathways I formed in my childhood, I still feel as though I can curl my missing left toes. I sometimes do so—one at a time, bending them in turn, just so. I hold them there clenched until I am ready to let go, and I release. My toes straighten, relax. And then I do it all again. As if I could move them. As if they were still here. As if through those movements I am someone I was meant to be but no longer am.
I know the residual, then, as both remainder and absence but also as phantom presence. It is a partial limb but intact in both its present and former forms. It is a maiming but also the site of unrelenting self-recovery. It is inexorable loss, and it is completion. It is me being what I am now and what I once was—and that is the greatest comfort I know.
Through the residual, I have learned a crucial lesson: broken things can heal. They may be forever altered and visibly scarred, but they also can give comfort and create new ways to find meaning. My residual limb taught me this: even partial things can be whole.
_____
I had been teaching at my college for many years before I decided to walk across campus naked. At least I felt naked as I crossed the quadrangle revealing my prosthesis, showcasing my disability for the first time.
That spring morning was unseasonably warm, and I saw that the temperature was going to hit ninety. I knew I had a long day on campus, and I didn’t want to be uncomfortable. I found myself in my closet flipping through hangers of short, summery dresses, wishing I could wear one to work. But I couldn’t possibly wear a short dress. For years, I had worn pants to work in spite of any heat, even in late August days when the thermometer could reach 105 Fahrenheit, because I didn’t want anyone to see my prosthesis. The right pants, socks, and shoes could hide my artificial limb from most anyone, and I walked smoothly enough that people didn’t think to wonder if something wasn’t quite right. Only my closest friends on campus knew I was an amputee.
I still don’t like to admit this, but I kept my disability hidden because I felt shame. I kept it hidden because I didn’t want to appear weak. I didn’t want to endure the stares or the pity in people’s eyes. I didn’t want to answer or evade the inevitable questions. (Why do even total strangers think it’s okay to approach an amputee and ask how they lost their limb?) I did so because I wanted the world to think I was utterly capable and complete. I did so because I wanted to feel complete.
But this late spring day, I was thinking of staying cool and feeling tired of being ashamed. I told myself that I had matured and should accept my own disability. And then I thought about my students and what they might think when they saw that I walk with the aid of titanium, carbon, and nylon and when they realized that part of my body is gone.
It might have been then that I realized my disability might be integral to my teaching. Maybe my students would feel more comfortable talking about their own fears of living incomplete lives if they knew that mine is not quite complete, either. By sharing my own experience with disability, maybe my students and I could explore our parallel circumstances and begin the healing work of cherishing what we’ve lost in order to get to caring for the world and making it, and ourselves, better. Maybe I could show them that even broken things can thrive.
I grabbed my favorite dress—a light gray one made of cooling fabric that fell mid-thigh, a few inches above my knees. With that on, my titanium ankle, carbon leg socket, and nylon attaching sleeves were on full display. I knew people would likely stop and stare, ask me with shock what had happened (as if I had commenced wearing a prosthesis overnight!), and then stare again as I turned my back and walked away—noticing this time my slight limp on the left side.
I felt naked, nervous, and somewhat shamed, but I also felt ready to reveal who I am. I had decided that I would no longer mask my own vulnerability as my students do the work of facing their own.
They did stop and stare. They did ask questions, raise eyebrows, drop jaws, or look away if they didn’t feel comfortable enough to stop and ask. And now, these days nearly all my students know I’m amputated. I don’t often wear short dresses, but I make a point of casually and just occasionally—just enough—referring to wearing a prosthesis or being an amputee. This seems to have changed the tenor of my classrooms. After their initial shock or discomfort, students seem more comfortable talking about their fears about our world and their questions about what it all means. They don’t feel like they have to hide their feelings of being partial selves in a partial world, because they can see that that’s all I am, and I’m okay.
They still ask me tough questions, but I don’t hedge when I answer. Instead, I admit all that I don’t know. And I remind them that phantom pains and environmental despair are the ghosts of what once was. They are nature not forgetting what it has been—and that this, too, is part of what connects all of us. Even our pain is part of what makes us whole.
_____
An amputee lives with ghosts, but she also knows to treasure what remains. She will nourish her body to its full potential, finding new ways to know full movement and full joy.
After my amputation, I realized that even though I am profoundly altered, I am still complete the way a meadow is still a meadow even when absent of some of its birds. I lost the ability to ambulate independently, but I cherish the movement still possible for me—both real and imagined. Sometimes when I am unable to move much at all, I relish the memory of movement. I sit and recall the sensations of running or dancing. I evoke those feelings in my mind and neural pathways. Or I remember the sensation of walking on a beach and curling ten toes in the sand. Or of having ten toes to curl.
On days when I cannot walk, I hop or crutch or crawl, but whenever I can, I walk, especially in places that are meaningful to me. On a recent hot, humid summer morning, I set off around Walden Pond. This is the place where Thoreau lived for two years, two months, and two days while he set to work to determine how to live. He said he wanted to do so deliberately, knowing that when the time came for him to die, he would know he had truly lived. He knew that our time in our bodies is all we have before we are dust again.
I took the path from the parking lot to the public beach, then walked from the beach to the trees along the shore. There I followed the well-worn path from the shore toward the train tracks and from the tracks to the site of Thoreau’s cabin. I walked the uneven ground with my eyes often downcast, watching the ground for roots, stones, anything that might throw a prosthetic ankle off balance. I walked from the cairn of rocks marking Thoreau’s cabin-site toward the yellowing green foliage lining Walden’s banks, and then back along the shore again.
As I approach the beach, I see it is fast filling. The summer heat brings hordes to these waters. I cross the sand on titanium and carbon, and people look twice as they notice my artificial limb. They try not to stare. They fail. I feel self-conscious and try to ward off the shame that still sometimes creeps in.
Deep down, I know that I did not choose my condition. It came to me like the climate-torn world comes to my young students. Our disabling arose gradually, through slow-growing disease inherited by circumstance and time. We all grieve and strive to heal all that remains to us, all that remains of us: the residual.
I keep on walking, grateful that I can walk. I walk amid robin and thrush and junco. With pine and maple and birch. I walk among the old-growth trees long gone from this place, among those Thoreau once planted here, among the vanished chestnuts. I walk with swifts fallen from summer skies and past searching stares speaking sympathy and sorrow. I walk with my students, most of whom have never been here, many of whom never will. I walk on a leg always here and never here again.
I am a landscape with absence walking in a landscape of absence, feeling the landscape of memory in the landscape of now.
_____
As the students prepared for graduation at the end of this spring term, they asked how I can hold onto hope when the forecast for life looks so grim. I told them this: During the brief time that we inhabit our bodies and consciousness, we become and we dissolve. Each moment, we live and we die in different ways—sometimes piece by piece, one limb early in life and the other parts of us sometime later, and sometimes all at once. Earth is like this, too. Its various parts and lifeforms thrive and then dwindle. Species proliferate and decline, ice builds and recedes, and everything—from species to glaciers to ocean—waxes and wanes in vitality like the light of the moon each month. The trouble has come because we’re rushing things. Human-induced climate change takes natural processes that should occur over millennia and compresses them into my lifetime and yours.
It’s as if life on Earth somehow constitutes one body, a single but multitudinous, cohesive but interdependent living thing—which it does—and we are amputating too many of its parts in very fast succession. We are like doctors removing limbs that could be saved if only we tended them. And since we are part of Earth’s body, we too are losing too quickly and far too soon parts of ourselves and each other.
I reminded my students that many people are working against this rampant wounding. I encouraged them to do the same: to devote their lives to restoring the planet and themselves. No work is more important or more urgent. No work promises to do more for each other or for themselves. No work will better ensure the potential healing of the residual world.
I admitted to my students that there is a certain sadness in this work, a knowing of all that is suffering and already gone. To some things, we must say goodbye. To others, we already have. We should feel anger and we should grieve. But there can be hope, too, for what could be more joyful than to devote one’s brief human time to healing what remains? What could matter more than nurturing the residual?
I have said that, long ago, my job was to educate students toward lives of passionate environmental advocacy, but then my job became educating them away from widening spirals of deepening despair. Now I am a partner in grief with my students, all of us educating each other toward the fragile beauty and renewing power that results from transforming pain into self-cherishing. Together, we learn to welcome the obligation, the opportunity, to go on.
This most recent spring semester, as the seniors worked to finish their courses, we made plans for the graduation party. They were all over twenty-one. I brought the beer.
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Some of us lose parts of our bodies to cancer, war, accidents, diabetes, or freak congenital conditions like mine. Some of us wear a prosthesis. But all of us are amputated. We have lost birds and mammals, frogs and insects, plants and whole populations of trees. We lose marshes as they dry and soils as they lose fertility. And we feel the phantom pains. The ghosts live in our memories, haunt us on walks, speak through our bodies.
We sense them in sawed-off trunks, in fields absent of wildflowers, and in the silence once singing with birds. We know them in woodlands dismembered of trout lily and mayflower and in meadows missing meadowlark and woodcock. Through our phantom pains, we are nature longing to be what it once was, missing fiercely what it has lost, but also striving to flourish, persisting in finding joy amid our very disabling. We might think of ourselves, then, as part of the nature that remains, re-membering itself in this, our new, amputated form.
Just like an amputee who nurtures the remnants of her limb toward healing, we can nourish all that remains. We can hold the residual in our hands, cradle its altered form and trace its scars. We clutch all that we are, all we have ever been, and all we will ever be. We cup stardust.
