My grandparents founded the Matheny school for my uncle, who was born with cerebral palsy in 1941.  He had come into a world that was ill-equipped to accommodate children with special needs. So my grandfather obtained a GI loan to open a school for my uncle and other similarly afflicted kids. My mother grew up immersed in a therapeutic environment designed to bring my uncle and his peers to their fullest potential.

You cannot help but learn empathy when you grow up in a place like Matheny.  These are people who are profoundly affected by their disabilities, people for whom God-given intellectual and creative gifts are often eclipsed by the bodies they’ve received — people deserving of care and respect.  Certainly more care and respect than was given to the gentleman mocked by a certain person during his Presidential campaign.

I had to drive by the Trump International Golf Resort in Bedminster on my way to the Matheny event. I may or may not have flipped the bird as I sped by.

*

I’m working on a new project now — a story about someone in my family whom I have never met.

My mother was adopted, after have been born to an unwed girl in the early 1950s, when America was great. A girl who hid her pregnancy from her family so well that when she went into labor on a Saturday in late September, her mother telephoned the doctor for a house call to see why her daughter was having such a bellyache.

My mother entered the world prematurely — perhaps due to the girl’s corseting, or stress. Or both. The doctor delivered my mother and rushed her to the hospital, where she remained in an incubator for another month before the Matheny family took her home. The girl, who labored and writhed and cried out in pain as her body expelled her sin and the trees outside her window released their autumn leaves — the girl was left behind. She never saw my mother. The girl’s name was Ginger; she had once been a counselor at a Matheny summer camp.

*

I was a freshman in college when my mother began the search for her birth parents. She hired a private investigator, who helped her with the process of tracking down her roots. I have the artifacts of their work in my office — thick notebooks containing photographs and correspondence, certificates of birth, marriage and death.

I am working on that story now, but suffice it to say that the plot of Ginger’s story resembles gravity. Like a branch dropped from a tree into a river coursing by, dragged under bridges by the cold current and thrown against the jagged edges of rock until finally stopping dead in a silt-choked place.

The narrative we told ourselves once we learned the painful details of Ginger’s life focused on the blessings of adoption — thank God you were raised by someone else — and of course we were right to be grateful for my mother’s adoptive family. But we said this as if her birth mother had been the Titanic, as if the ensuing alcoholism and suspected abusive marriage and mental health issues were inevitable, and had nothing to do with the shunning or the trauma she endured.

We said this as if she’d been bad, like a bruised fruit instead of a person. Like she wasn’t the kind of person who had enough character to work with the disabled.

*

This project deviates from my usual environmental work, I know. But aside from the fact that this story is part of my own, I am interested in the circumstances surrounding my mother’s birth because I think Ginger’s story is emblematic of a larger thing.

What I mean to say is that I think the way society treats its women is connected to its propensity for violence,

… which is connected to oppression,

… which is connected to exploitation,

…which is connected to destruction.

There’s parallel refrain in the study of women and earth in our culture. A parallel refrain of consumption and control.

*

Look at how women and the environment were treated, for example, back when America was great. Or better yet, look at the current policy agenda of the Trump administration.

 *

During my weekend trip to New Jersey, I visited some of the places where Ginger had lived. I started with the house where my mother was born. It sits on a curved county road in an affluent part of the state, near a one-lane bridge that crosses the Lamington River. A place with historic farmlands and equestrian stables — not all that far from the Trump golf resort.

After I stopped to record my impressions of the place, I returned to my car and drove on, quickly passing a house owned by someone as offended by Trump as myself. Their yard was filled with protest signs: Hate Has No Home Here, Stand with the ACLU, Resist the Madness, Clinics Not Alleys.

Hours later, into upstate New York, I drove through the trailer park where Ginger had eventually settled after she left her husband. Then onto Newburgh, where she died all alone. Here, the storefronts of buildings were covered with plywood and corrugated metal, and the curbs of the streets were littered with trash.  Sidewalks were occupied by drifting, listless people — stereotypical urban decay, stereotypical human decline.

I hadn’t expected my heart to pound the way it did, hadn’t expected to hear my own heightened breath. But there I was in the car, anxious to turn around and head for home. I know my own privilege amplified my reaction to the final place where my biological grandmother lived. Or maybe it was the thought that she had likely been one of those aimless people smoking a cigarette in an alcove of an abandoned store.

All I know is that I fought hot, angry tears when I saw that car right in front of me a few miles down the road, as I made my way back to the highway — that red Chevy sedan with a Trump bumper sticker and another one that read: Stop Planned Parenthood Now.

*

The saddest part of the story is that she died all alone, that nobody came to claim her after she took her final breath.

 *

Last year in Indiana, then-Governor and Vice President-Elect Mike Pence signed a law requiring health care facilities to notify female patients who miscarry and undergo abortions in their care, that arrangements must be made for proper cremation or burial of “their baby.” Lawmakers in Ohio, South Carolina, and Mississippi have recently considered similar measures; those in Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas have already succeeded in codifying such policies into statute. Which means that, in many places, there is more concern for the dignity of fetal tissue than for someone like the invisible woman from which my mother and I came.

I am aware of the irony of my unwavering pro-choice position — my mother and I probably wouldn’t even exist if birth control had been widely available in the 1950s, or if accessible, legal abortion had been an option for Ginger back when America was great.

But I believe this woman’s life was wasted because she had wandered outside the lines. She endured what she endured because she didn’t have much choice. I believe that she was somebody, a real person who had once cared for others less fortunate than her. And I can’t help the expression of empathy that she has passed down in my DNA.

Photo Credit: Sal Pellingra/EyeEm/Getty Images

The post Empathy appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

We spent the weekend camping, just the four of us. A long hike through the newly green forests of Vermont’s northern mountains. A 5-mile loop to the fire tower and back, led by the 10-year-old, who finally has the stamina to do this sort of thing. She hummed along the steep trail with her walking stick and darted up the rock ledges, encouraging the dog. We ate lunch at the crumbled remains of a Civilian Conservation Corps cabin, taking in the view, which was real, alive and true.

I like to think that this is the sort of freedom the fallen had intended to protect — the fresh air, the scenery, the time and access to move freely about this place we call home and absorb all its sensory pleasures. I like to think that my duty to the deceased is to cherish what we have, so I savored the sound of water tumbling over rock, the smell of honeysuckle and balsam, the squish of moss and mud beneath my feet. I looked out over the layered ridges in the distance, admired the variations of blue and green. I listened to the crack and hiss of the evening campfire, and enjoyed a conversation between owls on the cusp of night.

Later, when the camping was done and we’d returned to cell phone range, I learned that Brian Doyle had passed away. Taken from this life by a cancer of the brain, diagnosed just last Thanksgiving.

It is not lost on me, the timing of his final act. Brian was a man of wisdom, of deep humility and faith, his body of creative work a reflection of these traits (take, for instance, his essay, “Memorial Day”). It makes sense to me, somehow, that his exit from the earth occurred during a sanctioned time of remembrance, a time when we are reminded of our debts to those who came before us, when we question what, exactly, has been sacrificed so we might continue our quest for the American dream.

I think maybe Brian was a master of that pursuit, a master of finding happiness and other phenomena of the human condition within the folds of our pockets, in the everyday moments tucked between the recesses of our minds. Even in the wake of his diagnosis last fall, when the uncertainty of illness and pain loomed before him and his family, he requested of his friends and followers, simply: “Be tender and laugh.”

This has been hard. I have been sullen and short-tempered with friends, with family, with total strangers — I guess because lately, the state of our union has felt to me like a terminal diagnosis. I have descended into the rabbit hole of internet research, obsessing over best case and worst case scenarios, grieving candidly over the serious illness I feel is plaguing my country now — a “big honkin’ brain tumor,” as Brian Doyle called his own particular affliction.

Tumors of this sort work swiftly. Over the last six months, I have watched and protested as the powerful and greedy have begun to dismantle all the systems that were put into place to protect the historically oppressed and vulnerable among us. I have contacted my elected officials and marched for the integrity of science in policy while the Trump administration denies the realities of climate change and maneuvers to hoard and squander and pollute the land and water that we’re all supposed to share. It has been like witnessing a death — an intentional death, a dirty secret back room deal to divide the entire estate while those in charge hold a pillow over the gasping mouth of our democratic ideals.

Fuck this cancer. Fuck cancer fuck Trump fuck Pence fuck McConnell fuck Ryan fuck Sessions fuck Pruitt fuck Bannon fuck Tillerson fuck Kushner fuck Spicer and DeVoes.   I am sad, I am angry — so much that I am no longer making good on my pursuit of happiness.

Last weekend, my family and I wove through patches of purple and painted trillium in the forest surrounding Lake Elmore — a park that was gifted to the State of Vermont by local citizens in 1936. This was a dark period in our history, when Americans suffered under the Great Depression and Dorothea Lange snapped her iconic photograph, Migrant Mother, to expose the poverty and exploitation of migrant laborers, and Hitler’s dictatorship in Nazi Germany was metastasizing into a global concern. A period perhaps not so unlike the one we are facing now.

And yet, within periods of despair, there are glimmers of light. A community of readers come together to celebrate a departed writer’s gorgeous words. A group of local citizens donate a tract of land, so that 80 years later, a family might take a hike together in a forest and reaffirm their definition of joy.

Jesse Owens earned four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, disproving on a world stage Hitler’s unfounded theory of Aryan superiority. It was the very first televised Olympic Games; the world was literally watching. Remember that story? That beautiful black body exploding away from the line, pulling farther and farther away from the others in the race. A moment of human excellence, shining in an arena draped with hatred and aggression. Oh how it must have felt to be American on that day, to rise above that stain.

It must have been something else.

The post Memorial Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.