TITLE: The Impossible Resurrection of Grief
AUTHOR: Octavia Cade
82 pages, Publisher, ISBN 9781777091767 (paperback, eBook)
DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): IN A DYING WORLD, GRIEF HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN...
With the collapse of ecosystems and the extinction of species comes the Grief: an unstoppable melancholia that ends in suicide. When Ruby’s friend, mourning the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, succumbs to the Grief, the letters she leaves behind reveal the hidden world of the resurrected dead. The Tasmanian tiger, brought back from extinction in an isolated facility, is only the first... but rebirth is not always biological, and it comes with a price. As a scientist, Ruby resists the Grief by focusing her research on resilient jellyfish, but she can’t avoid choosing which side she’s on. How can she fight against the dead and the forces behind them when doing so risks her home, her life, and the entire biosphere?
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: There are plenty of books out there that utilize grief as a physical, palpable threat to the health and happiness of the protagonist, but Octavia Cade’s recent novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief rocked me particularly hard, and part of the reason this review is so delayed is because I’ve been trying to figure out why it affected me so.
Part of it, of course, is simply the way Octavia Cade writes. Granted, I have not read everything Cade has ever written, but I’ve read enough to know that when I see her name on a story I’m in for some deep character immersion, emotions tapped into and explicated in ways that the reader can’t help but connect with and linger over. This novella is no exception. Cade brings us into the mind of a woman watching her best friend deteriorate alongside the world around them. Ruby is as yet untouched by the Grief but compassionate enough to feel guilty: guilty about being untouched by the Grief, guilty about the loss of her friend, guilty about the fact that the thing she loves (jellyfish) are surviving climate change when so much isn’t. The guilt doesn’t immobilize her but rather motivates her to investigate the letters left behind by Marjorie and discover what those afflicted with the Grief are capable of accomplishing before they die. Ruby goes on a journey from wanting to save her friend to wanting to understand why her friend succumbed to wanting to honor her legacy, and I was fully invested throughout thanks to the relatable voice of the narrator.
As adults we’re often told to just ‘suck it up’ and move on when it comes to losses. What ‘moving on’ looks like is highly individual: do we cut loose whatever we lost and pretend it never existed? do we acknowledge the absence in our life analytically? do we obsess over it, analyze where we went wrong, try to fix it? Ruby does all of this in the course of The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, which leads her into danger several times. Through Ruby, Cade reminds us that there is no one way to process loss, to experience grief. Through Ruby, Cade also reminds us that we can never totally understand the depth of someone’s attachment to a thing (or person or concept) that they love, and thus cannot truly understand how the loss of that thing might drive a person to emotional despair or suicide. Ruby knows Marjorie loved the Great Barrier Reef as much as Ruby loves jellyfish, but she can’t understand the depth of her friend’s grief because Ruby hasn’t lost the thing she loves the most.
The Grief itself is a sort of nebulous phenomena. It seems mostly tied to losing something outside of yourself that you were passionate about rather than, say, the loss of a relationship or the death of a family member. I think Cade implies that Grief can be brought on by these other events, but the focus seems to be on losing some larger interest totally and, more important, irreplaceably. We all have had those hobbies/interests/passion projects that we think we’ll never leave behind but eventually do – that’s not what Cade is connecting the Grief to. Those types of things we can come back to (and often do), even if our feelings aren’t as strong the second or third time around. But the loss of a species or biome we’ve devoted our life to studying, in a way that makes it impossible for that species or biome to come back? Gone is gone. (Yes, I know, people make a lifetime of studying extinct species, particularly dinosaurs. Usually, that attachment comes from curiosity about what those species were like rather than from having experienced those species first-hand.)
The Impossible Resurrection of Grief takes place in a future near enough for the reader to be familiar with the technology the characters use in their daily life but far enough away that our impending climate change is this world’s present. It’s not just the Great Barrier Reef that’s been lost to rising temperatures and lost shoreline: different types of birds and terrestrial predators are gone as well, and Ruby meets people suffering the Grief because of how much they loved those populations. These losses are imaginary for us and the author, an exercise in what might happen if the climate continues to change in the direction, and at the rate, it’s currently going. But they are all too real for Ruby and the people in her life, and Cade does an excellent job of making them real for us as well.
There are some brutal moments within the narrative – Marjorie succumbing to the Grief (which is not a spoiler, given it’s in the book’s back cover description) in particular is packed with torment for Marjorie and Ruby both – that some readers might want to be aware of. Suicide, whether by intentional act or slow attrition, is always in the background when the characters discuss Grief. But it is never gratuitous and always pertinent to Ruby’s journey of understanding.
Deep immersion into a character’s mind, solidly realistic climate change repercussions, ruminations on the way we’re told to handle loss and grief – all of these are reasons The Impossible Resurrection of Grief affected me as deeply as it did, and I suspect each future re-read of the novella will open up more reasons. And I will be reading it again, certainly.