Openly Grieving Climate Disruption
What the ancestors can teach about enduring loss.
When my mother, Marilyn Sullivan Moran, died unexpectedly at the age of 70, and I was still in my 20s, a Scottish friend of hers told me that “ the mantle has passed.” Was she telling me that now I was fully an adult having lost a parent? I was not certain what she meant but I always remembered what she said.
It has been over twenty years and I’m very much an adult.
As an adult, what concerns me most, what is ever-present in my mind, is what we are doing to the natural world. The plastic in the oceans, bleaching of the corals, the melting sea ice, the weakened Gulf Stream, fires and floods, the daily extinctions.
I think back to what my Irish ancestors endured: the grinding poverty, the hunger, the wakes for the dead, and the wakes for the young people leaving. The mourning for the fracturing of community and the loss of language.
And one of the ways they addressed these losses was by keening.
There are not many words in the English language that have Irish at their root. Keen is one of them. It comes from the Irish word caoinim meaning “I weep, cry, lament” and even before then from the old Irish word coinim meaning “I wail.”
Keening was an ancient tradition practiced for many hundreds of years until the early 20th century. Each community had its own keeners, of varying talents, who vocalized formal laments in the Irish language or simply wailed during funeral processions and burials. Specifically, it was women who performed the keen, leading the bereaved in openly mourning their loved ones, thereby facilitating their community’s processing of sorrow.
Recently, in the middle of a string of weeks when my local air quality was especially poor due to wildfire smoke from hundreds of miles away, I had pain in my lower back for days. I thought to take deep breaths as I usually do to relax, but I was hesitant to breathe in more air than I actually needed. So I swam and did yoga to feel better. But I still had the pain. And I went to my chiropractor to help me feel better. But I still had the pain.
I awoke in the middle of the night one night and realized that the pain in my back was the manifestation of depression. And what did I feel so sad about? The state of our natural world. That is what I was feeling deep in my muscles and fascia.
As I lay in bed, I wondered what my role might be in this age of so much grief.
The answer was immediate: I can keen. I am at an age where I have seen and known what we have lost. I feel the loss. I can formally lament on behalf of the dead: the species, ecosystems, communities, and on and on. Lost in fire and drought and heat and floods and the indifference of so many in power.
Like the keeners of old Ireland, I can help to facilitate the open expression of my community’s sorrow.
My mind traveled to the words of my mother’s dear friend.
The country women of Ireland traditionally wore shawls. As they collected the seaweed and salted the mackerel and milked the cows and tended the hearth and told the stories and sat with the sick and keened the dead.
A shawl is a mantle.
Lying in bed, I decided to accept the mantle now that I knew what it was and made the conscious decision to express my feelings openly for what has been lost.
My mother died before most ordinary people realized the enormity of the climate crisis.
But she wore a mantle from our ancestors as well. Even though she was born in America, she retained some of the old ways, the simple ways of her grandparents and their grandparents.
She knew where she came from. She was a descendant of the Famine and never wasted food. A child of the Depression, she sewed fabric from old clothes into quilts. She read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and avoided chemical pesticides in her garden. She kept a compost pile. Though she lived in a prim suburb as an adult, far from the working-class immigrant community where she was raised, she continued to line dry the laundry even when the neighbors would rather she not. Such simple actions. But actions I feel that more of us must now take. To live more simply.
I fell asleep and when I awoke, I climbed out of bed without the pain in my back. It had subsided with my acknowledgment of grief.
I accept the shawl of my grandmothers, knowing there will be many opportunities for me to keen for the rest of my days. For what we have lost. For what we are losing.
And I also wear my mother’s shawl. I hang my wash and compost my apple cores and clean with rags made from worn shirts. And I listen for the birdsong each morning, grateful for all that we still have, appreciative of every Spring.
