Hello, and welcome to Ducks of the World Tree, the podcast that waddles across the manicured lawns of suburbia, flaps wildly in front of a speeding Tesla, and dives deep into the tepid waters of some kind of pompous drainage ditch masquerading as a natural water feature.
In today’s tales of neurodivergent, animist wanderings through end stage capitalism, we’re talking about grief, isolation, and profit, with a side quest down health insurance lane.
The first premise that I’m always working with is that there are no individuals — only fluid and interdependent communities.
The communal nature of our innermost being may be invisible to many modern people, and I assert that’s an intentional part of capitalism. Isolated people are vulnerable and thus easy to control. They’re also more likely to spend money on crap they don’t need to soothe the souls-deep injury of disconnection. In order to destroy the bonds of healthy, interdependent communities, modern people are intentionally isolated, both conceptually and physically. We’re isolated by the idea that there is a human and non-human sphere as well as various identitarian notions about who we do and don’t have relations with. Physically, we’re walled off in climate-controlled apartments, we work from home, we order groceries to be delivered online, and packages from Amazon appear neatly at the door. But all of this does, indeed, depend on others. Conceptually, we’re in constant dialogue with everything and everyone who has gone before. Physically, we depend on the land and sun and rain to feed us, human beings to pick and package and transport that food, we depend on computers and their networks, which are made by groups of people and large amounts of supposedly “inanimate” “resources.” Even in our isolation we depend on vast networks of other-than-self.
And we, in turn, must serve our part in the larger machine by going to work.
The glue holding this fractured, depressed, delivery-dependent society together, however, is not love or clan or religion or land-connectedness — it is money. Exploitation, violence or the threat of violence, profit. There is a real, alienating, socio-pathology that underpins the social fabric of modernity and that is unsustainable.
It also makes us sad. We are sad because we know that we are interdependent, community-hungry little hairless apes and we know we are weirdly isolated by all the trappings of modernity, and we believe all this to be inevitable — and it makes us sad. We grieve for the loss of connection. We grieve the lack of relation.
I’ve also asserted that Nature is alive, conscious, sentient, animate, intelligent, and willful. That the natural world reaches out to us. It longs for us to rejoin the communion of the living in relational awareness. As an aside: I hate to verbally cut “us” from “nature,” because it isn’t true; we are nature. But I think if I don’t overall clarity will be lost at this point, so go with me on this, acknowledging that it’s an imperfect articulation.
Nature also grieves humanity’s strange little detour down modernity lane.
That underlying belief leads me to assert that there are no inanimate resources lying about waiting to be exploited any more than there are women lying about asking to be raped or hospitalized people just wishing they could hurry up and die so that some CEO somewhere could buy a second yacht with their accumulated health insurance premiums. There are only delusional humans exercising power via violence or the threat of violence over other sentient, living, intelligent beings.
And the deluded people are wrong.
The world is alive. It is conscious. And we depend on our connection to it for our health. The disconnection we suffer under capitalism leads inevitably to death.
We grieve. Nature grieves.
Not participating in the relational exchange of life on Earth drives us crazy and makes us sick. The attitudes that arise from seeing the world as a pile of inanimate resources underlies our entire system of exploitation, of violence, pollution, climate chaos… fucking health insurance. The entire idea that healthcare could be for-profit, the idea that a person who is sick is actually a resource for a corporation to exploit and profit from…
All that arises from the premise that the world is inanimate. That premise is the root of evil. The love of money comes afterwards.
Flip the coin for a moment: If our basic worldview were that stones and trees were alive and conscious, and we treated even stones and trees as non-human people with varying levels of consciousness and autonomy, how then could we conceive of exploiting other human beings? How could we conceive of exploiting women for their reproductive function or other groups of people for their labor? If we wouldn’t exploit a rock because it has a recognizable spirit, how could we exploit a human?
Our disconnection from the larger animate world ultimately allows capitalism to destroy the entire planet with pollution, plastic, carbon emissions, corruption, perverting our social bonds and basic humanity. And because we are atomized by capitalism, exhausted in our solitary, parallel lives, we are largely unable to adequately respond. So we grieve alone.
The last two premises that I’m always trying to work with are that reconnection is healing and that if the cure to your sadness is being sold to you, it is not the cure to your sadness.
If we want to be happy, we must reach out. Go outside. Cling to nature. Recognize that there is no separation between you and tree, bear and stone. See the flow of energy and matter through various states. Fall in love with the human and non-human worlds. Interact with the bark of trees, the cool, moist soil, the smell of fish in a lake, people in flesh. Not mediated by plastic and glass and silicone. And remember, that no one can sell you the medicine for what ails you. A toxic mimic of connection is worse than just suffering disconnection.
So, we must reconnect. One part of reconnecting with the real, animate, living world is engaging with grief. This engagement must be honest, fearless, and authentic — because the blithe, superficial, “it’s all in god’s plan” Hallmark cards bullshit undermines healing.
Grief is real and natural. Just like old age, sickness, and death, grief comes for us — all. But in this twilight of capitalism, we have sectioned off all the “unproductive” parts of human life. Sickness and death and age get sent away. And if someone is truly grieving, they’re of no use to capitalism.
Grief is the abject sorrow of separation. It is disintegration where there should be wholeness. Grief is too real, too authentic, too resistant to being subverted and used by capitalism. So we isolate the grieving. We isolate the sick who might make cause us to feel uneasy. We tell the sad that they need to take their problems to a professional. They need to take medication. So they can hurry up and get back to work.
As long as we are stuck in modernity, therapy and medication may well be necessary. But also, every piece of evidence we have about human beings experiencing grief and trauma and then truly healing from it, indicates that what we need physical community, dance, drums, touch, communion. Connection.
Today, in an effort to do some of the real work of grieving and healing and reconnecting myself, I would like to reach out to you, dear listener. I’d like to read a piece of prose poetry I wrote a few years ago about watching a beloved friend’s spouse die of cancer.
As I watched the 29 year old husband of one of my dearest friends die, horrifically, the spectre of the American health insurance system was an ever-present additional torture. The for-profit health insurance system was a vicious backdrop to everything else vicious and horrific that happened.
From the fact that he wasn’t diagnosed with cancer at all until it had spread everywhere because — well, because of insurance, to the fact that this fully insured, fully employed young couple also spent over $100,000 cash in a vain attempt to treat this cancer, all of it. All of the suffering. Every moment of it was monetized.
And that makes me extremely angry.
In the piece I am about to read, I only brush the topic obliquely. The financial aspect was far too much additional horror to dive into in this one poem.
But I want to say here and now, that for-profit health insurance is an absolute evil. The push for private equity to purchase hospitals and doctors’ practices has only made healthcare more inaccessible, and more deadly. Use of AI in health insurance claim denial has only killed more people since this piece was written. Our grief and our rage as a society has only grown.
Each of us, in our isolated silos, have grieved the loss of loved ones who were tortured not only by disease, but also by insurance companies. We suffer from cancers caused in no small part by the pollution and tainted food that capitalism foists upon us all, and then they torture us a little more with insurance claim denials and malicious incompetence that amounts to harassment. Retroactive denials of prior authorizations. They defend their denials until long after our loved ones have died.
So I will read to you a piece about grief. And about rage.
The grief we collectively experience is not only of the loss of a loved one. It is the grief of isolation. Of financial precarity. Of insurance torture. Of separation from community. Separation from a natural existence. Dependence on toxic systems. The grief of capitalism.
So I will read to you of all this and more. Because part of reconnecting and healing is expressing our sorrows. Sharing our pain. Recognizing that everything touches on everything else.
A is for absolutely stunning. You, my dear friend, could not have been a more beautiful bride, nor could the groom have been more dashing. The two of you, both twenty-something, immortalized in ten thousand photographs: you are the effortless, natural definition of grace and youth and health — absolutely perfect in every way.
B is for best. For going home to your kind, warm, fabulously brilliant best friend every night. For the best year ever. For your new floors and grown-up furniture and fancy new picture frames (some still sporting stock photos). For your new job. As your mom says: “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Everything is so good, your friends (maybe just a little bit jealously) are speculating whether next year, B might be for baby.
C is for chaos. Because families are for holidays. I mean, holidays are for families. Families, a time to sit together and eat too much. And play with the little cousins. Eat too much, but not until you get a stomachache, goober. But the stomachache has grown. In reality, it has lurked there for a long time, weeks, months, quiet, barely known, but now it is something more. Something that hurts. So you take your silly husband to the doctor, and he probably has appendicitis, which is urgent, but not really any big deal in the grand scheme of things. The doctor sends the two of you to the nearest emergency room where a heavy-set, blonde woman in too-tight, sea-green scrubs scans his guts. And mild irritation wraps awkwardly around your thin shoulders as you swing your feet from the too-tall chair in the too-cold room, scrolling mindlessly through your phone. And you wait and wait and wait. But the tightness in your chest is because fuck this is expensive, and no one has time for this on the Sunday night before you both go back to work from Thanksgiving break, not because even the tiniest hummingbird-shadow of fear has crossed your minds.
D is for diagnosis. And then the doctor walks in, business-like and grim, and he says many things, but you hear only one clear word before the doctor turns away and closes the door on you: cancer.
And C is for chaos. For the order-less, justice-less dance of the universe and the traffic on the way to the hospital. For the spinny little particles of dust trapped in viscous ropes of sunlight as it passes through the window of the family room on the fourth floor of the cancer ward where you should not be, looking as though your heart is a dried-out, rotten apple that has collapsed in on itself, forgotten on the counter. Where he should not be, sitting there in a robe and a blue toboggan cap wearing his trademark lighthouse smile that almost masks the terror. Where I should not be, standing around like a bad impression of myself, offering oversized trays of chocolate candies you don’t really want making small talk with your mom and his cousins.
F is for things fall apart.
G is for gravity. The sensation that before this moment, the air was busy filling up, moment layered upon moment, with tiny grains of sand, but I had lived my life up to now unaware. And now I see that your body has gained the mass of a dying star, and all things fall toward your center. Now, the weight of terrible possibilities descend over all our minds like wet wool that expands to fill the volume of the chest, that twists inside the belly. It is the weight of my bones suddenly shot through with nails that squirm and worm their way up and down the long corridors of my arms and legs. Bones that would give their very marrow to flee, flee, flee — but that instead sit beside you as you sit beside him as we sit beside this strange new reality in the blue-carpeted family room on the fourth floor cancer ward.
I is for insurance. See also: Quasi-Satanic, uniquely American method of torture.
And I is for indignity. For every open-backed paper dress, cold tile on bare toes, samples of every possible bodily fluid lined up in clear plastic cups with blue screw-tops labeled with white stickers, his name and ID number and age scrawled across in black marker.
P is for the paperwork that comes in official emails, that must be faxed, that arrives in envelopes large and small. Paperwork that collects, sheet after sheet, in reams stacked and filed and folded as if we were preparing the sacrifice of great swaths of forest to lay on the altar of bureaucracy in the slight hope that a capricious god would grant reprieve to your beloved.
O is for operation. And C is for chemo. And for a different chemo. And yet another. C is for claim. And D is for denial. S is for savings, all used up. P is for the passage of less than a year’s time that feels simultaneously like a moment and longer than a century.
H is for hopeful, still. For the foolish, unutterable, tingling, sweaty, hot, swirling mess of maybe things will be OK after all.
And S is for one last scan.
M is for metastasized. For the sickness that creeps along the shadow of the fence lines of our lives, dark vines seeking purchase in untended ground. Tendrils waiting to blossom in spectacular arrays of horror.
O is for the operation to make a little more space in his lungs. Just a little space. Just for a little while.
F is for feeling like a force-fed tick. For holding all these things in my gut while I scurry the halls at work, trying to avoid the seeking eyes and prying questions of our co-workers. For feeling as though I have become insectoid and horrible, and that with every well-meaning query, my distended gray belly is tearing open to disgorge the purple morass of viscous churning news.
H is for hospital, again. And P is for pain. D is for the dread that rises from my belly, a clear, fine, sharp shape that spreads out in chrysanthemums of blue, electric shock along my collarbones and arms and palms and fingertips. And U is for unravelling.
J is for joy. Banal little snippets of sparkly, orange joy that shine through the cold, gray granite of this place. Mango Slushies. Bubble tea with popping bubbles. Watching him light up the room with that grin of his, bright as the only lighthouse on the coast, as he watches you shove Hot Cheetos into your face.
T is for time, for the way that time collapses to a pinprick, and I look at all my living friends and see us simultaneously as we are now and as we inevitably will be. As he is now. For the way that time is running out.
R is for regret, whileL is for lost, life, longing. And for lingering. And N is for now. Because now divides never-will-be from was, and because now is all that’s real, despite our protestations.
Q is for questions, the questions your other friends hurl at me because they’re terrified and they don’t want to bother you. The questions that pierce the fragile facade of I’m fine. The questions that come with jagged, slender, innocent edges. The questions that lodge in my belly and slice me open until I spew anguish across the room and the contents of my pathetic little heart paint the walls and desks and windows with my insufficiency and my fear.
E is for emotions. All of them. For the endless origami seascape of the human heart. The infinite possible contradictions. Because I felt all of them the day he waited until you had turned your attention to the nurse, and he took my hand in his and would not let go until I found his eyes. And I knew he knew. And you did not. Yet.
V is for vivisection, which is what I felt was happening when you told me what the doctor said that morning. Vivisection — for the cracks that seem to open in the body as a response to the heart’s pain. And for the light that shines through those ruptures. The light that shines from these fissures in who we used to be. The light that seeps, the light that pours, golden and broken. After that, X is for Xanax, which I think I may need because S is for screaming in my car in the parking lot at work. Because there is no more O for operation to buy time and no more C for chemo to buy time and no more T for time and
Z is the sound of the buzzing in my head because
H is for hospice, the word that transforms all possibilities and all hope and all love and all friendship into loitering corpses doped up on state-restricted painkillers.
K is for keening. For the songs we sang on the horizon of his deathbed. For your poetry of memory, time, tide. For the high wail of his stepmother in the bathroom. The soft raking of his father in the kitchen. For your mother and I, curled on opposite ends of the couch, trying to sob silently. For attempting to fold this grief into something tiny and quiet enough to tuck between the cushions of the couch because I cannot carry two sorrows, and there is time enough for me to care for my own later.
Y is for yesterday, when I knew he would be dead by morning. When I went racing across the parking lot of my apartment, house slippers flapping, to stand in the graveyard next door and take photos of the dying of the day because I saw that the sun had almost set, and I was running out of time. And for the moment yesterday when I thought: I’ve missed the best of it, but no big deal, try again tomorrow. Then the thought: No, no. This sunset is marvelous and unique and alone, and the atmospheric conditions will never be just this way ever again.
Every day is marvelous and unique.
And we are always running out of time.
And W is for widow, my dear friend.
And A is for absolute. For the line between before and hereafter.
