Playwright Kristin Idaszak, who writes at the intersection of chronic illness and the climate crisis, reflects in this essay on life with a heart condition, the horseshoe crab (whose blue blood is vital to medicine), the interdependence between living things and ecosystems, and the shared experience of ecological grief.
My experience of solastalgia is inextricable from my experience with chronic illness. After getting struck by lightning from inside my own heart (or so it felt), my body became a site of mourning—a place where my sense of being safe, being at home, was lost. The ravaging of Earth resonates with me on a cellular level. I think I know what the land feels like after a storm lays waste to it. Eventually, something emerges from the wreckage. Not hope. After I got shocked, I did not want to keep going. Yet, unbidden, I felt the groping, instinctual push toward regeneration, the same life force with which vegetables sprout from the compost heap.
More picks about ecological grief
With Regard to the Invisible
“The climates that run through us.”
Solastalgia
“Pleasant memories of places past: that’s nostalgia. But what do you call the grief that comes when the modern world leaves nary a trace of the place that raised you?”
To Live in the Ending
“I am not sure I know how to unbraid the language of the apocalypse from all this and still have a voice left to speak to you.”
