“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
AE: That is one of the things that I think is really exceptional about the book. It’s not strident. It just sort of opens up as you’re reading it. In the book your kid has these moments of discovery and wonder and then a sense of sorrow as he realizes “Oh! We’re gonna lose this, aren’t we?”
EC: It’s funny you say that. My kid is now 20, and as a birthday trip yesterday we went back to our favorite place in the world, which is the Field Museum. We saw an exhibition about cats, and there was a movie playing about conservation efforts to protect wildcats from extinction. It was extremely explicit about extinction and climate change. Sitting next to me was a kid of about seven. I realized how much the language around climate disaster, ecocollapse, and what we say to children has shifted since I was trying to parent my own kid. I wanted to teach my kid an outlier story back then—it’s broken, and it’s whole, it’s wondrous, we could lose it. I wanted to parent inside of the reality of loss. Now parents can’t avoid parenting that way. It’s not a theoretical question any longer—what the world is going to look like under climate disaster. We’re in it. It’s snowing in New Orleans because the jet stream has gotten wonky because the climate has changed, it’s burning in Los Angeles, the polar vortex I’m sitting in right now is part of that.
