By Barbara Drake-Vera
In this post, Barbara Drake-Vera describes finding new words to articulate grief and sorrow.
Photo by Jorge Vera
Readers often ask me questions about Andean culture and disappearing glaciers at author events for my new book, Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru.
But one of my favorite, though less commonly asked, questions is: “How did you decide to weave together two storylines—one about reporting on climate change, the other about caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s disease—into a single book?”
The answer? The destructive processes of climate change and dementia, and the unique griefs they provoke, have much in common. And these emotions are increasingly becoming hallmarks of the human experience in the twenty-first century.
For seven years (2007–2014), I lived and worked in Peru, where I investigated the melting of tropical glaciers in the high Andes with photographer Jorge Vera. A longtime Floridian, I had no direct experience of glaciers until I saw one up close in June 2006, on an 18,000-foot-high peak in southern Peru that the Andean people have venerated since pre-Columbian times.
On the afternoon I climbed to Qolqepunku (“Silver Gate” in Quechua), I found the white face of the glacier swarming with joyous pilgrims. They were laughing and throwing snowballs and harvesting sacred ice to bless their family members and crops back home. Leaning against the glacier’s immense, grit-studded terminus, I felt a surge of affection for the 50,000-year-old ice system and its luminous, turquoise-blue heart, visible through a large crack near the trailhead.
Photo by Jorge Vera
When I returned to Qolqepunku in May 2008, just two years later, the massive wall of ice I had leaned against was gone. The glacier had fled forty feet up the mountain and lay panting, like a parched white tongue, between two barren peaks. A casualty of human-induced climate change, vanished into thin air.
I stood at the trailhead, puzzled, trying to reconcile my vivid memories of the mighty glacier I had once touched with the mud and moraine now under my feet. Yes, I was standing on the spot I had visited in 2006. I was there. However, there was no more “there” there.
A physically disorienting, crushing sadness enveloped me. I did not have words for it.
Not long after, I learned that a philosopher in Australia, Glenn Albrecht, had invented a word for this powerful, baffling emotion: solastalgia. The emotional and existential distress induced by environmental change. The feeling of homesickness when one is still at home.
The word is a combination of the Latin word sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief).
Less than three years after my mountainside bout with solastalgia, I had another shock. My widowed father in Florida was diagnosed with advancing Alzheimer’s and needed 24/7 care. Decisions were up to me since I was his only child.
Through a series of unusual events, I ended up bringing my father to live with me and my family in Lima, where trained Peruvian home-health aides helped me look after him for the next eighteen months. They were among the most gifted and astute care professionals I have known.
It was heartbreaking to see my father’s cognition and behavior deteriorate—gradually, with occasional, sudden collapses—but as the process wore on, I sensed that I, as an onlooker, had traveled this unsettling landscape before.
My father with dementia was physically there, but mentally and emotionally he was not. He was my father, and he wasn’t my father. Both were true. The essence of who he was had evaporated.
Can you mourn a person who is still alive, I wondered?
After my father passed away, I encountered another unfamiliar term: ambiguous loss.
Researcher Pauline Boss coined the phrase in the 1970s to describe grief that is confusing and unresolved because it lacks the closure of death. Family members who look after loved ones with dementia often experience this unclear, pre-death grief, along with the other burdens and stresses of caregiving.
“So, that is what I was feeling with my father,” I realized upon first learning of the phrase.
Solastalgia for the glacier, ambiguous loss for my father. I need to understand this, I thought. I sat down at my computer and began to write.
Barbara Drake-Vera is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist who lives in Gainesville, Florida. From 2007 to 2014, she resided in Peru, where she worked as a field producer for NBC Nightly News and the TODAY Show.
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A prolific poet as a child, Barbara Drake-Vera loved writing almost as much as she adored her father, a moody postal employee with an elaborate comb-over and a fondness for Mahler. But when her successes sparked his rage, Barbara silenced her voice for years, terrified even to see her name in print. By age forty-nine, she was a professional journalist living in Peru and collaborating with her husband, a Peruvian-born photographer, to report on melting glaciers in the Andes, far from the reach of her father.
Melted Away recounts what happens after her father is diagnosed with advancing Alzheimer’s and Barbara takes him into her home in Lima, beginning a process of self-discovery that uncovers a path toward personal and family healing. A diverse group of allies support her on this quest: a trio of caregiving women from the provinces, who serve as home-health aides; a mischievous, Cervantes-quoting, nonagenarian suitor; and a stubborn alpaca herder who lives beneath a long-worshipped, life-sustaining Andean glacier now melting from rapid climate change.
Candid, poignant, and deeply researched, Melted Away is the true story of how a writer at midlife reclaims her agency, and an ardent plea to care for the planet by embracing collectivism and mutual aid.