i fought the awe and the awe won

yeah, life is misery. but i'm done feeling guilty for sometimes seeing its beauty. and i'll never, *ever* apologize for being a complete dorkball. take that, mr. death.

cw: this piece discusses suicide and includes details you might find disturbing.

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this is one dorkball who came by it honest. (photo © p.j. melton, snapped on the back 40)

so. today is my son’s second death day.

there are a lot of ways this column could go after that statement. it’s only going to go one of those ways—two max. but whatever your expectations are, i want to get one request out of the way right up front.

please do not offer me self-care advice

i’m good with wisdom, condolences, “thoughts and prayers,” silence, your own story of loss and survival, whatever. just not advice. and anyway, this column is not mostly about me or my grief.

what is it about then, you ask?

well … mostly it’s about emotional weirdness during catastrophes.

aaand it’s also about why it’s pointless to try not to feel however we feel.

and it’s about—

jesus, mary, and joseph! just read it already!

the worst day of my life (… so far)

yup, he’s mine! (photo © p.j. melton, snapped at the neighborhood schoolhouse)

one moment i was studiously and 100% obliviously working in my living room. the next moment my spouse, david, was finding our son’s dead body. as i heard his discovery unfold, even without yet knowing what it meant, an alien species of terror ripped through my entire nervous system.

my nervous system will never recover.

until that moment, it had never occurred to me to say “this is the worst day of my life” except in jest.

you have probably heard people say that becoming a parent fundamentally changes your identity, that it makes you a completely new person. ehhh, maybe. but the day david and i became the non-parents of one of our children has changed us far more profoundly and permanently. and it hasn’t stopped changing us.

you wanna know what’s weird, though?

how much is the same

like, if i turned to david right now and said, “argh, i hate writing this column! this is the worst day of my life!” he would definitely go, “you mean the worst day of your life so far.” cuz that’s just how we melton-houghton dorkballs roll.

there’s no catechism for a cataclysm

jude was in a world all his own. sometimes he would come down from neptune and visit us. but not anymore. (photo © p.j. melton, snapped at the montshire)

when something changes your life a whole lot all at once, weird, weird things can happen.

here’s one: even when you’re screaming your head off while your spouse pumps your long-dead child’s rigid chest in helpless, hopeless compliance with the emergency dispatcher’s instructions, your bladder can be full. one part of your mind can notice this and automatically guide your body into the bathroom, close the door, and take a pee while other parts of your mind and body continue to very audibly lose their fucking shit.

here’s another one: when people hear your child died and they start showing up on your doorstep bearing quiches and casseroles, one part of your mind can notice that your eyes are looking at a friend and can automatically draw the corners of your mouth upward. parts of your body can even feel glad to see them and make small talk and little jokes, and can chuckle about your now–dead adult child’s little strange quirks, like how he spent the first five years of his life with conjoined rivulets of greenish snot perpetually glistening on his upper lip.

all of that can happen even though this same quirky kindergartener seems to have skewered your heart with an ice pick.

i want to tear this fascist milky way apart

two years later, the ice pick is still stuck in there, btw. you get used to it.

here’s one more thing. you can be in pain—pain that is multiple orders of magnitude worse than the pain of giving birth, pain so bad you think you will just fucking die of hurting. and still …

you can want to never, ever, ever feel better

penelope scott says it pretty fucking well. (she usually does.) (even though she is only like 24.)

luckily (?) for me, i don’t think i will ever truly feel “better.”

consider the redwoods

fucking shattered. how like life. (photo © david fairchild houghton, snapped at prairie creek redwoods park)

but that’s not the end.

jude’s death was not my first rodeo. i had c-ptsd already. and since jude died—which is to say, because jude died—i’ve been for all intents and purposes forced to begin a profound healing process.

more than that: thanks to some outside help that i resisted accepting for more than a year, i’ve started rebuilding myself and my relationships with my closest loved ones, atom by atom, starting deep down in the very bottom of my selfhood. so deep within my being, in fact, that the healing is not coming from within me. it’s coming from the medium i’m rooted in—whatever the psychological equivalent of the mycorrhizal network within the forest floor is.

last time i started calling it a d.i.y. safety net.

jude wrote a research paper about mycorrhizal networks in high school, and the teacher, john kersey, shared it with david and me after he learned of jude’s death.

do not ask me what the mushroom watchers of america foundation is. a joke, i’m certain, even though i don’t get it.

if you read scientific american, you probably know that the nature of “the wood-wide web” has been somewhat overhyped in mainstream media outlets. (shocking, i know.) in essence, these networks are so difficult to study that there is barely any data, so non-scientists tend to jump to fun, semi-mystical conclusions that are essentially metaphors, not peer-reviewed findings.

this is very, very not ok: the science needs to continue for a long time before we truly understand the functions of these networks. so let’s not go spouting new age bullshit and pretending it’s backed by science.

all the same, i like the wood-wide-web metaphor and i don’t feel like waiting 20 more years for scientific consensus to use this metaphor however the hell i want. and guess what i’ve got—and peer-reviewed science ain’t got.

poetic license, y’all

david and i went on a spousal-bucket-list trip to the coastal redwoods in northern california this past fall, and it seemed like i could actually feel the forest’s subliminal connectedness, these perpetual and far-reaching exchanges of resources and information over tiny mycelium threads, far beneath the dark, moist, warm, rich, friable, mushroomy dirt.

and that felt familiar—like my own connection with the natural world, my loved ones, and my community.

sure, it’s all just chemistry (oxytocin, i love you, man … [blubbers]).

but you know what else is just chemistry? the light and heat of the fucking sun.

earthquakes, water walls, and fires, fires, fires

the pacific … isn’t. (photo © p.j. melton, snapped at gold bluffs beach)

brace yourself now. new metaphor incoming!

you don’t have to walk very far into an old-growth redwood forest to understand that the story of the redwoods is a story of catastrophe.

i don’t mean their catastrophic near-extinction, although it is true that only around 5% of the pre-european-contact coastal redwood forest remains. no, i’m talking about why they exist and how they survive.

the coastal redwood forests are just constantly, constantly streaming, dripping, and steaming. in addition to the ecosystem you can see when you walk through the forest, the canopy has an entire separate ecosystem of its own, with soil, water, minerals, and (presumably) mycorrhizal networks that support several other types of trees, various amphibians, and other species.

their environment is far, far beyond what you might call “rugged.” the forests are not far from the san andreas system of fault lines. and just in the last 15 years, various sections of the california coast have been hit by tsunamis that followed earthquakes as far away as chile, tonga, and japan.

what forces must the sea and earth have slammed and felled the redwoods with during their 200 million years of growth before humans existed to see it?

then there are the fires. most of the older trees david and i saw (many are 2,000+ years old) had visible charring. coastal redwoods are well adapted to fire (several groups of indigenous peoples have been doing controlled burns for thousands of years in what is now california), with bark up to 12 inches thick and seeds that prefer that mineralized, burned-over soil to germinate in.

what the actual fuck?

how can there be so much life here?

for that matter, have you seen the world lately? how can there be life anywhere on this big blue ball of pain, which humans seem intent on choking to death on its own vomit?

whyyy aaare weee doooing thiiis? are we even fucking from here? maybe a living, breathing, toxic disaster is just, like, who we are.

it can get a bit … uncomfortable sometimes, vibing with supervillain monologues.

ok,ok. more scientific possibility: the building blocks of life on this planet arrived from space via asteroids.

way less scientific opinion: life originates in cataclysm.

and then there were salmon

it’s all coming back around, sure as the tide. (photo © p.j. melton, snapped near klamath, california)

but it takes more than the cataclysm itself. you have to want to feel better. you have to do the fucking work. ultimately, you have to weave your own safety net. good news, though.

you don’t have to do it alone

but you do have to accept help.

during our trip, david and i spent a night in klamath, a tiny tribal town in between the prairie creek and jedediah smith redwood parks. as we were heading north, i suddenly pulled off the road, primally drawn to a scenic overlook (see photo above).

klamath made international news recently because the yurok (oohl) tribe, currently the largest native tribe in california, had won a decades-long fight to un-dam the klamath river and its tributaries. salmon, whose life cycle the dams disrupted, have been integral to the yurok way of life for as long as anyone can remember.

it took a long time, but the dams had finally all come down about three weeks before david and i arrived. days later, salmon were swimming freely in the klamath river for the first time in more than a century. less than a month later, the salmon were spawning.

from disaster to healing

jude william melton-houghton, 2002–2023 (photo © p.j. melton)

i don’t have to tell you that the recent election was a catastrophe, and its chaotic consequences are just getting started.

what i’m about to say isn’t peer-reviewed science, but i still think it’s true.

beneath the scorched earth, the polarized populace, the interstate highway system, the consumerist self-numbing, and yes, even the road rage, there is connectedness. it can hold us together in a collective exchange of information and resources. or we can keep hacking away and burning away and digging away at it instead.

that’s a choice

now, if you’ll excuse me, i’m going to go for a walk with david and scream and throw some shit and listen to the playlist from jude’s memorial and look at david’s slideshow of jude pictures and tbh probably drink too much and cry myself to sleep in the arms of my dead son’s father.

it’s going to be the best fucking day of my fucking life.

so far.