The wind was whipping up, but I ignored it. I was at my house in St. Louis, on the phone with the rabbi who would officiate my mother’s funeral, a thousand miles away. We spoke about her life, her family, the service, and other matters both material and spiritual. Mom had been sick for well over a year, but she started declining rapidly in December. Late last month, she was admitted to hospice. Along with her nurses and aides, I helped tend to her frail form as she slowly ceased to be able to eat, to speak, to breathe. Finally relieved of pain, she allowed comfort to overtake her.
When the emergency alert blared on my smartphone, I told the rabbi that we should probably finish talking later. My wife had just raced down the stairs to the basement, calling for me to follow. I did, but also I lingered: The sky was so dark. I had never seen a storm like this before. Later I’d realize that’s because I had never been inside an EF-3 category tornado with 150-plus mph winds, like the one that tore across metro St. Louis on Friday. But on my way to the basement, I didn’t know that. I took in the surreal, terrifying sight of a full-grown shingle oak scraping the ground. The storm seemed gentle to me in that moment, as it laid the tree to rest inside my yard. I saw it cradling the oak to its now-certain end, as I had done for my mother the week before.
My feeling of repose was gone by the time I reached the basement and heard windows shattering. Glass is a human invention, and its breakage is inevitably associated with human violence or a human accident: a burglar’s incursion, a child’s wayward baseball, a pogrom. I knew in my head that nature, too, can impose itself on the built environment, but still I was unprepared for the sensation of its happening.
As a midwesterner in the age of anthropogenic climate change, I have spent many hours in the basement waiting out tornado warnings. Normally, it’s boring to be down there in storm isolation, even though we all bring phones and tablets, and the power usually stays on. We might express frustration at the fact that official warnings rarely come to much. The tornadoes never pass through here, we say. They always move west of the city. As of Friday morning, I understood that tornadoes were unlikely; baseball-size hail was the greater concern. But when a tornado has begun to whirl around your home, a sense of smallness overtakes you. Who are you to think you know how any of this works?
In the basement, my wife held my daughter tightly, begging me to stop wandering toward the walls and windows. I didn’t do so out of bravado or even apprehension. I was enrapt. To watch the storm was to be a party to a power much greater than myself. As one gets older and more experienced, novel encounters become more precious. This one, embossed by the force of the powerful mph winds, was new to me. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that appreciating the sublime requires the safety of distance. Now I wondered whether he was wrong. Perhaps the sublime has to be confronted viscerally to be made complete, just like one cannot truly appreciate vertigo by watching roller coasters from the ground.
People lament and worry about the loss of human life. “I’m sorry for your loss,” they say when I tell them my mother died. “Is everyone okay?” they ask after the storm passes. At least five people were killed and dozens injured in St. Louis on Friday. But when we emerged from our homes to assess the outcome—which included a splay of tar roofing, air-conditioning condensers, and insulation hurled from neighboring buildings—it still didn’t feel right to relay the news that no one on our street had been hurt.
That’s because of the trees. The tornado appears to have begun in Clayton, a well-to-do municipality just west of St. Louis. It crossed the edge of Forest Park, site of the 1904 World’s Fair, and tore through residential neighborhoods as it moved northeast. Within them are residential streets planned in the late 19th century and built up in part by industrialists of the Gilded Age and progressive era. At the park and in the neighborhoods, the tree canopy has grown since then to some 80 feet in height. After a long and dreary winter, the pin oaks on my block, planted in tidy rows, had finally leafed out a few weeks earlier, casting an arch of shade over the whole street.
Almost all of them are gone now, felled whole or disfigured into shrapnel. To say they can’t be replaced isn’t quite right; it just takes decades to grow new ones. And yet, even this arboreal tragedy felt sublime, in its way: more than a century of slow progress wiped out in seconds. I will never see those trees again, not like that—but then again, neither would the people who first planted them in the early 1900s, when the saplings were too young to offer shade.
Trees are no less mortal than human beings. The pin oaks, by any measure, had already exceeded their typical lifespan of 100 to 120 years, and many had already suffered the ills of poorly drained soil and compaction. They’d been dying by the pair every year, but enough remained to give me and my neighbors the false impression that their shade was eternal, that we were owed it, that it was ours. The tornado ended that delusion.
At 75, my mother was young to die, by contemporary standards, but ancient by historical ones. Friends and family keep asking “What did she have?,” hoping for a simple answer. But what she had was something more amorphous, a set of interconnected but distinct ailments that, when blended together and seasoned by accident, led to a slow decline and then a quick one. To yearn for a tidy word—cancer, stroke—to name misfortune is to make a category error, like trying to lasso the ocean. It betrays the mystery of life and death, fortune and accident. It is no more or less unfair that this fate would befall her than that a tornado would careen across my fancy street. If such things happen to someone, why not us?
Mom and Dad were married for 52 years before he died two years ago. They worked together and did everything else together, too, a feat that would make me crazy but that my mother embraced. My father had a disability—I wrote about it for The Atlantic—stemming from a terrible auto accident in his teens, which he always tried to mask. Sometimes, especially late in his life, my mother would say that she remained so attached to him in order to take care of him, which is true. But she also maintained that close connection by choice. Seeing her confined to the same hospital bed that he had used, in the same room, taking the same narcotics prescriptions, felt somehow apt. This, too, they would do together, if slightly apart.
Mom kept close tabs on the weather wherever I lived, which was always too far away, by her judgment. She would text or call when she saw storms in the forecast. Are you okay? she might ask. And I would play the role of churlish son, answering We’re fine mom, don’t worry, or The tornadoes always pass to the west, as if I had a say in the matter. But the one time she was finally right to be concerned, she couldn’t express the worry anymore. I am tempted to call this irony, but it is better named indifference.
What a shame that indifference is seen only in a negative light. The storm’s disregard was terrifying and awesome. I felt it in the basement as the gale whipped around my house, and then in the street, amid the fallen oaks and the hurtled air-conditioning condensers. And I’d felt the same sense of the sublime at Mom’s bedside earlier that week as her fever became terminal. Neither Mom nor I were targeted for calamity, but it found us nevertheless. The universe is indifferent, and that is terrifying, and that is beautiful.
The post First My Mother Died. Then My Home Got Hit by a Tornado. appeared first on The Atlantic.
