In Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, she describes the moment between twilight and night, the in-between of a long summer day when the air turns blue.
It washes everything in a deep, impenetrable indigo. Everything—the streetlamps, the oak trees, the peeling shingles–looks and feels like an ending. It is a moment when the world holds its breath. Sometimes, it’s magic. Other times, it’s sorrow.
I’ve always loved Joan Didion, but I’ve particularly appreciated her recent books about loss. She writes with an unerring truth about what it feels like to live, to survive, without her husband and daughter.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, she unravels the contradictions of long-term grief, the way it sticks to the bones, fills us with hot air or leaves us breathless. She writes:
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
In Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, the protagonist, Fern (Frances McDormand), turns to nomad living after her husband dies and the town she has lived in for decades shutters due to economic devastation. When a sheetrock factory closes, almost all of the residents find themselves unemployed, forced to pursue opportunities in other areas. As a wanderer, Fern travels from state to state in her van, picking up odd jobs and slowly befriending other nomads.
While the film does portray the matter-of-fact realities of living like a nomad, including the struggle to find overnight parking and clocking what to do when you need a restroom, the story itself is far more interested in unpacking grief. At the end of the day, Fern’s journey is not one of hiking boots and brief interludes in the desert, but of what it means, really, to keep going when going forward feels like an impossibility.
Although I’ve never jumped in a car and kept going, leaving behind the past like an old skin, I do understand that impatient, restless feeling. There’s no cure for it, only the desire to keep moving, somewhere, anywhere.
I walk.
I know every single place I’ve ever lived in like a map stamped on the back of my hand. I’ve walked for hours, one foot in front of the other, my eyes skimming the blue of the sky, a blue that is so bright and sunlit it feels like my pupils are vibrating. Sometimes, my chest feels tight, too tight, and I picture myself as a clockmaker, unlatching the door to my torso, peering inside with a toolkit, and delicately unwinding the tangled metal around my heart. One foot in front of the other.
When there’s a river or an ocean, I stand. I watch the churning foam, feet planted on the sandbank, and let myself forget. I pretend I’ll walk along the shore for as long as it takes me, until the sand changes into sharp pebbles and dirt and still, I’ll keep walking. I’ll climb over boulders salted with seawater, kelp clinging to their craggy faces, and I’ll hop over broken beer bottles and stranded jellyfish. I’ll dive into the ocean, breathing in the fresh sting of water, and swimming for miles and miles and miles. My skin will freeze, cracking like ice, snapping cleanly from my limbs. And I’ll melt into the frosty waters, disappearing like sea foam. My entire self will dissolve, balancing upon the waves, pure and salty like a whitecap.
That’s the allure, of course. Traveling for miles, stretching past the sun-dried chasms, feet brushing the ocean, no longer singular but a part of a whole.
Grief is like a backpack you can never take off. It’s filled with rocks that you put in yourself, stacking them individually, wiping down the grime with the sleeve of your sweater. When you first put on the backpack, it strains your shoulders, forcing your back into an awkward hunch. It hurts. It drags you down, makes each step feel like an eternity, every new obstacle or challenge an interminable mountain. It makes you trip and ache and curse. You never do stop wearing that backpack. But, eventually, your muscles grow stronger. Your shoulders toughen. Your back stands straight. And the backpack is still there. But you’ve learned how to handle the weight.
In Nomadland, Fern meets others who know grief and who respect it. They treat her like a comrade-in-arms. They do not know the shape or size of her backpack, but they do know that she carries one. They speak to her like a person. No one interjects, no one tries to prove they’ve suffered more, no one erases the words of others. Instead, there is a mutual recognition. I see you and you see me.
At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, a yearly gathering for nomads, Fern moves through the crowd, hesitantly speaking with others. She’s not always firm on her feet, but her allies, Linda May, Swankie, Dave, tether her to a community.
Swankie, played by real-life nomad Charlene Swankie, has kayaked in all fifty states. When she tells Fern about her terminal illness, she says it frankly, without regret. She has spent years out there, traveling, moving, finding respite in her environment. She tells Fern about watching a moose family on a river in Idaho, about white pelicans that swooped over her kayak on a lake in Colorado. But her favorite memory, the one that makes all the loud things unimportant, involves a whole community of swallows living by a cliff.
Swankie describes the “[S]wallows flying all around. And reflecting in the water so it looks like I’m flying with the swallows and they’re under me, and over me, and all around me. And little babies are hatching out and egg shells are falling out of the nests, landing on the water and floating on the water. These little white shells. It’s like, well, it’s just so awesome. I felt like I’d done enough. My life was complete. If I died right then, that moment, it’d be perfectly fine.”
And Fern understands.
She travels westward. She sits in a ring of shade that surrounds the scraggly bushes and trees. The sheer vastness of the canyon leaves her breathless. The sky is a deep orange, embracing the jagged curves and pillars of rock. An eagle swoops low, its wings almost brushing the brown, yellow, and red bands of sediment. Perhaps part of her aches to break into a sprint and leap into the gulf, to feel the wind glide across her skin, to twist her body effortlessly as she wings through the sky.
Fern watches the land like it’s a movie she’ll never tire of watching.
Near the end of the film, she confides in her friend, Bob Wells (another “character” played fully real by a real person). They sit outside, the yellow of a sunset hovering by their faces.
Fern tells him, “I maybe spent too much of my life just remembering, Bob.”
He nods, a shared recognition.
“I rarely ever talk about my son,” he says. “But, today would be…Today would be his thirty-third birthday and five years ago, he took his life. And I can still barely say that in a sentence.”
Usually centered, amiable, Bob pauses, choked with emotion. He explains that he found meaning by helping other nomads, building this community of travelers, reaching out. Like Fern, like Swankie, he has a long-term relationship with grief. It is something that he carries, invisible. But he also knows that he is far from alone.
Bob adds, “And out here, there’s a lot of people our age. Inevitably, there’s grief and loss. And a lot of them don’t get over it either. And that’s okay. That’s okay. One of the things I love most about this life is that there’s no final goodbye. You know, I’ve met hundreds of people out here and I don’t ever say a final goodbye. I always just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.’ And I do. And whether it’s a month, or a year, or sometimes years, I see them again. And I can look down the road and I can be certain in my heart that I’ll see my son again.”
Like Fern, I hold memories in my fist, tightly, like a child gripping a plastic wheel of Hubba Bubba bubblegum.
I remember that my grandmother wore heels and Chanel No. 5 and rings on every finger. She laughed until she snorted. She walked to the padaria and returned with paper bags of fruit custard and chocolate brigadeiro and warm bread rolls. She lovingly tended a small garden in front of her house. She used to tell us that white butterflies were a sign of luck. But, really, she loved all butterflies, their waxy wings and antennae and fuzzy feet. Whenever I spot a butterfly on my walks, I like to think, There’s Vovó. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that it feels like she’s there, with me, watching me and maybe wishing I had brushed my hair better.
And so, Fern goes “home” one last time. She walks around the remains of her life with her husband, the empty house, the chain-linked fence, the sprawling desert. She remembers, like she used to. Then, she returns to her van. She drives. A world of trees and roads that she knows how to maneuver. The sky is a soft blue, touching the roots and the air and asphalt. And it is there, finally, that Fern feels home. And it’s not sorrow anymore. It’s magic.
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