My grandfather entered hospice on Thursday, August 13, 2020. That same Thursday was my first day of distance teaching. It was 2020, a year of devastation and unrest: panic and waiting, the reinventing of routines. A dry California was about to ignite from a series of lightning strikes. There was “so much fire in that sky,” writes Manjula Martin in The Last Fire Season. “It had to land somewhere.” Martin’s memoir chronicles her life during the LNU Lightning Complex Fires in the late summer of that year. The fires that raged in the background of Martin’s life in Sonoma County also raged in the background of mine in Sacramento.
My grandfather spent his final week surrounded by his family. COVID be damned, we gathered. We needed to be together. I was scared. Not just scared of Grandpa’s imminent death, but scared of infecting my family members with a virus I didn’t understand. These were the early days of the pandemic, when everything was unknown and fear made me choke on my own breath. Everything about existing was scary, and fire was about to make that worse.
Martin’s memoir captures the breathlessness of that time and Californians’ collective discomfort as we tried to keep the dual catastrophes of a pandemic and wildfires at bay. As she examines her own complicated attachment to a Northern California home tucked into the redwoods and our state’s complicated relationship with fire, the author expresses the uncertainty and overwhelming havoc of a time when our first action to keep one another safe was to move apart. It was a time when the only safe space was outdoors, but the outdoors were toxic. Every cliché applied; we told one another how we had no words. We were caught between a rock and a hard place. The tightest of spots. In a time of ineffable fear, Martin writes, “such hyperbole was forgivable.”
We sat around my grandfather’s bed that week, taking turns holding his hands. My uncle would dip a sponge into water in a plastic Bert and Ernie cup, then hold it to Grandpa’s lips. Mostly, we were just together. Just there. Ours is a close family of teasing and hugging and good-natured competition. My mom and her siblings seemed to be engaged in an unspoken contest for who could remember the best family recipes, who could cook the best version of a family dish, and who could remember the best family story. They’d leave to buy food and come back with boxes of candy from their childhood. They cooked through their grief, filling time and our mouths because we couldn’t address the emptiness we faced, the hole we knew he’d leave in our family.
It was a time of not knowing, my first experience anticipating a death. Martin conveys the indecisiveness of the time, the collective weight of our climate anxiety. She says, “You just couldn’t know anything anymore.” While we waited for the winds to subside, for the fires to burn out, we also waited for Grandpa to let go. The Earth refused to cool. Temperatures climbed to desert highs. Gusts shook the fruit trees Grandpa had worked so hard to curate into a thriving backyard farm. It looked apocalyptic, and it felt like the end.
“You should come,” my mom said when she called late Saturday night. “Grandpa is awake and speaking.” I got dressed and rushed over. The lights from Grandma’s vanity were dimmed in the corner of the room, casting a gentle glow on the faces of my aunts and uncles, who scanned each new person who entered the room, every one of their faces doing the same work. They searched for a question or a reaction, trying at the same time to communicate something indescribable. We played hymns and John Denver. Sang without shame and cried openly. Occasionally, a song sparked a story, and we’d peal into laughter. I could tell that Grandma felt comfort in the warm and messy flow of family conversation. One last night.
It was enchanting. We searched for the next song that might extend it and bring him back to us, if only briefly. Grandpa clapped his hands to John Philip Sousa. He said “I love you” several times in a soft voice, an approximation of the commanding man we’d known. He looked into our eyes, mouthing other words too softly to hear. When my husband entered the room and greeted him with a handshake and a “Good to see you, sir,” Grandpa reacted. “Sir” brought some part of his consciousness to the forefront. He shook Eric’s hand, clasping his own on top.
Eventually, we’d leave, driving across town to lie in our own beds. We counted our breaths, wondering if Grandpa was already gone. The sky erupted in lightning. Early that Sunday morning, it struck in several counties, sparking dry grass. The weather was mawkish: a first draft of fiction that was too on the nose. Temperatures peaked even though the wind howled. An embarrassment of metaphors. The state burst into flames, the beginning of one of the greatest wildfires on record. As Martin writes, “everywhere was dangerous, inside and out.” The next day, the sky remained an unsubtle gray. Branches shook and strained.
It’s a strange thing, waiting for someone to die. Is it a transgression to write that it felt like waiting for a birth? Let go, I thought. Help him let go. Sometimes my grandmother would lean close to his ear and tell him that it was OK. I didn’t know what to pray beyond that, so I just tried to hold everyone up. A loving-kindness meditation, over and over: May you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live at ease. I tried and failed to think of death as part of a life.
I don’t know why we’d think it was more likely to happen at one moment than another. Some times felt closer to the line. Just before he did pass, I was sitting with my sister and dad. My dad was talking about life insurance, and she said, “Wait.” This was it. Everyone came. But we didn’t know. How do you know? You are hoping it comes quickly because you’re exhausted. You want him to let go of pain, even though you would give anything to have him back. We sat in silence, afraid to breathe, to interfere. It doesn’t happen the way you’d think, with a sudden break in breaths. There were several long silences, each followed by a breath. Then nothing. We waited. Someone asked, “Is it over?”
Martin writes of solastalgia, a neologism for “the grief that a person felt when her home environment was irrevocably altered.” Quoting Glenn Albrecht, the Australian professor and environmental activist who came up with the term, she notes that it’s “‘a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.’” In that moment, I was already homesick for Grandpa and homesick for the version of us I’d always known. The house couldn’t remain the same. The yard full of fruit trees would change. Martin writes that as she faced the reality of the fires, she “wondered how much of my fear of these fires, that smoke, was really about the world ending and how much was about my world ending.” That week was a little of both. Martin’s work is a reminder that change is the fundamental constant. To think we can go back to some before or keep the natural world the same is a fool’s errand.
An unchanged landscape is a myth. So is an unchanged life.•
Join us on Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Martin will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Susan Orlean to discuss The Last Fire Season. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Q&A
Read an interview with Manjula Martin about her path as an editor before recently joining literary magazine Zyzzyva as its senior editor. —Zyzzyva
BERKELEY NOIR
Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin reviews Owen Hill’s The Giveaway, which collects the complete Clay Blackburn tetralogy. —Alta
SPOKANE NOVEL
Read an excerpt from Jess Walter’s latest absorbing book, So Far Gone. —Narrative Magazine
GATSBY
Critic and Alta contributor Paula L. Woods reviews Kyra Davis Lurie’s The Great Mann, which takes its inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel and foregrounds lesser-known L.A. history. —Los Angeles Times
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