“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”

"And you, my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray./ Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light." —Dylan Thomas

My mother is dying.¹ From the south slope of Mt. Rainier, and from down near the Columbia River, smoke banners out from wildfires. Closer, it pillars up from grasslands along the Deschutes River’s basalt cliffs to join the dirty white fug. Bone white.

In eastern Oregon, diffuse fogs of smoke obscure the land, its folds disappearing into particulate clouds. There is no territory beyond. That eastward land is like tomorrow in these hospice days.

Smoke gets in your eyes. My mother coughs.

Conflagrations. Wildfires on a scale beyond what I can fathom. Hundreds of thousands of acres here, there. And the season is young. My mother is old, 92. Across the continent Hurricane Debby has softened her winds to tropical storm speeds, but still so very, very wet. Over a hotter-than-ever ocean she drew her moisture. Now to release it in deluge. My mother is dying.

We have finally turned south, after flying so far east I worried I was on the wrong flight. Here and there across the panorama smoke rises. Thick as water falling where it can be no help. My father is dying. In his wheelchair, strapped in ever more ingenious engineer-defying belts and buckles because he slips out, rises like smoke, falls like water.

The Cow Valley fire, July 15, 2024, when it was the largest in Oregon and had burned over 132,000 acres (526 sq km). NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from USGS.

Hospice nurses and wildland firefighters are the underpaid escorts of demise. I want to hug each of them. Contagion, soot—no matter.

We approach Nevada’s basin and range territory. Alkali lakes, their shores bone white. Like headwaters of a particulate wind. The edge of a fire—the new burn, the traveling burn—is so sharp that from up here it seems to cut the hillside.

From under the smoke layer, two ridges poke up like my mother’s knees under her brown knit blanket. Awkward, asymmetrical, askew in the latest bedsore-mindful positioning.

Nevada’s legs are long. They part the cloud. Oh, may it be cloud, though where could water vapor come from. The floods are elsewhere. In the West, in August, my mother is dying. My father is dying. Seventy years they have loved! And three months. And seven days.

We turn to traverse the Sierras from east to west, leave this mottled plain. What happens when clouds of smoke meet clouds of water. How do they mix? Which carries which? Last winter, Dad would have crossed over—so sick, too weak even to swallow—but for Mom’s life-grip on his hand. Both of hers wrapped around one of his. She did not release him.

Now, sometimes, he knows her. For a moment. After, like a wisp: the memory of a presence. I tell myself that on some level he knows she’s dying.

Once many years ago, Mom told me about a retreat she attended with women in her church. “They wanted us to talk about how we felt about God,” she’d said. “I didn’t know what they meant. How do you talk about that?” Oh, my lifelong-churchgoing mama, can you feel God now? Is that eternal Creator very close? The Spirit’s breath warm on your face?

A highway cuts across pale yellow Earth toward distant ridges where the Comstock Lode made some men wealthy beyond imagining and killed others. The women who served them in kitchen and brothel. On the wing a red light blinks. A white one.

Earth is resilient. Like a liver—remove the insult and healing can begin. If it is not too late. In the cabin we prepare for turbulence. The crossing will not be easy. Buckles and latches and stowage. When I get to their room, the release will not be easy. Buttons and zippers and laces hold us together. Trust the pilot is all any of us can do.

A valley. A reservoir. The dam’s gift: green fields nearby. Rising from its shore, a sudden line between light and dark—a fence between where overgrazing happens and does not happen. We turn toward the Sierras, Mono Lake in the distance. Remnant snow graces peaks and cirques. The lower ridges are edged in sparse trees like chic, stubbled chins.

Here, again, smoke enfolds valleys. I cannot keep my eyes from seeking the raw edge of the burn. Under the old burns, even the soil is different. Dark. Then the relief of green. Growth. Life. This year, reservoirs are full again. Streaked with white, the wake of pleasure boats. Ridges beyond are shadowed in thin, bone-white smoke. Southern California must be aflame to pack the Great Valley of California’s southern edge that thickly.

But here, the hills are as gold as gold. Golden rumpled velvet. Each hilltop studded with a palace. Jewels in the fables of their owners. Rows of orchards. Orange, lemon, pistachio, walnut. We will drop into Fresno like a stone in a torrent. Turning and tumbling and rolling into an eddy. Earth sprayed bare under acres of solar panels installed to save it.

1. Mom died on August 20, not long after this trip.