Micro-scale real estate. Marvelous birds with better memory than yours. Neighbors recording neighbors. Love among seniors. A profile of a woman who’s been both ubiquitous and anonymous for 15 years. All that—and more!—in this week’s edition.

1. Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures

Scott Huler | Esquire | November 20, 2023 | 5,653 words

In summer 2020, I ordered a miniature house kit, thinking it would be the first of many cute dioramas I’d construct while stuck at home. As I write this, however, I glance over at the unopened box, a bit embarrassed that I have yet to experience the joy of making it. For Esquire, Scott Huler immerses himself in the world of working miniaturists, and a movement that exploded during lockdown and grew even more popular thanks to Instagram and TikTok. Speaking with collectors and artists, such as professional miniaturist Robert Off, Huler explores the why behind this art. What makes a roombox—the boxed display that houses a miniature 3D environment—so irresistible? I love what Huler discovers: for many miniature makers and viewers, a roombox provides a way to focus, a place of relief. An entire world in which to escape, or to control. An outlet to imagine and dream that “just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway.” This piece brought me joy, not just because I was wowed by the skilled craftsmanship of miniaturists working today, but it also reminded me of the peace we can find within our interior world, and the power of our own imagination. —CLR

2. Last Love: A Romance in a Care Home

Sophie Elmhirst | The Guardian | November 23, 2023 | 4,036 words

I had to take a moment after reading this essay to sit and untangle the mess of feelings it brought up. It’s joyful, desperately sad, and a poignant reflection on aging: a standout piece. Sophie Elmhirst introduces us to two lovers, Mary and Derek. Theirs is teenage love, pure and easy, with no responsibility to weigh it down. But Mary and Derek are no teenagers; their meet-cute is in a care home. With just a few choice words, Elmhirst brings their characters to life, mixing their love story with memories to remind us of what came before a life of inconveniences and incontinence pads. She uses short, crisp sentences, jumping from place to place and emulating the way fragments of memory come bright and clear before fading and falling out of reach. It was as if I was sitting with Mary, listening as she grasped for a memory before finding another. In a few paragraphs, we have a snapshot of two lives, swinging from love to tragedy, the way life can—a history that makes the love story even more beautiful. “It’s different, meeting someone late in life,” Elmhirst explains. “You know you won’t have long, so the love feels more urgent.” (Even if this leads to awkward noises from the home’s bedrooms.) When the love is lost, it hits with a jolt, and Mary is shocked into facing the truth that she will never go home again. Yet, her final pragmatism is inspiring. An essay that made me think about aging in a way I never have before. —CW

3. How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Lauren Smiley | WIRED | November 7, 2023 | 7,704 words

Last April, law enforcement in San Francisco’s Marina District responded to 911 calls about an unhoused man who was beating a local resident with a metal object. The suspect was quickly arrested and the story soon went viral, in no small part because there was a video of the incident. But there were other videos—as Lauren Smiley writes, “In San Francisco, there’s always another video”—and in time they revealed there was more to the story, particularly as it pertained to the supposed victim. I don’t want to give the rest away, because this feature should be read in its entirety. It’s a masterful retelling of events, certainly, but it’s also a razor-sharp, much-needed analysis of the way San Franciscans now police one another via cell phone videos, Ring cameras, and other devices. This citizen surveillance, as Smiley shows, is feeding the national narrative about San Francisco as a place of squalor and violence. Tape something on your doorstep and before long, “the cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In with Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk.” —SD

4. The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

Brian Payton | Hakai Magazine | November 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

First, let us have a moment of appreciation for this banger of a headline, in tribute to Judith Viorst’s classic childhood read, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. I was powerless to resist this piece and was well rewarded for my time. Brian Payton’s Hakai story about the winged wizard known as the Canada jay is satisfying beginning to end. This is no paltry plumed profile; Payton weaves fact, anecdote, and story together so deftly that these 3,700 words evaporate before your very eyes. I could have read a story double the length and still would have wanted more. You’ll meet 81-year old Dan Strickland, a naturalist who is the world’s foremost authority on the bird species, his knowledge gained from decades spent observing and interacting with the cunning corvids in the boreal and subalpine forests where they make their home. “Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information,” writes Payton. “London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.” Not only is this story about a jay a real joy, it’s a rare treasure that reminds me of why I fell in love with reading in the first place: learning about those with such deep interests is deeply interesting. —KS

5. Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

Caity Weaver | The New York Times Magazine | November 25, 2023 | 4,690 words

I always feel just a twinge of guilt recommending a story that has already become The Thing Everybody Read This Week. In my defense, though, I read the story before This Week had even officially begun, and immediately knew that it would be my Top 5 pick. Also in my defense, the first line is perfect. “One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth.” Why is this perfect? Well, because it tells you everything you need to know about what the story will be about, and what this story will be. It will be funny (as Caity Weaver’s profiles always are). It will be clear-eyed. It will be armed with some well-earned cynicism about how companies—or, rather, their vaporous and often uncanny incarnations known as “brands”—operate. The one thing this sentence doesn’t quite prepare you for is how generous the story is. How generous its subject is. And how generously you might think about things thereafter. We all have aspirations. Sometimes our life realizes those aspirations, sometimes it doesn’t. But sometimes even when it doesn’t, it does. Stephanie Courtney, the comic actor once bent on getting to Saturday Night Live and now in firm possession of a far more fulfilling gig, knows that better than anyone. —PR

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? Drumroll, please!

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

A push for slavery reparations. The dilemma of wild cows. A complicated racial heritage. How bees require a balanced diet. And the joys of swimming in the slow lane.

1. Inside Barbados’ Historic Push for Slave Reparations

Janell Ross| TIME |July 6, 2023 | 4,309 words

It’s been nine years since Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic. Today, the idea of compensating Black Americans for the horrors of slavery and institutionalized racism remains fringe at best. The same goes in other countries that were once complicit in human bondage. But in the island nation of Barbados, where slaves made sugar plantations wildly lucrative, support for reparations is very real—and growing stronger. This year, under the leadership of President Mia Mottley, the country is asking European countries for a “Marshall Plan-like public investment,” as opposed to the individual payments we usually associate with reparations. Mottley, though, isn’t at the heart of this feature about Barbados’ groundbreaking efforts. Instead, writer Jannell Ross showcases Esther Phillips, the country’s poet laureate, who went from believing reparations were radical, to viewing them as unlikely, to arguing passionately for them. Phillips hopes that other people, particularly in Europe, will undergo transformations of their own. “If something of such horror is revealed,” she tells Ross, “and you’re still benefiting from the proceeds, you cannot turn you head and say, ‘Well, what has to do with me?’”—SD

2. The Republic of Cows

Jude Isabella | Hakai | August 15, 2023 | 5,525 words

Last year, our sister publication, The Atavist, published one of my favorite features in recent memory: a story about feral cows who were washed away in a storm surge, only to resurface miles away, perfectly fine. I don’t think I’d thought about feral cows before that point. In my mind, conditioned as it was by cheese companies and weird college mascots, “bovine” was synonymous with “domesticated.” Even after reading it, my image of feral cows remained indistinguishable from the archetype of the placid ruminant. But as Jude Isabella points out in her visit to Alaska’s uninhabited Chirikof Island, the truth is udderly different. “Trappers on Chirikof have witnessed up to a dozen bulls at a time pursuing and mounting cows, causing injury, exhaustion, and death, especially to heifers,” she writes. Troublesome rutting is only one of the issues plaguing Chirikof; the 2,000 cattle there are federally protected, but everyone else is torn about whether that’s a boon or a bane for the island’s ecosystem. One wildlife biologist Isabella talks to points out that Chirikof’s shape—either a T-bone steak or a teardrop, depending on who’s describing it—neatly embodies the tension at hand. At its heart, this is a nature piece, one that transports you (by seaplane) to a land of wind-rippled meadows and majestic untamed beasts. But it’s also a challenge to our very conceptions of cows. Yes, we can imagine Chirikof as a utopia for its massive herd—but what of the many other species that call Chirikof home? —PR

3. My Time Machine

Arthur Asseraf | Granta | July 25, 2023 | 3,029  words

Arthur Asseraf became a historian in part to overcome the confusion of his ancestry: his paternal grandmother was born in Morocco and eventually returned to France, for reasons undiscernible to Asseraf as a child. As he gains context and knowledge, Asseraf carefully confronts his grandmother’s distaste for Arabs and her unwillingness to see them as equal to her as an Algerian Jew. The more he learns about her past, the more distant he becomes to her. “I never told my colleagues the truth: that I knew colonialism not only through reading books, but also because its representative served me fish fingers after school,” he writes. Things change as Assaraf’s grandmother develops dementia and she reveals the anti-semitism she encountered as a Jew after the Second World War. This piece is a beautiful read about a grandson’s desire to understand a heritage mired in racist colonialism, coupled with the discovery that his grandmother, over the course of her life, was both oppressor and victim. —KS

4. America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

Lex Pryor | The Ringer | August 3, 2023 | 6,482 words

Nearly 6,500 words on the state of bees in America? Yes, please. Lex Pryor’s piece is the bee’s knees—one part education, one part entertainment, and replete with fascinating characters—a piece that just might inspire you to do what you can for your local pollinators. It is well known that bees help produce many of the foods we eat, and keepers Andrew Coté and Bill Crawford are among those who tote hives to farms across the US to ensure that there are enough pollinators buzzing around for crops to thrive. But, did you know that monoculture farming is partly to blame for dwindling bee colonies in America? “It used to be that I could put down my bees somewhere and they’ll get a nice diversity of nectar and they’ll be healthy,” says Coté. “But now if I put them down in almonds, it’d be like if you or I ate kale. Kale is good, kale is healthy…But if we eat kale only for six weeks, like the bees have almond nectar only for six weeks, at the end of it, we won’t be dead—we may wish we were—but we’ll just be unhealthy and then susceptible to other health problems.” It turns out that a balanced diet isn’t just good for you, it’s good for the bees, too. —KS

5. Epiphany at the Y

Diane Mehta | Virginia Quarterly Review | June 12, 2023 | 4,236 words

I love to swim. Put me in front of a body of water and I will want to jump in it—temperature be damned. The feeling of a new silky texture rushing to envelop your skin. The silence of submerging. The sudden weightlessness of heavy limbs. However, not all swimming has equal majesty. Give me endless wild splashing in a sea or a lake, never the confusing etiquette of public pool lane-swimming. As I read this beautiful essay, I nodded to Diane Mehta’s frustration at swimming in the slow lane of her local YMCA pool. Why was a woman touching her foot? Why was another woman performing cartwheels and ballet steps? But Mehta keeps on going. Every. Single. Day. You will root for her as she learns to swim freestyle for the first time, and feel for her as she comes to grips with middle age and her new, less cooperative body. She swims until she “fell in love with the woman who cartwheeled down the lane, the stalwart silver-haired man who strode in with deliberation, [and] the older lady who gravitated forward like a Galapagos turtle.” And she swims until she also loves her own body again. I think I need to give lane-swimming another chance. —CW

Audience Award

Here’s the piece that stood out for our audience this week.

Healthspan—years lived in good health—might be the unsexy cousin of longevity research, but figuring out ways for people to live healthier lives could have a much greater impact than extending lifespan by a few years. A big part of extending healthy lives is pinpointing when people start to decline in health, and what the early indicators of that decline might be. One way is by looking at frailty—a measure that usually takes into account factors like social isolation, mobility, and health conditions to produce an overall frailty score. In England, the National Health Service automatically calculates frailty scores for everyone aged 65 and over, with the aim to help people live independently for longer and avoid two major causes of hospital admissions for older people: falls and adverse responses to medication.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Mylène Dressler | Longreads | April 11, 2023 | 19 minutes (5,461 words)

Surfing shouldn’t be done alone. Like diving, spelunking, rock climbing, or cutting a watermelon, too much can go sideways. Conditions are unpredictable, equipment or experience can fail — and injury is always the biggest worry. Come off a surfboard the wrong way in three feet of water, and you can hurt yourself, sometimes badly. Come off the wrong way, at the wrong moment, in the wrong place on a large wave and go tumbling into its powerful impact zone, and you might end up floating to the surface (or not) unconscious, or be unable to move some crucial part of your body you’d been counting on to steer you back to light, air, life, and joy.

And that’s the thing about surfing: risks and all, it’s an incredibly joyful activity. It is, in fact, the single most joyful thing I have ever done in my five decades on this beautiful, wave-driven, water-circled planet. And it’s an incredibly joyful life. Surfers plan their days around when they can plunge into the gorgeousness of an ocean, and then spend hours trying to attune their bodies to something as old as time, to the very water that our bodies are made of, and that feels, when you finally manage all that weight, like standing up on the lip of a laughing, moving heaven . . .  while at the same time it hurtles you, almost ferocious, across a strangely solid-seeming surface, on the ride of your hey-look-at-me-I’m-flying life.

There is nothing quite like it. Surfing is, for many who hit the waves, more than “fun,” “cool,” or “good exercise.” It is a way of being connected to a deeper deep, an older old. Perhaps even to feel, to learn something that is eluding you on land.

But there are those sticky risks, and all surfers know them, or should. Nonsurfers always ask me first: What about sharks? (Actually shark attacks are quite rare, although they do happen, and then not being alone on the water might save you — it’s how famous, now one-armed short-boarder Bethany Hamilton survived and still surfs.) What about protection from what can hurt you? Some surfers wear life vests, even helmets. Most surfers’ best protection is self-knowledge; they only go out when the size of the wave matches their skill level, and no higher. And all surfers know the admonition about going out with a buddy, or at least when there are others in the water. Just in case. It is common sense. It is wisdom.

And yet, some days, I go out alone.

Most surfers, when pressed, will tell you that surfing alone isn’t really an issue — because these days, and especially at the best surf spots on the planet, surfing solo is becoming damn near impossible. This is because there has been, in the last decade or so, an absolute explosion in the sport (what elite surfers do) and the addictive hobby (what everybody else does). Fueled at first by the development of safer, beginner-friendly boards (large, puffy, and buoyant, these “foamies” are easier to stand up on and less likely to slice you with a hard rail or razor-like fin), and then by an accompanying rise in the number of surf camps, clubs, instructors, and videos, the explosion turned even hotter and brighter in the dark season of the pandemic. Hungry and desperate for “safe,” liberating, virus-thwarting outdoor activity, thousands of novices (or “kooks”) headed to surf shops for boards, leashes, rash guards and wetsuits, and beaches filled with new, giddy converts. Many of these were women, who, after a half-century of being active and yet still barely visible in the water, now account for perhaps 20 percent of surfers worldwide.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s very best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning—and keep up with all our picks by subscribing to our daily update.

• Longreads Newsletters
• Daily Updates

I was one of them. I had tried surfing for the first time about 10 years earlier, on the beaches at Wilmington, North Carolina, and then for a second time at surf hot spot Nosara, Costa Rica. Both times I fell in love with the feel of the waves and the deeper deep, and was in awe of the beautiful, expert surfers (both women and men) all around me, riding with such grace and focus. Still, it was hard to imagine myself, really, as one of them. I adored and could manage the surging, pushing “whitewash” — the “inside” of a surf break that is close to shore and consists of smaller, already broken waves, ideal for beginners — but it was hard to see myself ever surfing “outside,” where the full-throated, heavier swells were. And after I turned in my rented board and flew home again, distance did the work of doubt. If you don’t live close to the water, surfing requires even more gas, a greater effort of will and imagination. Ah, well, I thought. Who was I to pretend I could move in the way that Bethany Hamilton did?

Then the pandemic hit. As it happened, months before the virus shut down everything in between two oceans, I had already decided to relocate to Oregon to be closer to my elderly parents. They had moved to a tiny town, an unofficial but de facto retirement community perched high on a cliff above a beautiful Pacific cove. Strangely, we had had the sense that something, some surge was coming, something that would be better endured if we were all together (I’d thought, vaguely, it might have to do with climate change). We didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, it would be better not to be alone.

The little town where we settled was low-key, serene, somewhat remote. (I am not going to   name it, in the time-honored and somewhat selfish tradition of a surfer trying to protect a special, quiet spot). It seemed like a good hideout. And there were, intriguingly, what looked, down below, like rideable waves.

In those early weeks when I studied the cove, there would indeed be a surfer, sometimes alone, and now and then buddied up, a pair of bodies floating tarred and thickened in heavy black wetsuits. Usually, though, the water was completely empty of humans. There were more whales and seals than any flipperless mammals. Even the small beach had few people combing it, and when I walked there I found almost all of them were older, some walking with balancing sticks.

I kept looking at the waves. Clearly they could be surfed. And the water was right here. But could I, barely a “kook,” handle it?

To find out, I drove 45 minutes and two towns away to the nearest surf shop. There an affable young man with dreadlocks told me that better breaks for beginners were farther north, and that the small cove’s waves weren’t really all that attractive, “mushy,” closing out fast, often criss-crossing as the tide went in or out. But people did surf there, sure. Not often. Not many. A few.

On his advice I bought a hooded black wetsuit recommended for 50-degree water, and a pair of black wet boots. I bought my first board: a blue and white beginner board, a foamie, eight-and-a-half feet long. I was so excited I had to call my friend back in North Carolina, the woman who had first encouraged me to go into the water. I was really going to do this, I told her. I was going to try to be a surfer.

The very first day that the gray, choppy waves below looked less cross-stitched and hairy, I lugged my board down. There was no one in the water, but there were a few people wandering around on the beach, and I decided that that would have to be safe enough, that at least I could be seen from shore. (The looks I got as I passed with my big, fat board were surprised, wrinkled, smiling.) Besides, I decided, if I was waiting for a buddy in a place where no one really surfed, I might be waiting for a long time.

I waded into the water, alert — but not afraid, I noticed, or at least no more so than I had been the few times I had surfed before. When the water was waist deep I hopped onto the deck of my new prize. The board was reassuring. A boat, of sorts. I floated for a moment. And then it happened. The lessons I had taken before all at once came back to me. Within a few minutes, I was surfing “inside,” standing up briefly and falling joyfully. Even in this cold, out-of-the-way, fairly inhospitable little bay, all the feelings I remembered from my earlier “sessions” came back to me. Of riding on the tongue of something magical, long, wild, wide and laughing. Of sinking into something huge and real and roiling that made it impossible to think or worry or wonder about anything else. Of being connected to something that was bigger than me, but included me, of being part of some unspoken history. (I am mixed race, part Pacific Islander. Had some current in me, I wondered, traveled this ocean before?)

What I hadn’t expected was how magical it was to be alone in the water. Always, when I had surfed before, there had been a crowd with me in the waves. Here, instead, flocks of gulls circled overhead, and an occasional pelican. I saw a seal’s head and neck at a bobbing distance, checking out my own black-hooded costume. The people on the beach were mere specks. Everything else that was human seemed to have melted away. In all that beautiful solitude I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I hadn’t known how much I needed this aloneness, after years of crowded work at a university, after months of eldercare, the phobias of the pandemic, and the stresses of a crowded, socially mediated, 21st-century life. And too, after five decades of being told, as a woman, I should try to avoid being alone in a risky place, whether it was a parking garage or at the base of a cresting swell.

My friend, Maia, the one I’d called from the surf shop, the first person to encourage me to try surfing, likes to say that water is the universal solvent. It breaks things down. Put anything in it for long enough, and it will dissolve it. It can erase distinctions. It can blur the rigid. Water, the ocean, scrubs, refines, releases. It defies expectation.

Under my wet boots I could feel the cove’s shifting sandbars rising and falling. When I came back a few days later, they were in another place. No place where you put your foot, in a sea, is ever the same. No wave, curling from the intensity of finding fresh bottom, is ever the same. Each moment in a surf session is unique. And in that endless originality, I quickly discovered, is a kind of salvation. A freedom. Because you can’t force an ocean to bend to your will. You can’t meet an ocean rigidly or with any idea of ultimate control. You are not in charge, and you can’t learn to surf if you think you are or ever will be. But neither are you nothing, disengaged. You are water meeting water.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

Week after week, month after month, session after session, I tried and failed and sometimes succeeded in riding, for longer periods, the smaller waves, while sowing all my stresses into the gray, punchy, churning Pacific. On the days that were too big for me to surf, I still stared at the waves and tried to read them, understand them. And understand myself beside them. It seemed to me I was learning to let go of many things, with their help: rabid control, the idea of being the perfect daughter, the perfect caretaker of aging parents, perfectionism in general, even (at least as it pertained to surfing), ambition. I was never going to be great at all of this, I decided. It didn’t matter. I would do my best. Each time I went alone into the waves, I couldn’t stop smiling. With no one to see the smile, and no one the smile was for. When I came out of the water, my cheeks actually hurt from so much joy. The water had been balm, the wetsuit had warmed it, and the ocean had circled me, and me alone.

For about a year I surfed solo in the cove. Now and then, on a big day, unsafe for me to do anything but watch from the sand, an experienced surfer might arrive and — ignoring my gaze — paddle to the outside, usually all by himself, and ride the fat waves there. Then come out, perhaps nod, and drive away. And then the cove was empty again.

Sometimes, when the cove looked sketchy and internet surf forecasts suggested better waves to the north, I ventured to the more crowded, “beginner” beaches. But I never noticed that I did any better there, and was always glad to come back to the imperfect and familiar. By now I and my blue and white board had become such a fixture on the beach I was called by the locals the “Surf Lady.” I admit, I reveled in this status. (They didn’t know I was at best a mediocre surfer, and it didn’t matter to me that I was.) I was a surf lady. My whole world, my life, had been transformed by my relationship with the water. My days were guided by 1) whatever it was my family might need that day, and 2) the rhythm of the waves and the tides. I learned to read the surf forecasts as though they were runes. I studied swell direction, wave energy, wave height. I watched for offshore winds (better for surfing), but went out in crosswinds or when they were onshore, too. Finally, I felt I had outgrown my beginner board and bought my second board: shorter, sleeker, thinner, pale cream with a brown stripe. It was amazing. Like switching from riding a mattress to riding a motorcycle.

One day, as I was coming out of the water with this new board and walking toward the cliffs and past the small, scattered line of elderly beachcombers, a man approached me and introduced himself. He had just moved to town, he said, he lived right there (he pointed close to the water), he had taken a surf lesson and loved it, and he wanted to surf more. His wife, however, wouldn’t let him surf alone; she held firmly to the buddy rule. So he was wondering: Could he surf with me?

I stared at him. He was lean, with a shaved head, and looked like a spry elf that had materialized from nowhere. I hesitated. I like to surf alone.

Then I remembered, when I had first started surfing, how kind Maia, and others, how welcoming they had all been to me. And no one owns the ocean.

We talked a bit, maintaining our pandemic-dictated distance. We were surprised to learn we were born in the same year, that we were both defectors from university life. And that we both wanted to surf, here, in this unlikely place, this tiny town, in this little cove. What were the odds? But then everyone wants to surf now, we agreed.

His name was Charlie, and he explained his wife had seen him in too many accidents — skiing, biking, kayaking. She basically didn’t trust him alone anymore. He didn’t look accident-prone to me. He looked lithe and athletic, especially with that shaved, sleek head. But I understood his wife’s concern. And even though it was never said, the implication, of course, was that going out with a buddy would be safer for me, too. And so it would be.

So I said, yes, why not, we could make surf dates.

At home, peeling my wetsuit off, getting in the shower, toweling dry, I suddenly felt, like a bruise, my error. I saw it in the mirror. Along with the red welt on my forehead from my suit’s tight black hood.

The water. The beautiful solitude. The water. It was never mine. It was better to have a buddy. It was wisdom.

But that didn’t mean I had just been wise.

When there isn’t solitude there is company. And unfortunately, for women surfers all over the world, at well-known breaks or on obscure little beaches, that company can sometimes be less than companionable.

The ocean is the opposite of a parking garage; the more people on it, the more risk there is, for some. Ask any woman waverider, go on any women’s surf group on social media, and you’ll find startling (or worse) stories of harassment (or worse): of women’s boards as they sail past a man’s being dangerously pushed down at the tail by a disapproving or mocking hand; of men “dropping in on” (ostentatiously and sometimes dangerously cutting in front of) the woman already riding a wave; of demeaning talk or its condescendingly “helpful” cousin, unsolicited advice (to impress upon the woman she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and perhaps has no business being out so far). Eighty percent of surfers worldwide are men; yet on any given day, in the experience of many women surfers, and depending on where you are, the actual differential can be much starker, a woman’s body more exposed. (Water dissolves, but it doesn’t necessarily dissolve gender, or at least it hasn’t just yet. Or culture. Or race, for that matter. Surfing is still an overwhelmingly white enterprise.)

Yet much of the surfing world is also generous, kind, capacious, always trying to do better. Water has a way of reminding: You all breathe the same stuff, correct? And Charlie seemed nice enough. The kind of guy who listened to his wife, anyway. And it seemed unlikely he would want to alienate the person his wife was going to allow him to surf with.

So that, I thought, isn’t really why you are anxious about a session with him.

I looked into the mirror, and knew.

You don’t want him to be better than you.

Water can dissolve. It can also, it seems, disguise.

In the water all alone, I had imagined I wasn’t competitive. That along with undercutting my perfectionism and some of my more unhelpful ambitions, it had melted my tendency toward measurement against another. But. But.

I am the Surfer Lady!

In the cove alone, I was the best surfer there.

Oh my god, surely, I thought, in all this expansive ocean I wasn’t so small as that?

To be certain, I texted Charlie as soon as I could. As soon as the sun was shining, the wind calm, the waves reasonable. Looks good, I say we go.

He waved as we met on the sand, his sleek, bright yellow, professional-looking board making my own look suddenly chunky and a little wan.

“Here we go!” he shouted, obviously excited. We quickly agreed we would not hover too close, but would keep an eye on each other, and signal if we got into any trouble. Since he was what surfers term “regular footed” (left foot forward on the board) and I was “goofy footed” (right foot forward), we would tend, usefully, to go different directions on a wave anyway, right versus left.

We paddled out on our boards. I was the first to take a small wave, smoothly, and ride toward shore. I was startled to hear a cheer and whoop go up behind me. When I turned, Charlie was grinning and fist-pumping at me.

I had never had anyone cheer me on a wave. It was like not knowing you needed a kite, and then finding one.

I watched him take his first wave, and saw he was a true beginner, not as far along as I was, using his knee to get to his feet, wiping out quickly, but then popping out of the water and grinning from ear to ear. So nothing to worry about. I whooped and cheered, too.

It was the first of our many sessions together, that summer and winter. We grew more comfortable with each other over time. I met Shelly, his wife, who had no interest in surfing and was happy to stay at home. Charlie and I surfed alone. Sometimes, on the water, we wouldn’t surf at all, simply marveling at the pelicans swooping low, diving for fish, or we’d stare at a shimmering sundog overhead, a rainbow with an eye.

Sometimes, on certain days, I still went out alone, either neglecting to tell Charlie I was going, or because he and his wife had gone out of town. On those days the full solitude was again delicious, relaxing, with no responsibility, in the water or elsewhere, for anyone’s safety but my own; smiling again with no one, and for no one. It always seemed to me I was a better surfer solo, too, connecting with the water more cleanly, more intimately. Yet it was also strange without Charlie. Like missing an optional but useful accessory, an extra arm out on the current.

One day Charlie and I both went out but I finished the session first, tired from ferrying my parents to distant doctors’ appointments earlier in the day. I sat on the beach, and Charlie came out and asked if he could try my board. He was having such trouble catching bigger, “green” waves. We both were, in fact. The timing needed for a larger wave is tricky, and Charlie and I both tended to be too late, not catching it until it was already broken and whitewater. He thought my more buoyant, shorter board might help. It didn’t seem likely to me. Longer boards are easier to surf than shorter boards, and taller people need longer boards. Charlie was taller than me.

“Sure, go ahead,” I said.

I was there. I saw it happen. The moment Charlie went from beginner to better. From “kook” to “intermediate” surfer. I watched him catch a nice overhead wave and ride it perfectly. He was so shocked afterward he turned to look at me from the foam, speechless. Then he hooted and fist-pumped and paddled out and did it again. And again and again and again.

I was cheering him on. Yet there was such a pain in my chest. There he was: Passing me up. On my own board. Right in front of me. As somehow I knew he was always bound to do. Leaving me behind. He was a skier, a kayaker, a road cyclist. (He was even, it turned out and as if that weren’t enough, a golfer.) He was an all-around athlete. I was a writer who happened to live by the sea.

Charlie was so high, so joyful when he came out of the water, he was trembling. I hoped he was oblivious to the slight hiccups, the tiniest of silences between my sentences of praise. He thanked me for the use of my board — wow, it had really helped! Yes. How happy, I thought, my board must have been, so responsive to, so relieved to find all that jumpy testosterone on its deck, and Charlie’s greater muscle mass.

We said goodbye — he and Shelly were going out of town again for a while — but assured each other we would surf together again when he got back.

In the weeks that followed, I went out nearly every day. But no matter what I tried, I could not do what he had done on my own board. I pushed myself. Hard. For hours. I cursed, I swore on the water (something I’d never done before). I tried changing my timing, my feet, the position of my arms. The waves went on passing underneath me, leaving me behind. Maybe I’ve reached my limit, I thought. Maybe I ought to be okay with that. But clearly I wasn’t. My surfing deteriorated. I kept falling off the board, impatient, unhappy, where before whenever I’d fallen I laughed with joy — because what is more wonderful than falling into white, frothy water, what could be more like play, more like an acrobat tumbling, when standing was merely what you did all day every day?

As with many things, there is no predictable arc of growth, of progress, of discovery, in surfing. Surfers describe “hitting walls,” or losing their “stoke” — the magical drive, the essence of their connection to the water and the wave that keeps them coming, entranced, back to the swells. Taking or being forced to take a season off, surfers will describe losing their takeoff or their timing. Middle-aged surfers will describe, with shock, how they can no longer leap to their feet or “carve” or “cut” their boards sharply back toward the top of a wave, as they used to do. Surfers will change boards, buy new ones, looking for fresh or lost magic.

The longer the board, the easier it is to ride. Watch children learning to surf on a longboard. It’s astonishing how easily they manage it, the way they take to it, the same way they take, perhaps, to new languages. I once asked an instructor why this was. Was it some innate, childish balance? Was it fearlessness? Intuition? A lack of acculturation? Not knowing any better? Not knowing that they couldn’t?

“Nope,” the instructor said. “They’re just so light, the board doesn’t even know they’re there.”

For days I felt nothing but my own weight. And deep frustration. With myself, my board, and the unaccommodating, slashing Oregon waves. I left town for a while, too, with my parents. The pandemic was beginning to lift its fog. I was tired, we were all tired. We needed a vacation. We decided to go inland. The ocean is beautiful but if you see it all day, every day, and what you see in it is a constant measurement of your own insufficiency, your own smallness, you’ll want to run from it and its wrinkled mirror.

Charlie texted he was back and hoping to surf; I texted we were just leaving and his best bet would be to go to one of the busier beaches. I wondered if he could read the subtext. Don’t depend on me. Stop depending on me. I was that small.

A set is a group of waves in a swell, created either by wind or current. There are generally between three and 10 waves in a set, followed by a period of relatively waveless quiet, a lull. Surfers will use the lull between sets to get “out the back,” behind the breaking waves. A lull isn’t always necessary to get past the break, but it can be helpful; it’s less of a beating, less of a fight, to get to where you’re trying to go.

Away from the water, my heart, I found, still yearned, still turned toward the waves. I found myself lying on the floor of a distant, white-carpeted room, practicing my paddling, my leap to my feet, my stance, my balance, thinking about what I knew was required for a bigger wave yet couldn’t bring myself to do. One of the many fascinating things about surfing is that it is both simple and complex problem-solving. The simple part is understanding the obvious mechanics of what it is you are trying to accomplish: Position yourself as you paddle on a moving floatation device so that it will neither nose-dive or stall back from the arc you are trying to catch, and then stand up on it at the precise moment when you can harness the energy of that arc and be launched down and forward by the force of gravity. The complex part is everything else, put together. You. Your brain. Your body. Unique to you. The wave. Unique. The surroundings. Sand or rock. Beach or reef. The shape of the land. Peninsula. Oceanfront. Bay. Cove. Island. Pier. The culture you are swimming in. History. Habits. Bad or good. Weather. Wind. Board. Tide.

The longer I stayed away, the more I missed surfing. But I was afraid to return to it, too. What if I returned, and I discovered that I had taken something so pleasurable, no, more than that, positively ecstatic, and lost it, because I had carried into it too much that was hard and brittle and me?

When we came back, Charlie and his wife had gone away again; he had decided to teach another class at his university. I stared out, uncertain, at the water. There was no one there. I told myself: Go out with no expectations. Try to let go. It’s hard. But try. Try not to think. Just go with the water. Just that.

I took my board in hand. Entering at low tide, I repeated the words of a little ritual I had initiated when I’d first started surfing in earnest. Hello Maia, to honor the woman who had gotten me into the waves. Hello Ocean, thank you, to honor the water, and maybe in a bid for it not to kill me.

I was all alone again. Here came a small wave. I turned and paddled for it. I didn’t think. I didn’t try to do anything new, ask myself to be better than I was. I leapt up.

And there it was. To surf is to ask a wave to let you join it, and get no response but the wave itself. It is not your partner, your friend, your compatriot, your competitor, your doppelganger, a mirror, or your enemy. It is physics touched by human imagination.

One day, not long after this, following a solo session that was quite wonderful but I can’t remember why (an odd thing about surfing, as many surfers will tell you, is that after you have ridden a particularly beautiful wave or had a particularly beautiful session, you sometimes can’t recall a thing about it, it all happens so fast, is so unthinking, so unlike any other part of recorded life), a woman approached me as I was crossing the cove. She introduced herself. Her name was Lori. We were about the same age, she a bit older. Small world; we found we both, through friends, knew Maia. We seemed to have so much in common.

And then we didn’t. Lori told me she had survived three separate bouts of cancer. Each had nearly killed her. That she had first tried surfing 10 years ago, in Mexico, but had to stop. That she was about to have more tests. That she desperately wanted to get back in the water, but was afraid to, alone.

She didn’t ask. I spoke. “I have a foamie. You get a wetsuit. I’ll take you out.”

A week later, Lori plunged in. I saw the fear in her eyes, at first. Everything is such a risk. Then the slow settling. The familiarity. Here is the water. I have been here before. We have been here before. This is where we come from. There is where we are going, dissolving.

She slipped and fell, slipped and fell, stood for a moment. She was overjoyed. “It’s coming back!” she said. “It’s coming back!”

The tide will do that.

Charlie returned. Introductions all around. Nowadays, we are often three on the water. Other surfers, more experienced, occasionally come and go from the cove. They prefer better waves. We stay. We have become a sight, a trio, on the beach. The other day a woman, a mother with a teenage daughter, just moved into town, said her girl wants to join us. Likewise a teenage son from another, new family. The cove is getting younger. If this keeps up, Charlie and Lori and I joke, things are going to get crowded. And the youngsters can’t go out alone. It’s not safe.

I still go out alone, from time to time. Not to be foolhardy. I study the forecasts to be safe. Not to “escape,” or at least not entirely to escape other surfers, or my responsibilities on land, my family, my work, or the fragile, half-inoculated world around me, or pretend I am free of things I am not free of. I go for a certain kind of peace, an assertion of body, and of choice; I go because there is surprise in solitude, as there is wonder in togetherness, in unity; I go because I can, and because, waving back to the older, caned beachcombers who smile and shake their heads at me, I don’t know for how long I can will be true.

I go to melt what I am able to, in cold, cold water, and make friends with how a wave passes.

Mylène Dressler is a novelist and essayist whose recent books include The Last To See Me and Our Eyes at Night. You can learn more about her work at mdressler.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

I am freer than I’ve ever been, yet I quite often feel edged out, and it’s clear that I have become actually and metaphorically deaf to significant contemporary sounds. My spectator’s view of it all doesn’t fail to remind me that other people are not so lucky or so detached, that some of them are sad beyond hope, that there are young people who don’t want to stay alive and people who worry to distraction and despair or who suffer all kinds of untreatable pain. I became an adult just after the end of the Second World War, and I think of the 1950s, so often described by younger generations as bleak and impoverished, as a time of idealism and optimism. I find it difficult to detect that sort of faith in the future now, though I hope against hope that it’s there in some form I’m simply too old to recognise.

The staff of Live, which transforms into a bottles-and-tables dance club for young professionals around 10 p.m., adores the elderly crowd.

“They have the most fun,” said Chelsea Anderson, a 31-year-old bartender, who has been working the happy hour for six years. “Everybody loves each other. It’s a stark difference from the late crowd, where everyone is upset and barfing.”

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Lisa Bubert | Longreads | November 30, 2022 | 11 minutes (3,072 words)

When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short man with a thick north Texas accent and a handlebar mustache who finished the training with the advice to “treat each resident like they’re your grandmama.” The course lasted two weeks and came with the stipulation that I stay for at least six months. Employee turnover was high.

This job, caring for grandparents around the clock, paid $7.25 an hour — above minimum wage, the hiring manager boasted, which at the time in Texas was set at $5.15. This really was a great job, the other aides told me. It was steady work that came with a lunch break and health insurance for your kids, things that were lost on me. I was an anomaly in that job: a teenager, in college, white. 

None of my friends understood why I wanted to work there. Young people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of death. Death hung over the place like a ghost, the hospital smell embedded daily in my clothes. All I can say is that I wanted a real job and I liked old people. I’d already seen my share of dead bodies, thanks to the slew of open-casket funerals that came with a childhood spent in an aging rural community. Also, the home was the only place that called back when I applied.

The facility was broken into seven distinct hallways, with two aides assigned to each for their shifts. Each hall housed 15 or 20 residents, making each aide responsible for eight to 10 residents. There were no firm state or federal regulations on what the resident-aide ratio should be (and still aren’t), but 10-to-1 is considered easy street in most facilities. To be clear, this is still a terrible ratio. Imagine having to wake, bathe, dress, and hand-feed 10 elderly patients who need total assistance: buttoning shirts, brushing dentures, changing bedsheets for those who will have inevitably soiled the bed in the night. Imagine having to complete it all in an hour or less. It’s an impossible task. Which is why dentures don’t get brushed, baths don’t get offered, nightgowns are worn at the breakfast table. Now double it to 20 patients; this is what you have in many facilities across the country. 

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

Hall One was for rehab patients, those who had suffered strokes or broken bones and were simply there until they could regain strength and rejoin the world (if they were lucky) or move to another wing (if they were less so). Hall Two was reserved for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They were mostly ambulatory, which was great for those residents who liked to wander and terrible for the aides who had to keep track of them and everyone else. Halls Three and Four had a mean reputation, old folks who bit and scratched. One resident in that hall was a literal shit-flinger, known to keep her hands hidden until an aide was close enough to smear. Many of the Black residents were placed on these halls, creating a racist chicken-or-egg situation where the care was poor because the residents were difficult and the residents were difficult because the care was poor. Hall Five was a tale of two extremes — people who either needed a ton of help or none at all. Any aide was happy to get that assignment, though, because the extremes averaged out to something sustainable. Hall Six was for the bedridden. 

It was a toss-up whether Hall Three, Four, or Six was the worst assignment for aides — it depended on whether you felt like taking insults or blowing your back out. But Hall Seven was the hall everyone wanted: elderly people who were mostly lucid, mostly independent, who just needed a little help and some company. Hall Seven was heaven. And because I was young, too small to lift alone, and white, I got assigned to Hall Seven every time. 

I loved working Hall Seven because Hall Seven felt like home. I had grown up in the presence of old people, my grandparents some of my earliest caretakers. My father drove truck; my mother worked at the hospital by day, and had nursing school at night. She would dress me as I slept and shuffle me off to Granny K’s house at five in the morning, where my grandfather, Papa, was always awake and waiting, the local weather news segment on the TV glowing blue in the front window.

Granny K would make the meals, play with me, pick me up from school. We watched One Life to Live and General Hospital every summer day at 1 and 2 p.m. She was small and short, shrunken in her big, pink armchair. Papa was large, big-bellied, farted often, and smelled of peanuts and sweat. Granny K was sweet to me and harsh to everyone else; Papa was a teddy bear, grown soft in his old age. 

Papa died just a few years prior to my stint at the nursing home. The first sign of his illness was the loss of his round belly. He shrunk, then shrunk some more until he was confined to the hospital bed Granny K kept in the living room. Pancreatic cancer. We didn’t even try to fight. After he died, Granny K sank into a sullen, depressive loneliness I couldn’t understand, so I visited less and less until I moved to college and got work in the home that let me pretend everyone was my grandparent.

There was the lady who covered herself in beaded necklaces and split her secret stash of chocolate with me as we watched game shows and talked about boys. There was the man who wore a daily uniform of plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and Reeboks. There was the teeny tiny woman who couldn’t remember shit moment to moment but still thought all of this was pretty funny anyway. I’d take her to dinner with the other ladies who couldn’t remember shit and we’d sit and laugh about god knows what. She had no teeth so everything had to be pureed. I remember feeding her from piles of color on the dinner tray — green for peas, yellow for potatoes, brown for meat. 

Some of the residents refused to leave their rooms for dinner and would have their meals brought to them on a meal cart. Some of them had to be fed or they wouldn’t eat. Most of them refused even that, hell-bent on starving themselves out of existence. Take the food yourself, they’d tell the aide. You weren’t supposed to take the food, management said. That would be wrong. But things moved so fast that lunch breaks could pass untaken, and on days like that this was the only chance for food. An untouched butter roll, stale French fries, cold steak fingers, unopened cartons of juice. The chart truthfully updated — resident refused meal — the food in an aide’s mouth. Some wrapped the food to take home to children. You would take the food too, you just would. 

The entire elder care system operates on a mantra of out of sight, out of mind. Medical residencies feature little to no geriatric training; the profession experiences an annual turnover rate of 60 percent. A 2021 study found that turnover in nursing care facilities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the average annual rate in 2020 at a shocking 128 percent. In other words, if you apply for a job at a nursing home, you can pretty well count on getting hired. For someone with little access to education living on the edge of poverty, this fact is a godsend. Yet, caveats lurk. There are countless reports of understaffing in nursing homes, underfunding, limited regulations where it matters (staff pay, patient ratio) and reels of red tape where it doesn’t (hours of required paperwork that detail how many ounces of water the resident drank, but not how they cry at night for their children). And while you may be trained on how to wipe from front to back, there’s no training to prepare you for the psychic toll of watching your people suffer until they die. 

There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places, and I’m sorry to say that my experience working in one did not change this perception. But I can also say that the perception has less to do with staffing, funding, and regulations (or lack thereof) and much more to do with our country’s fear of death, its rejection of vulnerability, and its subsequent inability to see the inherent dignity in people — especially in their vulnerable moments.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that? 

Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity. Our friends pass on, our families visit less and less, we spend more time alone, helpless to arrest the breakdown of our own bodies. It’s no wonder the elderly — and those who care for the elderly — are steeped in a hot tea of shame. And because shame repels, it is no wonder our policies and priorities for eldercare are so lax as to be nearly criminal. Out of sight. Out of mind.

Granny K and Papa were both het up about “not being put into a home.” Papa didn’t have to, on account of the cancer. But no cancer came to save Granny K. She just got older and older and lonelier and lonelier until she couldn’t care for herself and my parents couldn’t leave their jobs to do it for her like she’d done for Papa. She went into assisted living, very reluctantly — though not until after I started working in my own facility. And by then, I’d seen how the sausage was made. 

I visited Granny K at the facility every time I came home. Short, quiet visits in her room that smelled of cough drops and Kleenex. The hum of her oxygen tank. The humidifier on high, turning the air wet. She would never say much past lamenting how terrible it all was, how she just wanted to die and be done with it. My visits grew shorter and shorter and then I took to calling her on Sunday mornings where I would hear more about how terrible everything was and how death would be a welcome ending. I called my mother crying, who then called Granny K and told her she couldn’t tell me those things anymore. My conversations with Granny K dwindled and dwindled, both of us playing a morbid waiting game to see how long it would take to get what we both wanted. 

Christmas 2012, I sprung Granny K from her facility for family dinner. As we drove home, the sun was setting across the fields in a dazzling display of purple and pink and rustling prairie grass and open, open pasture with room to run as far as the eye would allow. Live oaks with massive curling limbs cast long shadows in the hazy light. It was, by far, one of the more beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen, in a place that’s no stranger to such spectacle. Granny K sat up straight in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed out the window, taking in every sight, committing it to memory, presence. I wanted to say something, but stayed quiet. The moment was hers. 

We had Christmas dinner. We opened presents. My father offered to take Granny K back and the four of us — my mother, father, brother, and me — all went out to the car to see her off. It was the first time it had been just the four of us in years. A memory flickered to the surface of us eating around the dinner table when I wasn’t yet in grade school, before my brother got his first job and my mother worked nights. We said our goodbyes, watched Granny K’s small head disappear in the window as the car drove off. I already knew when I watched her watch that sunset that this would be the last time. 

It was; she died a week later. Just before, my mother called me and placed the phone at Granny K’s ear. I said I was glad to know her, that I enjoyed our time together. I could hear a clicking, the soft rattle in response. That was our last moment. But I prefer to remember the sunset. 

I worked at the nursing home until the six months were up and then I left. I’d had enough of the hours, the lifting, the side eye from the other aides who knew I wouldn’t stay. I didn’t need the job like they did. I was just a college kid. I was playing grown-up. 

A decade later, though, my training came in handy. May 2020, the height of the pandemic; my other grandmother, Granny Nawara, lay dying in a hospital bed. My mother had tried to keep Granny Nawara in her own home to care for her there, knowing the moment she went into a nursing facility would be the moment we could no longer sit with her. But it grew to be too much. My mother was a veteran nurse at our rural hospital; when the administration heard about Granny Nawara, they transferred her to a room there. I took my chances and flew to Texas to be with my mother as we watched Granny Nawara’s last days. 

For three days, we sat together in that room — my mother knitting a lovey for a new baby, me burying my head in work, Granny Nawara lying in bed, just breathing. Mom and I would trade off. Mom would check Granny for bedsores, sop a watery sponge to her cracked lips. I would rest a damp towel to Granny’s forehead and she would open her eyes for just a moment, see me, and smile. Mom spent the nights at the hospital, unwilling to leave. I went home to sleep in my childhood bed. The last night I told Granny good night, she gripped my hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks, pulled it to her chin, and wouldn’t let go. She blew a kiss and I stood there, letting her hold me until it grew late and I had to pry my hand out of her grasp. She would still be with us the next morning; she would only die after her older brother said his goodbye. Granny Nawara did always like to get permission. 

I have a hard time writing about this, not because it’s a traumatic memory, but because I got to do something so many others couldn’t in this pandemic. I sat with my grandmother as she died. And there is no act of love greater than to sit with someone as they face their deepest moment of vulnerability — an act of love denied to so many these last few years.

There’s plenty to be said about the ways the pandemic has laid bare the failures of our eldercare system, how our fear of weakness has driven our entire healthcare system to the brink, how we exorcise this fear through a cycle of abuse that directly impacts our old, young, and poor at alarming rates. How our abject terror of vulnerability robs us all of dignity. Dignity requires witness, to see and be seen; if we are too afraid to look, it slips away.

All I want to focus on now, then, is the sunset. A terribly beautiful sunset, one we all know is the last, one from which we cannot tear our eyes away. Commit that dazzling display to memory. Watch the light as we fade. 

One of my favorite tasks at the nursing home was supervising the 4 p.m. smoke break. Many of the residents were lifetime smokers and no nursing facility was going to curb that habit, so after breakfast and before dinner we’d wheel everyone to a small, glassed-in room off the corner of the dining hall. It stunk like only a room solely used by smokers could stink. Staff hated covering smoke time because of it. But it was also 15 minutes in which all you had to do was light cigarettes and make sure nobody burned themselves. I volunteered every time. 

Everyone’s assigned cigarettes were kept in locked cabinets. The families were responsible for keeping them stocked; no begging or borrowing loosies allowed. I’d separate the packs from their cartons, hand everyone their brand of choice, light them all with the management-issued lighter. Residents would relax back in their chairs, stare out the glass enclosure as though it was a window that looked outside, and drift off into some other beautiful world.

I loved smoke time for the pure peace and bliss of it; not just mine, but theirs. You could see their younger selves when it was smoke time, slouched back like a bunch of hoodlums, yakking and jawing like they were kids getting away with something. The muscle memory of the ritual — inhaling, holding, flicking into ashtrays, stubbing the smoke out when they were finished — transcended dementia. A few might forget, long lines of ash dangling at the ends of their lit cigarettes. But that’s why I was there. To remind them. 

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Len Necefer, as told to Frederick Reimers | Longreads | August 2020 | 3,211 words (12 minutes)

It’s early March, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, and I-25 in downtown Albuquerque is nearly deserted at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. It feels like a risky time for a road trip. After filling morgues in Italy, the virus is propagating across the globe and countries everywhere are closing their borders. No one seems sure exactly who transmits the disease or even how it is spread. Every day feels like living on a knife ridge. A light rain is falling and the signs hanging above the highway that normally display traffic times instead read: Stay Home, Save Lives.

I’m trying to save a life by dashing across five states. Driving eastward from Tucson, where I’m an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, I’m bound for Lawrence, Kansas, where my 72-year-old dad lives. He’d retired from teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University there four years ago, and has been living alone since. “I’ll be fine here,” he says, but when I ask him who can do his grocery shopping or who would take care of him if he were to fall ill, he can’t think of anyone. All his friends there have moved away or passed away. I can’t bear the thought of him riding out a pandemic alone if cities and states are locked down, and don’t really trust my older parent to take precautions against the virus. I’m going to get him.

I throw in some N95 masks and nitrile gloves I have from tinkering with the van engine, clean sheets for the van’s bed, and food to cook on the camp stove. I don’t want us eating in restaurants, and figure we can share the bed instead of risking a hotel. I notify my students that class, already moved online, is canceled for the week, and drive out of Tucson just before dark on a Tuesday.

* * *

The next morning as I’m driving through Albuquerque, I call my mom, who lives there with my stepdad Dan. I tell her that I am on my way to Kansas to bring dad back. “Was he open to the idea, or did you have to convince him?” she asks. My mom, who is Navajo, knows that like a lot of white guys of his age, Dad has trouble accepting help. He agreed to shelter with me for a couple months, I tell her, though I’m planning on him staying much longer. She invites us to stay with them on our way back through, and it’s good to think that at least right now, I’m within a few miles of her. This road trip has already gotten a little weird.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

The night before, I’d driven until I was tired, past one a.m. I pulled off the highway to camp at a spot I knew in the open desert in western New Mexico — just a clearing in the saltbrush and sage flats off the side of a dirt road, earth packed down by the tires of successive car campers. I’d been surprised to see the broad white side of RV after RV appear in my headlights at each potential turnout. I had to drive a few extra miles to find a vacant spot. Other campers always make me uneasy when I’m pulling in late at night, and I really couldn’t understand what all these people were doing out here in the middle of the pandemic.

Then in the morning, I’d been awakened by texts from friends in Salt Lake City, where there’d been a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. No one had been hurt, but the shaking had knocked the trumpet out of the golden hands of the Angel Moroni perched atop the highest spire of the principal Mormon temple; my friends noted wryly that the Latter-day Saints were counting on Moroni and his trumpet to herald the second coming.

Finally, two hours past Albuquerque, I pull off the highway to cook lunch at a place called Cuervo, New Mexico, that turns out to be a ghost town. Standing beside the van, waiting for the water to boil, I scan the crumbling husks of houses and a fenced-off stone church. Thinking of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel about a father and son traveling together through abandoned towns after an unnamed apocalypse, I laugh to avoid thinking of this rest stop as an omen.

That afternoon, driving Highway 54 through the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, more cars began appearing. I’m surprised to see a bowling alley and then a restaurant with full parking lots. Somewhere in western Kansas, I pass a group of high school kids playing full-squad basketball. At a gas station, people look at me strangely as I operate the pump wearing my mask and gloves, and it is obvious the residents and I are listening to different news sources.

* * *

In Kansas, I pass signs pointing to Haskell County, which I recognize from a podcast I’ve been listening to about the 1918 flu pandemic. The Spanish Flu is believed to have originated in Haskell County where it jumped from pigs to humans before hitching a ride to Europe with some local kids who joined the army to fight in World War I, where it mutated into the deadly strain that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide. It’s ironic: that so much vitriol is already being directed at China and towards Asian Americans, when the biggest pandemic in modern history began just miles from here, in America’s heartland.

The 1918 pandemic also hit my people hard, taking as much as 24 percent percent of the Navajo population. It was a population just a little more than a generation removed from an even larger trauma — the Long Walk of the Navajo. In 1864, the U.S. Cavalry forced the Navajo from their homeland in North Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern Utah, and marched them 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the winter, with only what they could carry. Hundreds died from starvation, hypothermia, or execution when they couldn’t keep up. By the time they left Sumner four years later,  more than 2,000 had died. We are taught not to talk about Hwéeldi — “the place of suffering.” Normally when I drive to Kansas, I detour far around it, but in this case, it lay along the fastest route; I’d passed signs for it in the morning. Late that night, I pull into a campsite at Pratt Sandhills, a vestige of remaining tall grass prairie spread atop ancient sand dunes. The dirt road is a pair of parallel puddles from a recent storm and the van loses traction here and there. When I finally turn off the ignition, it’s a day I feel glad to let go of.

* * *

I make Lawrence the next afternoon, embracing my dad, Edward, on the walkway to the small house where I’d spent much of my youth. He has the easygoing demeanor of a good teacher: attentive, warm, a mischievous sense of humor. He grew up in Detroit in the ’60s then joined the Peace Corps, teaching English and math in Liberia. Once home, he meandered through a series of jobs in the Bureau of Indian Education, and eventually got a gig teaching math at Haskell, where he met my mom.

“Have you thought about what you’ll bring to Tucson?” I ask.

“I’m all packed,” he says, and it’s a relief. I’d been worried we’d waste a few days wrangling over his belongings. But when we pull out of Lawrence in the morning, we’re in two vehicles, not just my van. He says it is because he doesn’t want to leave his car parked on the street while he is gone, but I’m sure he just isn’t ready to give up that independence. I’m frustrated because I know it will slow us down and leave us more exposed. It means more breaks — I assume he’s no longer capable of driving more than six hours at a shot — and more gas stops, since his Volkswagen GTI has less than half the range of my van.

At the first, just past Wichita, I say, “Let me gas up both cars, so we only have to use up one set of gloves.” He says “Okay,” but when I turn around after getting the second pump started, I see the back of him disappearing into the store.

We’d talked about staying out of buildings — paying at the pump, going to the bathroom behind a tree. Just a few hours in, and he’s already broken that. I stew angrily at the pumps waiting for him to return, trying to keep panic at bay. If I get upset, I think, he’s not going to hear anything I say.

“Dad, I thought we talked about this,” I say when he returns. “We have to make these decisions together. You have to take this seriously.”

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s talk about it. I can stay out of gas station restrooms, but I’m going to need to get a hotel tonight. My back is already stiff.”

I can’t budge him. “Okay,” I say, “but we’ll have to scrub it all down with Clorox wipes — every surface. Let’s try for the Kansas border,” I say. “The town of Liberal should have hotels. We’re exposed in Trump country, but at least we can take comfort in the name,” I joke.

A few hours later, I still feel we the need to lighten the mood, so during a stretch break beside the highway, I show Dad a few quarantine videos people are posting on Instagram — the sock puppet appearing to eat traffic on the street below, and people “rock climbing” across their apartments with ropes and harnesses. “We should make one,” I say. “How about ghostriding the whip?” I explain the concept of the meme, grooving to music alongside, or atop, a moving vehicle without anyone in the driver’s seat. I show him a few examples, and Dad is game. I crank up some music on the van stereo — the Snotty Nose Rez Kids — put the emergency brake on halfway, and put it in gear. Dad does the rest, strutting alongside the open door of the slowly moving van with his sunglasses on and his cap turned backwards under the bright blue Kansas sky, always happiest staying loose.

I post the video on Instagram with the caption, “My dad has ascended to the throne of Quaranking.”

Except that he hasn’t. He won’t give up on the hotel idea. In Liberal, I manage to convince him to drink a can of cold-brew coffee from the van fridge and drive a little longer. Two hours later, at sunset, we gas up in Dalhart, Texas, and I propose we shoot for Tucumcari, New Mexico, an hour and a half further — and in a state where the governor has put some precautions in place. Ironically, when we get there, those precautions keep us from finding my dad a bed. Hotels are only allowed fifty percent occupancy, and there are no vacancies. At the fourth and last hotel we try, Dad holds the door open for a woman also entering the lobby and she gets the last room.

He is dejected and exhausted. Driving for 12 hours has taken its toll. We cook a pot of ramen in the parking lot, huddled inside the van against the windy night.

“What if we just sleep here in the van?” I ask.

“I need my own bed,” he says.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I say.

“I’m going to have to get up to pee in the night a few times,” he says, now irritated, “and I don’t want to disturb you.”

“It won’t,” I say, but he’s not having it.

We decide to try to push through the last 175 miles to Mom’s house, but after 100 of those, I can see Dad’s headlights dropping further back.

“How ya doing?” I ask over the phone.

“I probably need to stop,” he says, and we pull over at a rest area, just an hour from Albuquerque, to sleep till morning. There are a dozen others there doing the same, towels tucked into their windows for privacy. Dad sleeps in his car. I can’t talk him out of it.

* * *

We spend two nights recovering at my mom and stepdad’s house in Albuquerque, knowing Tucson is just a day’s drive away. They are all friends and Dad has stayed with them before; any tension is on my end. Over dinner, I’m surprised at how much Dan and Dad minimize the pandemic, and how they assume things will get quickly back to normal.

“Guys,” I say, “it’s gonna be at least 18 months before there’s a vaccine, and because of your age, you’re both in a high-risk demographic.” I never expected to be parenting my folks so soon. “In fact,” I say, “if something does happen, I’m probably going to be the one who makes all the arrangements. I should probably have copies of your wills.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” says Dan.

It comes to a head the next day. I’d watched Dan come home from the grocery store, toss his mask on the key rack, and settle in without washing his hands.

“Dan,” I say, “if you really care about my mom’s health, you have to take this seriously.” He assures me that he is, but I can tell I’ve pissed him off. Later, I have an aside with mom.

“I’m pretty frustrated with Dan,” she says, “and I can imagine you are frustrated with your father, too.” I tell her I really did need their last directives and will documents. “I’ll get that for you today,” she says, “and we can talk it through.”

It’s not surprising that my mom’s approach to the pandemic has been markedly different from my father and stepfather’s. Both of the men are white baby boomers, members of a generation who’d had the freedom to live exactly how they wanted. Their attitude towards the pandemic is, “It’ll work out,” because for them, things always have.

My mother was born in Red Valley, on the reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico. She grew up trailing her family’s sheep herd to high camp each spring and back again in the fall. It was the same journey that my great-grandparents made twice a year, and the same one that my cousins and I tagged along on as kids, walking alongside the herding dogs, and running into roadside stores to buy candy with cash my grandfather or uncle would slip us.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

Mom’s family have always been planners. It comes from migrating with the sheep, and from the cultural trauma of the Long Walk. In the summer of 1864, life was as it had been in Navajo country for hundreds of years. Then, in September, Kit Carson burned the crops, and in January an entire people were being force-marched across New Mexico. “You know, when society collapses, we need to be prepared,” I’d hear my grandfather say.

I’ve inherited that affinity for being prepared. I took my education all the way to a Ph.D., fulfilling the idea that it’s better to be overqualified for a job. I take pains to cultivate my relationships, knowing it leads to more social resilience. Before I drove to Kansas, realizing I hadn’t met all my neighbors yet and that such connections might be critical in the coming months, I knocked on every door to introduce myself and left notes at the doors no one opened. Even my van, fully outfitted for camping adventures, is subconsciously a backup home.

Which is why it is frustrating, and even a little scary, to watch my father resist my guidance. I’m sure it’s how a parent feels watching their teenage children make brash choices in a bid to establish their independence. I realize that all I can do is continue to offer support, and to remain patient myself. Which isn’t all that hard when you love someone, I realize that night as the four of us sit around the kitchen table sipping on whiskey and enjoying each other’s company.

* * *

On the last day we get on the road early, and with just a seven-hour drive to Tucson, I feel relaxed. When we stop for lunch, I can’t find the utensils to spread the peanut butter — Dad had stashed them somewhere after our parking lot dinner nadir — so I use a 19 millimeter wrench. If I were Cormac McCarthy this is the kind of thing I’d put in my post-apocalypse book, I think.

I’m excited to get home. “Maybe you should look at this quarantine as a trial run for moving to Tucson full-time,” I’d suggested to Dad the night before, glad that he seemed open to the idea. It should be a pretty easy sell — few places compare to southern Arizona in March, with mild temps and the Sonoran desert in bloom. Then fittingly, just around Wilcox, I see that the entire desert is carpeted with yellow and orange fiveneedle pricklyleaf. Clumps of the daisy-like flowers have erupted from the desert in a superbloom, spreading for miles across the basin southwards towards the blue ramparts of the Chiricahua and Dragoon ranges, storied strongholds of the Apache people who were some of the last Native Americans to resist white settlement. I pull off the highway, and Dad pulls in behind me. “Let’s take a little walk,” I say.

“Let’s keep going,” he says. “We’re only an hour away.”

I realized he isn’t seeing the flowers. “Dad, take off your sunglasses and look out there,” I say.

He lifts them up, looks around, and just says, “Oh.”

We walk out among the flowers on a faint gravel road, taking in the blooms and the tiers of mountains reaching southward clear to the Mexico border. We wander, just breathing and releasing the tension of driving. “How long do they last?” Dad asks.

“Only a week,” I say. “We’re lucky to be here.”

* * *

The next months are bittersweet. Dad loves Tucson’s ample cycling opportunities and is a good houseguest. Wary of culinary skills atrophied by two decades of bachelorhood, I do most of the cooking, though he does help pack the van for my next road trip. By May, Covid-19 has torn through my Navajo Nation homeland, inflicting the highest per-capita infection rate in the United States thanks to underfunded health resources and food deserts that have increased health risk factors. A Natives Outdoors fundraiser provides masks and hand sanitizers to communities on the reservation, which a friend and I make two separate trips to deliver.

By the time we return from the second, Dad has decided to move to Tucson for good. We’ve found a place for him to rent and a moving company to pack up his house in Kansas. I’m pleased of course, but also sad that our time living together again will soon be over. We’ve bonded over these strange quarantine times, but there’s also a real feeling of accomplishment to having successfully adapted our lives to each other. Multigenerational living is becoming rare — it challenges the supremacy of freedom and convenience, but in that we also lose something, additional layers and complexity to our most foundational relationships.

* * *

Len Necefer is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. His writing and photography have been featured in the Alpinist, Outside, Beside magazine, and more.

Frederick Reimers is based in Jackson, Wyoming, and contributes to Outside, Bloomberg, Men’s Journal, Ski, Powder, and Adventure Journal magazines. Follow him at @writereimers.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Matthew Bremner | Longreads | July 2020 | 12 minutes (3,429 words)

Clementina doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t know her nine children, her grandchildren, or the names of her mother and father. She doesn’t know where she lives, where she has lived, or where she is now. People she has never met tell her that they love her. They say they are her daughter or her son. They assure her they used to play cards together — make wine in the bodega across from her house and chorizo on the patio after the local matanzas (pig slaughters). But Clementina doesn’t trust these people; she doesn’t know what they are talking about.

She didn’t trust me either when I first met her seven years ago. I was at my girlfriend’s family home in Villaveta, a dusty hamlet of dilapidated houses in the hinterland of Castilla y León, Spain. We were preparing lunch for the whole family. Clementina sat at the head of the table next to me. She was hunched by her 93 years, and her skin was wrinkled like a date. “Who are you my boy? she asked, squinting through creamy cataracts.

I mumbled that I was her granddaughter’s boyfriend and that I was from Scotland. “Oh, darling, you’ve traveled a long way today,” she croaked. “You must be hungry.”

Clementina looked away to ask one of her children something, but when she turned to me again, her brow crumpled. She felt for the contours of her face. She jolted her head back and forth: from her daughters and then back to me. But she found no answers. Then her hand, swollen like fresh ginger, seized my arm. “When are we leaving?” she whispered. “I don’t know these people.”

***

That was the first time I had met someone with dementia. I had never witnessed that type of fear or seen someone so threatened, by what, seconds before, had been familiar to them. Over the following years, I would return to the village with my girlfriend with relative regularity, and I watched as Clementina’s condition deteriorated. I saw how it weighed on the family.

When Clementina became frightened and refused to eat, when she had forgotten even her earliest memory, that’s when the family felt it most. I saw her daughters’ shoulders sink and her sons’ brows furrow.

Their mother’s decrepit frame warned of life’s fragility, or more precisely, its cruelty. Would this be their future in 20 years? Would they be the next to slurp on liquified meat and stare into the abyss? A somberness hung over the dinner table on those days. They all knew it, but talking meant facing too many complicated problems. Grief lingered, though no one had died.

I thought about this type of grief a lot over the following years; how it must take its toll — how it was possible to miss someone who was there in front of you. And I thought about it more when my own grandmother died in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clementina’s story was in no way similar to my grandmother’s. In many ways, they were complete opposites. But over the days and weeks that followed, as across the world, tragedies pixelated into statistics across TV screens, when people talked about death and infection rates like they were football scores, each helped me better understand the other.

***

The first time Mum called, I ignored it. I was dancing with my 7-month-old son in my kitchen in Spain. It was a thing we did. When he’d start to get grouchy, I’d put on some thumping Reggaeton and we’d bound gracelessly about the apartment. It always seemed to make him laugh.

But then Mum called again. I paused the music and picked up the phone.

There was that marked silence, like a cliché from a bad novel. There was also a groan of verbal constipation, as if Mum didn’t know where to begin, as if she couldn’t find the words. I knew then (though it’s also possible I retrospectively invented this premonition) that something wasn’t right. “Your grandmother has had a serious stroke,” she finally said, “and it’s not looking good.”

The news provoked a strange reaction. I didn’t cry.  The first thing I did after she passed away the next morning was to try to find her again. I had lost her, I thought, and I wanted to find something that would convince me she wasn’t dead, that would prove reality had gotten it wrong.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

I found her first on my outgoing calls from the day before: we had spoken for 15 minutes and 51 seconds at 10:10 am. There was also a receipt for the flowers my sisters and I had sent her for her birthday. Because of the slow postal service, she had received the bouquet two days later, the morning she died. She had sent us all a thank you text. She was fine, she told us, bored with the lockdown, but otherwise okay. Twelve hours later, when she lay in the hospital morgue, I thought of the flowers still fresh and in their squeaky wrapping plastic.

I had seen death before. In my journalistic career, I had seen dying babies in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh; I had covered mass graves in Mexico and peered at the puckered, waxy bodies of gangsters in the funeral parlors of El Salvador. Still, in my personal life, my mind was warped by denial. I suppose I had been made invincible by middle-class privilege; hidden from inevitability.

This made it all the more difficult to countenance the suddenness of my grandmother’s passing — that journey from moment to moment, from when she collapsed in the shower at my auntie’s house in Peterborough, when the blood vessel in her brain burst and the pressure started to swell, to when my mum saw her contorted body and collapsed face in the searing light of an anonymous hospital on the crisp white sheets of an anonymous bed. I couldn’t bridge those two disparate moments, from when everything had been fine to when it hadn’t.

It would strike me days later how often ordinariness conceives tragedy — how, in one moment, you are doing something so normal, and in the next everything has changed. I was dancing, my son was laughing; then, the music paused, I listened to Mum’s words, and nothing was the same.

I suppose this was just denial — the type of denial that, in Western society at least, comes from seeing death as a shocking inconvenience rather than an inevitability. We complain about the meanness of life — its shortness — as if our mortality were a personal affront. Death is denied as if it were a conspiracy, or treated unanimously as a tragedy; a societal defect that needs fixing. We’re always on the lookout for guilty parties: governments, doctors, nurses.

Maybe it was better when we believed in God — when living was the worst part, and in death, we had the chance to be saved. Maybe it was better to understand mortality as part of destiny’s design, instead of whether it was solvable or not.

Still, I knew the root of my denial was guilt. I had been very close with my grandmother when I was younger. I remember interminable summers at her house in Leeds, in northern England. I remember her chicken and ham pies, her soggy pasta, and the malicious tabby cats she used to keep — cats that only seemed to like her, and despise everyone else.

When she moved to Scotland, where my family lived, I saw her more often. I spent many afternoons with her in her living room, besieged by cups of tea and bacon rolls. We talked about her evacuation during the Second World War, about her first and second husbands, about her neighbors, about her friends. She became more risqué as she got older and could never resist picking up any object, be it a sweet potato, banana or kitchen utensil, and comparing it to a penis: “I haven’t seen one of those in a while,” she’d say.

After I moved away from home, first to London, and later Madrid, I saw and called her less. I knew I should have made more of an effort, and sometimes I thought I could hear it in her voice when we spoke on the phone. Still, whether I was right or not, she meant so much more to me than my negligence suggested.

***

I watched her funeral through a webcam link. COVID-19 had swept through Spain and the UK, and strict travel restrictions were in place. Outside my window in Burgos, the streets were deserted. The was only the flashing lights of police cars and the grunt of military trucks. Everyone was ensconced in their apartments, afraid of the air and their neighbor. The outside world was alone.

At home with my girlfriend, and with my baby squirming on my lap, the crackling silence of the crematorium stirred through my tinny computer speakers. A sludgy drizzle was falling 1,000 miles away in Peterborough, England.

The undertakers dusted the creaking pews and straightened the lectern, and I took in my grandmother’s last room: the oversized crosses; the cool shine of the concrete walls; the threadbare green carpets; and the large floor-to-ceiling windows. A modernist death factory, tired and overworked.

When the funeral began, I listened to Mum’s shaky voice as she read “All is Well” by Henry Scott Holland. I listened as my auntie and uncle coughed and sobbed, and as the pixelated coffin jittered and froze amid the purple velvet curtains in front of them. Then I saw Mum trying not to cry, my sister motioning toward her, and Dad hanging his head.

When the funeral ended, I stared as my computer screen flashed “buffering.”

Seneca wrote, “it isn’t that life is short, it’s that we waste a lot of it.” Granny knew love and happiness; she knew divorce and pain. She had once run away in the middle of the night from the drudgery of a 25-year-long, often loveless marriage to a man some 20 years younger than her. And though that relationship had not worked out as she had hoped, she at least had had the guts to bet on change. Her life was full and imperfect, and, as the crematorium curtains drew shut, I was comforted by that — I knew her death wasn’t a tragedy.

I looked at my girlfriend, who had tears in her eyes, and  I thought of Clementina. For her, fate did not seem so kind. Because while Clementina is still here — while her breath still smells of garlic and her body of soap; while her false teeth still need washing, her glasses wiping, and her clothes ironing; while she still farts, burps, snores, sleeps, and wakes — she is absent, death bagged up in a sack of skin and cartilage.

Though I couldn’t believe the suddenness of my own grandmother’s passing, my girlfriend’s family had been forced to endure that same disbelief for more than a decade: caught between Clementina’s presence and her defining absence.

***

Before the fog, Clementina had been a busy woman. Together with her husband, she ran a small farm and butcher shop. When she wasn’t cleaning out pig intestines, hacking through joints of beef, or pressing grapes to make wine, she was nursing one of her nine children.

Back then, Spain was under a dictatorship predicated on deeply conservative Catholic values. The church controlled the school system. At the same time, the Francoist dictatorship promoted masculinity and the traditional role of women.

In rural areas, the Guardia Civil patrolled small towns and hamlets, weeding out any who spoke out against Franco’s regime. Standing out or asking too many questions back then brought unwanted attention from undesirable people, the family told me. If God didn’t provide the answer, then no one else would.

Clementina was a product of her time and circumstance. She was small and stocky, with short hair and skin hardened by nine children and four decades of farmers’ hours. She was stoical, and she muddled and mucked through life, making minimal drama from tragedy and trauma. When her eldest daughter ran away from home for six months after a dispute with her brothers, Clementina cried, but when no one could see. She was not noisy with her pain, even when her family, the only thing that really mattered, was in disarray.

Food was important to Clementina. She liked to cook and to prepare large meals for her family, their families, and any stray friends. But it was in her cooking that her life started to malfunction. Around 20 years ago, she started putting strange combinations like prawns and pineapples in classic Castilian stews. While the family would feign enjoyment, Clementina was baffled; she couldn’t remember how she had prepared the dish.

Such odd behavior was initially excused and justified as a mistake. There was no need to worry; surely she was just having a bad day, the family thought. Then, several weeks later, one of her daughters found 20 kilograms of steak crammed into the freezer. Clementina had been going to the butcher three times a day.

The family took their mother to see a neurologist. Clementina’s frontal and parietal lobes were, indeed, atrophying, and it was likely she was suffering from dementia. The doctor told her she would feel confused. She would be stumped by everyday tasks, experience mood swings, feel apathetic, or suddenly angry. But this would just be the waiting period before the disease took hold, he said; she would still have quality of life.

For Clementina, it was a purgatory flecked with visions of hell. A time when she would look in the mirror and question who she found there. She found salt in the underwear drawer, her false teeth in the oven, and her shoes in the pantry. When a spoon became a knife, a bowl became a mug, a mug became…well, a bulbous, cold, empty thing.

There was still a future, yes, but it was a future crowded out by the inevitability of the disease, and constant remorse for her behavior. And she feared everything about it. She feared its fog, its nausea, its dark, its light, its bitter taste, its rancid smell, its forgetting, its remembering, its crying, its laughter.

Her children suffered, too. First, she would confuse their names, then she would forget them, and when she became very panicked, she denounced her sons as robbers breaking into her house. When she remembered who she was, the abrupt resumption of life caused her to break down in tears and ask her sons for forgiveness.

For the family, their mother wasn’t dying, she was disappearing; the relentless, unforgiving grind of reality squeezing her mind like a tube of toothpaste. They could only sit and watch.

***

I thought about Clementina’s fear in the days following the funeral. My grandmother’s death had been unforeseen and painless; she probably never knew she was dying. Clementina’s death was slow and suffocating. Something intangible, invisible, and insidious was out to get her. She didn’t know when it was going to come, or how bad it would be when it did.

This fear was heightened for its similarity to what gripped the outside world. I looked out and saw it on the street outside my window. People rushing around in their own capsules of preoccupation and paranoia, veering from each other’s paths, looking down at their shoes when they once would have looked up. People enveloped in masks, plastic screens, and surgical gloves — fighting and flirting through pixels on a faltering Zoom calls.

We didn’t know what was coming, when it was going to happen, or how serious it would be. We just knew it was out there, and that was enough to fear ordinary life.

***

Though the years anesthetized the family’s shock, and treatment slowed Clementina’s deterioration, her descent into amnesia was inevitable. Five years after the diagnosis, she had lost all sense of who she was. She became a baby: she needed feeding, dressing, and regular trips to the bathroom. But, unlike the nonsensical conversations one has with a child, those with Clementina were never endearing. She was a haze of perceptions and reactions, always in flux, ever-changing. There was no way of knowing who she would be next.

Although almost all of the family lives in the nearby city of Burgos, every weekend, sons, daughters, grandchildren, aunts, and uncles make the 40-minute drive to Villaveta. Lunches start at 3:30 and pass in gesticulations, gulps of wine, and oven-roasted legs of lamb. The family talks about what most families talk about: achievements and failures, times gone by and times to come, people alive and dead, housework, and holidays. Listening to many of these conversations over the years, it appeared to me that the family’s collective memory somehow compensated for Clementina’s absent memory.

Over the years, I admired their patience. I saw how, amid spooning mashed-up meat into her mouth, routine bathroom trips, rattling medicine bottles, stray false teeth, convoluted conversations, and having her ask who they were 15 times a day, they endured their mother’s gradual disappearance. Though Clementina no longer knew what home meant, at least her children could see her in a setting that was familiar to them. After all, their childhood was all there, and she was their childhood. There, among the ramshackle houses all leaning on each other for support, between the fresh green grapevines and in the yawning yellow wheat fields, bristly like stable brushes, they could see their mother as she had been.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

I would often watch her in a wicker chair on the porch outside of the dining room in Villaveta, her false teeth strewn across the table in front of her, her auburn hair shining in the pale spring sun. She clapped her calloused hands, snapped her fingers, and bobbed her head to the rhythm of her shaky vocal cords. She sang about the time Franco’s fascists came hunting Republicans in her village, about the migration of the villagers to the Basque country in search of work. She sang the songs that she had learned when she was young, when she was middle-aged, and when she was old.

Clementina would sing her life’s history, remembering every word and every melody. As Clementina’s daughters sang with her, she looked at them not with her typical vacancy but with the mischievous grin of collusion — as if she knew them again.

***

In the days following my grandmother’s death, I worried most about my mum. Though she would eventually take my calls, I knew she was wrapped up in administration, in death certificates, undertaker bills, in condolence cards, and bouquets of flowers. She was always busy giving people details.

Mum talked to my grandmother at least four times a week and visited her house at least twice weekly. Now, she had one less person to speak to, one less person to attend to. The gap in her life would be abysmal, impossible to fill.

I knew she would try to reassure herself that she was okay, that she was doing well. I knew she would try to be tough, would try to demonstrate her fortitude. But I was also sure that these icy walls of common sense would be floored by searing moments of red-hot memory that reminded her of the contrary — reminded her that her mother really wasn’t there anymore. Perhaps it would hit her in the garden while pruning my grandmother’s favorite rose bush, perhaps when she came across papers etched with her handwriting.

Grief starts off as a fear of absence and then becomes the acclimatization to it. I think Clementina taught me that, or at least, her daughters did. Though they had once tried to suppress the fear of their mother’s disease with denial or outward displays of positivity, they now confronted her absence with stoic resignation. They lived with the fear because they had no choice. Because though Clementina remembered herself when she was singing, though she knew her daughters and they knew her, almost every time the last song ended, when the words in her head ran out, her brow creased, and she sank deep into her diminutive frame.

“When are we going home?” she would whisper to her daughters.

“Soon, Mum, soon,” they replied.

***

Matthew is a Scottish writer and journalist. He has written about topics spanning suicide in Japan to the drug-trade in Bangladeshi refugee camps, and now works mainly in Latin America. His work has appeared in the LA Times, Slate, VICE, Men’s Journal, The Guardian Long Read, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Emily Flake | Longreads | April 2020 | 9 minutes (2185 words)

My parents took me to see The Last Unicorn in the theater when I was 5. The experience is seared into my mind for a number of reasons: Terrifying burning bull! Handsome prince says “damn!” Unicorn!!! But no scene hit me with quite the power of the one where the sad old bag Molly Grue meets the titular (last!) unicorn for the first time.

If you’re not familiar with this movie, allow me to express my condolences. It’s a batshit Rankin/Bass adaptation of the Peter S. Beagle novel of the same name, and it’s about a unicorn — but it’s not the magical creature that I’m interested in here. The character Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman, a scullery maid we meet as the unicorn is being led to safety by an inept wizard named Schmendrick (ha!) for reasons I won’t go into now (but really, stream it, you won’t be sorry). Her reaction to encountering an honest-to-goodness magical beast isn’t fear, or awe. It’s grief-stricken rage. “Where have you been?” she howls. “Where were you when I was new? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?” Even as a child I knew anguish and sorrow when I heard it — I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the word “melancholy,” but I understood that she was no longer the kind of woman to whom beautiful things happen, that to be a participant in a beautiful thing you had to be beautiful yourself. I felt that with every inch of my weirdo 5-year-old heart, and now, at 42, it resonates with a power that’s almost unbearable.

I am this, now. That feeling of loss, of being too old to be graced by magic — that’s no longer a hypothetical. My young maidenhood wasn’t spent sitting around under trees waiting for a unicorn to come to me, but I certainly looked for magic in places sacred and profane (mostly profane). I was blind to any beauty I might have possessed. I spent a lot of time apologizing for my body when I first started using it to have sex, a practice meant to head off any criticism my partner might have had, but which I now realize was insane and a perfect way to kill the mood. These days, I catch myself reflected in a window every now and again and feel uncomfortably sure that the tired-looking marshmallow with very dry hair squinting back at me no longer remotely qualifies as that kind of magic bait.

Mind you, youth doesn’t appeal to me, personally. Young men are sexual blanks to me — boring, unseasoned chicken breasts with nothing interesting to say. Give me your grizzled Gen Xers, your gray beards, your potbellies, your crinkled eyes. Give me your hearts heavy with regret, your gorgeous tattered men. I’ve always been more attracted to men at least a decade my senior, and once in my early 20s I slept with a man in his 40s because I wanted to see what that was like, to feel like I was giving my young body like a gift (for the record: it was lovely, bittersweet and poignant, yet deeply hot). Physically speaking, I no longer feel like a gift to anyone, not even to my own husband, a man contractually obliged to accept my body even if as a burden. In the increasingly rare instances where a comely stranger flirts with me, I hear Molly Grue’s voice: How dare you come to me now?

***

Another memory, this one much more recent: I’m on the phone with my mother, talking about my sister, who’s been going through a truly awful rough time. “She’s so miserable,” my mother says, and then her voice catches, “and she’s gained so much weight.” Those 20 or 30 pounds of stress-weight loom larger in my mother’s mind than any of the other disastrous consequences of my sister’s rough patch. A woman may lose her partner and her home, but the loss of her figure is a real mortal sin. This preoccupation with weight in my family goes deep — a constant drumbeat of self-excoriation for our extra poundage, a fog of shame we eat our way through. You’d think this obsession would render us thin, at least. It never has. Or you might think the flip side of the coin — the food side — would represent something delightful and irresistible, a form of joy worth sacrificing our waistlines for. But no, we had no food traditions, no family dinners, no beloved recipes. My sister and I ate cereal alone at the kitchen table, most nights. The food-way of my people is secret late-night runs to Wawa’s to stock up on obscene amounts of junk food, to be eaten alone in the always-damp basement while watching 120 Minutes. All of our deficiencies, written on our bodies. Imagine the surprise and joy when men started to look at me with interest. The idea that my body could be anything other than a source of shame and self-loathing was intoxicating, a drug I wanted to do as much of as possible.

I’ve spent my life worried about my weight; the aging issue is a relatively new voice in the cacophony. But it strikes the same notes — my blurring neckline feels like a personal failing, my drooping eyelids a sign of moral laxity. A new way for my body to display the deficiencies of my soul. I’m not denied magic because I’m not beautiful — I’m denied magic because deep in my soul I don’t deserve it. You can tell just by looking at me.

But recently, a new counterpoint presented itself. I was out to dinner with some lady friends, and I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. The light was extremely flattering, my face a bit flushed and my eyes sparkling not just with booze and lively conversation but with the feeling that shit was finally starting to come together — that years of flailing might somehow be resolving into something resembling a “career.” I’ve written books. I get on stages regularly and make people laugh. I make a significant portion of my income practicing the nearly dead art of gag cartoons. I am at the top of the Google search results for my own name (not hard with a last name like Flake, but still). I looked at the woman in the mirror and saw potential unfolding. “This is it,” I whispered. “This is my prime.” I felt full of a new kind of power, not the half-cocked reckless mojo I used to carry out of a bar bathroom, but a fierce, capable joy. I am this, I thought. Now.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

It’s a nice feeling if you can get it, but you better figure out a way to bottle it if you do. It fades by the light of day and less accommodating mirrors. It is difficult to tap into that feeling of power when you feel stuck, bereft of ideas, distracted by chores, parenting, the goddamned internet. But to know that joy is possible is to catch a glimpse of the courage you will need to push yourself into unfamiliar territories, into places where your calling card might have to be something other than your beautiful face. My face was never so great that it could take me places — I was never going to pretty myself into a career or the respect of my peers or anything else worth having. My power to get those things, to work, to discover what I’m capable of as a writer and an artist, to live in the world, has only gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older. Forty-two-year-old me has considerably more wit, capability, and agency than 22-year-old me, who had a kewpie-doll appeal but didn’t know her ass from her dimpled elbow. But that face did serve, I realize now, as a ticket into the act of participating in desire. Not even to act on desire — my marriage has been a long and happy one so far — but in the act of desire itself, a satisfying little frisson of a glance, a smile, a hit of serotonin from an IRL “like.” I am as vain and greedy as I ever was, but easy co-signs are no longer a thing.

And yet: this new sense of capability is rich and intoxicating and a delightfully weird surprise. I recognize, of course, that these bones will be dust someday no matter how I manage to use them while they’re mine, and that a good week can turn into a bad year just as easily as anything. But I want this grace and power with a swooning desire that feels very much like love. Maybe this is a truth that doesn’t often reveal itself to the young, or the rich, or the beautiful — that you don’t have to sit under some dumb tree and wait for magic to come to you. You work, you fight, you learn, and every once in a while, you’ll look into a mirror and realize you’ve made your own magic.

It’s silly to expect a tender green shoot like that to supplant a lifetime of blaming my body for everything that’s wrong with me, the conviction that the loneliness and awkwardness and cruelty I experienced growing up were the natural consequence of my having round cheeks and a pot belly. In some ways, this new and possibly fleeting appreciation of my capabilities feels like it’s come disastrously late — how dare you come to me now, when I am this? I think a lot about Tina Fey’s definition of “crazy” in show business — “A woman who won’t shut up even though no one wants to fuck her anymore.” Who might I have been, if I’d gotten my shit together in what my mother called my “pretty years?” I worry that my ability to make myself heard will fade just as I’ve finally managed to get my voice into something resembling a shape. “Be so good that they can’t ignore you no matter how unfuckable you get,” I tell myself, despairing a little of never being that good. But it’s also silly to focus on the impermanence of looks when the body itself is so impermanent. The real goal should be: “Be so good that they can’t ignore you even if you’re dead.”

And let’s face it: even that is a goal born of towering foolishness, of short-sighted narcissism. None of this matters, truly. The entire scope of human history is an imperceptible blip of time on a minuscule nothing of a planet. When I’m in a good mood, this truth feels liberating. When I’m feeling like the old, fractious, dissatisfied bitch I find myself turning into — it feels heavy. Why bother with any of this? It’s not a brave question, and to answer it bravely and with hope requires a daffy optimism and, yes, a certain belief in magic, a willingness to fall in love. Is this willingness so easily crushed by my drooping face and newly aching joints? If I’m *this* already, what on earth am I going to become? “Functional but invisible” is almost certainly preferable to “crumbling and loud with pain.” At least Molly Grue could *walk.*

***

But putting aside the loss of my looks and the attendant damage to my shallow ego — I have to ask myself if the idea that ol’ turkey-neck Flake is too busted-up looking to Make It in the world isn’t something of an abdication of responsibility, a convenient excuse to duck out of a fight. It’s haaarrrd, I find myself whining. They should tell you this every day in art school or creative writing class: the bulk of your creative time will be spent either disappointing yourself or devising ways to avoid the inevitability of disappointing yourself, and that is an emotionally taxing way to live, even if you get to do it while wearing pajamas all day. Feelings of victory and joy and that state of “flow” people are always talking about are the exception, not the rule. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing (or that I’m even qualified to do — I was a good waitress, but not good enough to be a career one, and my music-distribution experience plus four bucks will buy me a latte, thank you, Spotify), but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that I don’t fantasize of just getting into bed and letting roots grow deep into my mattress. It’s the possibility of magic that keeps us going — of making work that rings clear and true, those fleeting moments where work feels like flying. We need to believe in magic, but somehow live without expecting it.

What I know in my heart, even if I don’t always live it in my mind and body, is this: All of this, the whole stupid enterprise, from working to fucking to writing to making art to walking, at any age, takes hope. Silly, reckless, pointless, goofy hope. Without it, I may as well sit down under that tree and wait, not for a unicorn, but to die. I know unicorns don’t exist. But I can hope it’s true that they live forever.

* * *

Emily Flake is a New Yorker cartoonist, writer, illustrator, and performer.

Editor: Sari Botton

* * *

Also In the Fine Lines Series:
Introducing Fine Lines
Gone Gray
An Introduction to Death
Age Appropriate
A Woman, Tree or Not
Dress You Up in My Love
The Wrong Pair
‘Emerging’ as a Writer — After 40
Losing the Plot
A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Girl
Elegy in Times Square
Every Day I Write the Book
Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me
Everything is Fine
Barely There
Bracing for the Silence of an Empty Nest
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
Game of Crones
Father’s Little Helper
Whole 60
Conversations with My Loveliest
What is Happening to My Body?
Keeping my Promise to Popo
Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother
Old Dudes on Skateboards
I’m 72. So What?
Learning From Perimenopause and a Kpop Idol
The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People
We Are All We Have
Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief
How I Got My Shrink Back