Page 148 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico during my diagnosis and treatment, and then, in

Hawaii during my recovery, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.” Eva Saulitis is of our

time—was of our time--and my hope is that the personal nature of her account will spur

us to heal the Earth we have damaged so badly.

I had tracked the last years of this colleague’s life through her online journal, and found

there a compelling investigation into the end of life, including the design and weaving of

her own casket. I was similarly riveted by the opening chapter of Becoming Earth, where

Saulitis returns to New York state for a visit, and comes to understand the violence

perpetrated against her homeland and her own body, likening it to "an embodied

memory of abuse, like silence."

"I witnessed sources of that abuse during childhood drives to Buffalo to visit my parents'

immigrant Latvian friends, the thruway taking us through the steel mill town of

Lackawanna, with its spewing stacks and grimed-up row houses...we came of age an

hour's drive from Love Canal, downwind of Three Mile Island, on the heels of Silent

Spring.

"Genetic testing would eventually reveal one piece of my ancestral story. (A) mutation

shut off my immune system's ability to fight breast cancer. It was just bad fucking luck--

genetics meets life history. My oncologist would later say as much. We live in a poisoned

world. Some people have the genetics to handle it, some don't, that's my sense of it."

Saulitis reminds us of the inescapable relationships between our bodies and the Earth,

even as, in illness, we might try to deny them. "(I was) still wearing low-cut jeans that

pinched my hipbones,” she writes. “Still thinking I might one day train for a

marathon...but how can I say this: dissociated from my body as flesh, which is

vulnerable, which is mortal. Dissociated from my body as a repository for my natural

history, and the unnatural history of my birthplace."

Even though I have spent many days of my life in doctors’ offices, chemo infusion labs

and radiation waiting alcoves, accompanying my own loved ones on their journeys, I

have not done this as a patient. I prefer (don’t most of us?) to pursue what seem like the

more pressing matters of living, not dying. In Becoming Earth, Saulitis is a pathfinder for

all of us, as she peels back the layers of her dying process.