Emily Cunningham

If it weren’t for my climate work & then Trump’s election she’d have believed till the very end that life was slowly getting better for everyone; it’s what her generation needed to believe, and what the luckier ones truly could believe.

She was the child of Swedish immigrants, the first person from her town to graduate from college; she’d gone to Christmas services in her uncle’s sleigh. Even if we are very, very lucky, I suspect it will be millennia before lifespans like that are common again:

we have poisoned this Earth too badly. Hers was the last generation to grow up with whole & natural food: no pesticides, little processing. The air and water were clean, the northern WI climate harsh but consistent.

So as I think of my loss of her, it seems tied to every other loss. Maybe the loss of a mother always is. But in the past, people could console themselves that life would go on—for their descendants, for the seasons & the natural world. We know now that that may not be the case.

In her last months, my mother said something that meant a lot to me, but that I think I didn’t understand fully. Of my work she said, “I know you’re doing it for all of us.” It meant a lot to me, b/c I felt keenly the guilt of worrying her (with my possibility of prison).

Knowing she understood meant that I could let that go a little. But now, what I notice is that she knew she was dying, yet perceived there to be an “us” to work for. She didn’t say I was doing it “for the children”, or “for those who aren't to blame”, as many people do.

She was including herself in the great human (and perhaps even nonhuman) “we”, even as she was about to depart it (as far as we know). Our climate work will only have real impact in the future, if it has any. I think my mother saw herself, in some way, as part of that future.

And that inchoate sense of connection—inchoate b/c she was Christian, and anything else could have been unseemly—that was the greatest gift she gave me. It was a little like growing up with a good witch; she spoke to the flies as she shooed them out of the house, she noticed...