My Mother Lived and Died in a Polluted Ecotone

A Mother and Daughter Are An Edge by Sarah Giragosian

“A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity.”
– Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

When my mother died, I was handed some pamphlets about grief, its permutations and stages. What to expect. What falls within the range of normal, although what I could have used was a field guide. Suddenly everything around me, the animals and plants, people and objects, changed utterly. I had changed. The birds had changed. A hummingbird was no longer just a hummingbird. A hummingbird could be a decoy for my mother. The mother deer that feeds from my garden could be a proxy for her. My brain craved my mother, needed to see her or at least see the world as she once did. Its vibrations, bundles of energy and meanings that once lit her up did the same to me. I took an interest in the things that once riveted her, and I needed to inhabit her perceptual world, her Umwelt. When I missed her most, I imagined her sitting next to me, inhabiting the same space, looking out at the same view.

Grief cracked me open, rewired my brain, transformed me. Now, I’m filled with questions.

My mother died of esophageal cancer. I have all sorts of questions about what caused it. Her systemic scleroderma is a likely contender (an autoimmune disease that tightens the skin and organs), but there are other dark-horse candidates: the toxin chromium-6 that is found in her town’s drinking water, her apartment’s proximity to a nuclear power plant, and the industrial park abutting her old house that was once a Superfund site. How clean can a former Superfund site really be? A federal review tells me: “. . . the EPA is satisfied that the site poses no threat to human health and the environment if the property is reused for commercial/industrial use.” But I don’t trust the EPA anymore, which allows fracking companies to steer clear of regulation. Most of the time I don’t really know what I’m drinking when I fill my glass from the tap.

To townies and tourists, my mother resided in a coveted place, a coastal town in Massachusetts. But I’ve pored over the cancer cluster maps, and there’s a high incidence of cancer right where she lived. She lived and died in a polluted ecotone, a place by the sea that in the summer is flooded by tourists.

In her monumental work of conservation Silent Spring, Rachel Carson writes, “There is an ecology of the world within our bodies. In this unseen world minute causes produce mighty effects . . . To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts.” Carson would later die of breast cancer, but before that she was constructing a biochemical map between the complex ecosystem of her body and her region. In my own way, I’m doing the same, charting my mother’s inner and outer ecologies. There are territories of body and place that leave me with more questions than answers. Climate change and the polycrisis of our times upend ecological interactions, threaten biological health, increase mortality, undermine hard-won resilience.

Ecotones are sites of transition. A forest clearing is an ecotone, as is the littoral zone of a lake, the saturated swale of the marshland. The word’s etymology comes from the Greek roots “oikos” (home) and “tonus” (tension). It is a meeting zone, a space of interchange and energy. Think of it as akin to a contact zone, a bordering habitat rather than a line, a place where ecosystems converge. For Rob Nixon, ecotones “may . . . open up new configurations of possibility (and for some species, introduce new threats) as the transitional areas create so-called edge effects.”   

Ecologists have found high species diversity in ecotones where rich habitats sustain different kinds of life. Birds frequent the edges of land and water, while the edge between seas and rivers have many fish species. Some animals are restricted to the edges of ecotones while others travel between habitats. Many migrate across ecotones. Some creatures thrive in them. Others may meet their end. Climate change has introduced new threats. Drought, for example, may exceed a plant’s ability to withstand a water shortage. A shortage of rainfall can limit flower and fruit production, which in turn can have system-wide impacts on wildlife and people. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The ecotones my mother and I shared were the placenta, the umbilical cord, our cells and DNA. Then, later: the ecotone of her milk, which included vitamins and minerals, but also the pollutants and pesticides and heavy metals in my mother’s system, in many mothers’ systems in first world countries these days. Those tender hydraulics between mother and child are marked with uncertainty. An ecotone is a “place of danger and opportunity.” A site of slippage and risk. In that fraught zone, my mother and I were knitted together from the get-go. Ours was a geometry of leaning in, of giving and receiving. Another word for this might be love.

Grief, too, is an ecotone: I’m half in, half out of this world. A sense of unreality pads alongside me. Weather passes through me, unseen, unfelt. The seasons too. My mind wanders off somewhere again. A serious question: Where did I go? Send out a search party; take me home.

Branching out of my heart are all sorts of versions of me: the one who wants to float off on a barge down the river, destined for who-knows-where. The one who daredevils too rapidly on the highway. The one who wants to call up my mother on the telephone and tell her about the lifetime of things I have experienced since her death. I did hardly anything in the months after my mother’s death. But emotionally speaking, I was trying to make a go of it on a dark planet with no vegetation or water, with no soul save me.  

I’m seeking out the ecotone of the page, where there is potential interchange, perhaps even a sort of dialogue that I might enter with my mother. I’m testing out the contours of a spiritual field where we might transfer energy between us. Energy, they say, can’t be destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. I imagine her voice, what would she say. I know my mother would tell me that, whether I’m wounded or not, I have more life to live. To get on with the business of being. I know this, yet I want to see her again, disheveled but radiant with life, her jeans garden-soiled, her hair flung back from her face. Her friends gravitated to her warmth, her irreverence and integrity. Once, her laugh and smile were all I needed to recalibrate myself, to remember the small wonders around me I missed: butterfly bush, coneflower, the bright orange shock of a newt in the soil. Look, Sarah, look! I miss that voice, loud and buoyant, ripe with awe. My mother was most alive at the ocean, in a forest or garden. Before the chemo, my mother was vibrant; after, it was like she curled in on herself.

Grief feeds off my body from the inside out. It feasts on my doubts: Did I do everything in my power to help my mother during the eight months her health declined? What if there was more I could have done? 

Cue her voice, cue her wonder. I can hear her in my memories, but I’m fearful of what my mind is capable of undoing. I would give a garden’s worth of bird songs to hear her voice again. I want it to be more than an echo in my mind. I suspect that all my future writing will be made in pursuit of her voice. It is inside of me now; I have to excavate it.

In his book Game Management, the ecologist Aldo Leopold identified what he termed the “law of interspersion,” noting that animals flourish in ecotones where they can simultaneously benefit from ecosystems. In an ecotone, they can flourish as they take advantage of the vegetation and abundance of prey. But abundant life also offers new opportunities for predators. This space of energy and entanglement, opportunity and danger, is what’s called an edge effect.

Writing has become an ecotone between my life and her death, a place where I tap the sources of memory and creativity to bring her back. There’s energy in this contact zone. Perhaps we are both trying to communicate with each other. Call this magical thinking (Didion is right: We become magical thinkers when we lose a loved one), but my mother—in whatever form she is now—would want me to feel her steadying presence. Sometimes I feel her presence in the thoughtful stare of a doe or the hummingbird that hovers by the living room window, peeking in, or any of the other creatures (red-tailed hawks, cardinals, chickadees, dragonflies, and monarch butterflies) that I associate with her. Spirit animals, those she sought to draw to her garden. 

My mother’s signs of good fortune have become mine.

The summer my mother died was the summer of hummingbirds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds at the feeder. Ruby-throated hummingbirds whizzing inches past my face. To the Aztecs, hummingbirds were warriors. To Mayans, the sun in disguise. To Emily Dickinson, “A Route of Evanescence.” Perfectly agile and unworldly creatures, which enchanted my mother and filled her with delight. Sometimes I imagine there must be a gap between her world and mine, and she’s scooting them through to send me a reprieve from my sadness. True: It’s hard to sustain sadness when you’ve glimpsed a hummingbird. You have to surrender to their spell.

Hummingbirds are drawn toward ecotones, the edges between meadow and forest where they can feed, breed, and nest. Telegraphing their iridescence, they swoop and turn on a knife point, drinking from our false indigo and columbine, our sugar water in its red bottle. But summer is fading, and I know they will soon return south for the winter. To sustain my cheer, my partner refills their sugar water each time the bottle runs out. In her love of animals and love for me, she is not so different from my mother. 

But can hummingbirds be a substitute for her? Can writing? Can I forage in the margins between life and death until I find a version of myself I can live with? I don’t know. On some days, it’s enough to see a bright flash at the bird feeder. On other days, I rage at the thought anything other than her, proxy or not, could possibly be enough to sustain me. 

I miss the little things: the way she treated strawberries as a delicacy, placed sachets of lavender under her pillow and mine, left treats out for the birds, mailed me greeting cards with photographs of wildlife “just for the hell of it.” She loved the sound of ocean surf and could spend a whole day reading on the beach. She could pass the hours watching old Hitchcock movies with me or exploring a new bookstore. She made the best mushroom soup. The most decadent brownies drizzled with chocolate fudge. I miss calling her on Sundays to tell her about my week.

My mother was a caretaker at heart and managed a home for developmentally disabled adults. She was fiercely protective of them, but she had a tough side too. She quickly grew frustrated with self-pity or extreme emotion: When I discovered that her cancer was at stage 4 and she was given a year or less to live (she would ultimately have eight months), I cried and cried. Although in my thirties, I wanted her to treat me with kid-gloves, to reassure me. “Knock it off,” she said when she saw my tears. Then she dragged me for a walk along the beach. All our walks from that point had an air of desperation. I think she was trying to teach me how to walk off my grief, how to pay attention to something else, anything other than the pain.  

After she died, I kept finding myself in strange places: at an unfamiliar part of the city, on a street bench too stunned to stand up, or crossing the street against moving traffic. I don’t know how I ended up at any of those places; my feet had their own mind. 

Not the deathbed body, not the graveyard scene, not the paper-thin proxy of icons or the mirage of blessings, but the close-up of her big laugh; that’s all I want.

I crave her momisms, wrapped in material tough as rawhide, but softhearted in intent.

Before she died, I wasn’t aware of what I see now. I see in photographs that she had eyes only for me, forgetting all about the camera lens. How did I never notice this? Every snapshot is another iteration of her breaking into a grin, her eyes crinkling as she peered down at me, while I rolled my eyes. This was part of our act. We were mother and daughter, not terribly far apart in age. She was a single mother. I was her only child. Of course, we loved each other. Of course, we grated upon each other’s last nerve.

She could be slapdash or refined, hysterically funny or annoying. She was playful, which I realize now is a smart way to disarm people, to open them up or—in my case—to provoke a reaction.  

“Mom, do you want to run out to the store with me?”

“Only if I can tease you.”

“Stop it, Mom.”

“Stop it, Mom,” she would parrot back. Inane, but on and on it would go. 

Once her habits grated, like her loud voice or the way she forgot to wash the kitchen counter clean. Now I just want her back. 

I would greet her as a zombie, Edwidge Danticat once said of her desire to see her mother after she died. I get it: I would take my mom back no matter what unholy arts resuscitated her.

I connect ecological trauma with my mother’s death. I pore over Massachusetts cancer data; the graphs tell me that 2017-2021 (the last years that data was collected) in my mother’s region had a higher incidence for esophageal cancer than in previous years. Is it normal for the bereft to search for answers like this? I don’t know. Grief, like my OCD, is a frightful loop. I can’t fully pull myself away from the questions that I can’t answer. They summon me back, even as I write this essay.

I don’t know for sure if the unseen toxicities of the land and water gave my mom cancer or not, but if so, it adds another layer of horror to her death. My mother who stewarded the land, who kept soil and shovels in her car trunk for the next garden she promised to re-design or just spruce up, usually for her work or her sister or a friend. My mother, who never forgot to leave seeds out for the birds.

I don’t feel like I can face the collective traumas of the current moment, ecological and political, without her. I check my body for tumors. I check the news for the latest atrocity. I watch the skies for smog and wildfire.

Sure, in a way the Earth is my mother, but in a much more real sense, my mother is my mother.

I hear silence and wonder why the birds are not singing.

If you mapped the home that my mother created for the two of us, it would be full of books and jagged edges where the past could lie in wait around the corner or the summons of the present appeared in the form of a sun-bright day and a couple of walking sticks at the door. We lived in a tiny summer cottage, cold and uninsulated in the winter, on a dirt road not far from the bay. We looked for clams in the summer, frequented ice cream shops, the ocean, and the library all through the year.  

Inside and out, the plants were toothed and full of berries, some sweet, others bright and bitter. All sorts of creatures drifted in through the front door. My mother taught me the names of the flowers in our yard: lady’s slipper, Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions. She showed me which I could pluck, and which I could only look at, like the lady’s slipper, a delicate orchid, which is endangered or threatened in some regions.

She taught me about the secrets of the soil: how to look under logs for rich earth glinting with worms and slugs, when to plant sunflower seeds, how to watch for deer in the morning as they nuzzled their snouts into dew-licked grasses. We took headcounts of the purple beach pea in the dunes and in the spring we left sugar water out for the hummingbirds.

“Look, Sarah, look.” I miss her voice, edged with wonder, exhorting my attention. Maybe a small gesture, but significant for me who is often too much in her head. When you carry unease inside of your body much of the time, you begin to cherish the moments your stomach unclenches, your muscles slacken, and your throat tastes, no longer, of acid. In the forest or garden or bay with her, I was present. I listened to her injunctions to pay attention, to be alive to the world beyond my own worries.

And I miss my mother’s body of knowledge, my favorite body of knowledge, who recognized the calls of most songbirds in the Northeast and taught me to be present to the creatures, plants and little animals around me.

“Go get dirty” she’d urge me, and as a child, I would play in earnest with my friends in the woods, unafraid, unlike some of the other kids, to come home with ripped jeans, skinned knees, or dandelions and violets tangled in my hair.  

My mother furnished our home with bedtime stories and works of art and old jokes, the same ones like touchstones across the span of years. Sometimes we dined on chocolate pudding while winds from the north tried to knock down our door. Roughhewn but welcoming, our home flushed with pink light almost every morning. Cicadas and orange-bright newts roamed its edges. Once upon a time, no mercury or toxins or disease could get past the front door. Once, a mother and daughter counted themselves lucky.