Image from The Ecological Relations of Roots “Once my father became someone transformed and once I was a part of transforming him, into ash, into pollution, into bagged teeth sent away, the world of what was out of sight would not stay gone,” Kathryn Savage writes in Groundglass, a book-length essay about her father’s death from cancer and its likely connection to environmental contamination. As she navigates her grief and weighs the consequences of having lived on the fencelines of industry, Savage visits a number of Superfund sites that complicate the scale of her loss.
Reckoning with crises both personal and ecological, Savage works to map the “culpabilities between extractive industry, illness, and displacements.” This fragmentary essay is drawn from notes she took while her father was in the hospital, and offers a window into how intimate observations fed a more expansive inquiry.
— Eryn Loeb for Guernica
April 2
My father started hallucinating his dead today. His dead mother, his old hockey buddies. I bring him the newspaper. We sit in matching recliners. I can’t look at his face when he tells me how his mother stood at the foot of his hospital bed that morning. His great aunt, calling him by his favorite nickname. He sweats chemo. He is my living, and my hallucination too.
April 3
In the tree book I flip through at the hospital, I read about fir broom rust, witches’ broom. Words try to blot death up, but death leaks faster than language can soak. Baby crying, man coughing, low murmurs from the nurses’ station: What room are you taking her to? A woman is rolled past me; her eyes are covered with a knitted cap that she’s stretched over her forehead and down across the fine point of her nose. Machines beep at uneven intervals, like frogs in a wetland. Circulated air pushes out of silver pipes, metallic arteries that lengthen behind thin walls. I look up at the drop-tile ceiling. Porous flesh.
April 3, later
A witches’ broom, a proliferation of abnormal growth that disrupts the tree’s vascular system, is the most human-like carcinogen that can sicken trees. Other types of tree cancers include galls, burls, and fascinations. Galls are tumors. Burls are wood galls. Fascinations are flattened shoots. Like animal cancers, human cancers, tree tumors grow until the tree can’t support the cancer, or itself, and then the vascular system gives out. My boyfriend’s father carves big salad bowls out of wood galls, burls. He smooths and polishes the wood until it shines.
Before, my father was a big, burly man.
April 4
We watch TV. My father’s ankles, hairless from chemo, are smooth down to his bare feet. Smooth like mine, as if he has started shaving his legs too.
April 11
Out the sliding glass door, a little concrete balcony. One chair and an ashtray, a lighter. Below us, in the near distance, there’s an apartment-complex swimming pool covered with a green tarp. My father has quit smoking. It’s not lung cancer he’s dying from. He’s stopped working construction too. Any activity in which he could break a bone is now, strictly, a part of his past. Doctor’s orders. “Do you ever cheat?” I ask. I already know the answer. We both have it in us — the compulsion to bend life hard until it snaps. “I cheat all the time,” he says.
April 14
Trees grow from older trees. They are connected by root entanglements and nodes and fungal webs. These ecological interactions form intergenerational relationships; defense enzymes can stretch throughout forests and inform whole generations.
April 17
Body burden, the load of environmental pollutants a body holds, can be transmitted prenatally. Toxins pass from one body to another body through blood. Through breast milk.
April 19
For weeks now, he’s been vomiting everything. But he’s still so hungry. Food sounds delicious. He watches cooking shows on cable. Watches people compete to turn out the most delicious slow-cooked pork, cream sauces, and peach cobblers. Today he wants a whole roast chicken to himself. Fat and bone. We watch a man chop ribs. I lift the Ensure, pale as death, up to my father’s chapped lips.
April 21
My father is dying because we lived on the fencelines of industry. Outside toxins built up inside his body. Tar from the nearby shingles factory. Soot from the nearby rail yard, polluting the air. This is suspicion, or it is fact. The doctors don’t know why he is dying. When I let myself think that the bad air around us did this to him, I feel specious, like someone who suspects their spouse of an affair. All is my own hushed theorizing, and yet — the surgeon with bright green eyes, who likes to talk at length with me out in the ICU hallway beside my father’s room, has some unique theories.
April 22
Leaving the hospital, I write a note on my cell phone that says: Salts have normalized. Continuous low-grade stomach pain. Liver like a scallop. Left kidney, a new cyst.
April 23
In a healthy forest, many generations of trees coexist beside one another and share survival information and enzyme matter. Dead trees are important to a forest, too, because in their very decomposing, they aid new plant growth.
June 14
During the consult with the genetics counselor, I answer her questions about my age, family history, and how and where I live. She tells me with ease, “We could cut it all out of you.” My breasts, she means. My ovaries. My past.
June 29
After the funeral, my cousin has brought me wine and yellow tulips. My son and his friends are playing a noisy game upstairs. Furniture slides. They knock the walls; they dive from bed frame to chair to bed frame to chair. They are laughing, playing at living, leaping to avoid sinking into the hot lava floor. It’s raining, but the sun is out. A warm spring dusk. We drink wine, and my cousin asks if I’ll open up the Arizona porch — the room that reminds him of purgatory, he says, smiling. I tell him I’d like to smash the walls but doubt I will. A cold rotisserie chicken is wedged between our thighs in a plastic container lined with gleaming, gelatinous fat. Rosemary sprigs, long as coniferous needles, poke our palms and thumbs. Pull flesh from bone with both hands; add salt. We savor the meat.
Kathryn Savage’s debut essay collection, Groundglass, is out now from Coffee House Press.