Caitlin Stall-Paquet

As a kid, I had a knack for silencing my surroundings, retreating into tunnels dug in my mind. I was once forcefully dragged out of them while sitting on a restaurant patio with my father and two brothers, in my hometown of Frelighsburg, Quebec. I’d been navigating the underworld but could still hear a satisfying pop from shoving my thumb into the opening of an empty glass Pepsi bottle and pulling it out swiftly. I started hearing my father and brothers’ voices, far away, saying my name. I looked up, they were staring at me, and then I howled from a jolt of pain. A honeybee had stung my thumb. The bee—attracted by a ring of sticky sugar—had been trapped by my thumb. I leaned against my dad, sulking. My brothers teased me, as the bee lay dead at the bottom of the bottle.

After my parents’ divorce, I was twelve, in the first throes of puberty, and dug my tunnels deeper. Starting high school with a new embarrassing body and fractured family came with what were, in hindsight, rumblings of depression, ebbing and flowing as I sat still. I holed up in my room writing sad-girl poetry and testing eyeliner techniques gleaned from Seventeen magazine, glossy pages that taught me to hate my thighs via a monthly subscription. I sat in my father’s La-Z-Boy as I watched hours of teens with lives in That ’70s Show and Dawson’s Creek. My brother Jeremie occasionally flew by the living-room window on his snowboard, soaring off a jump he’d made, as self-loathing dug my tunnels deeper. My father addressed this despondency by repeating “va jouer dehors.” Go play outside: an idea that was hard to get excited about. I felt past the age of play and didn’t have an athletic bone in my body that now drew attention from middle-aged men at the grocery store.

When outdoors, I read, nestled in a thick branch of my favourite maple tree. I sank into the natural world rather than observe it, though observation was what my father gently pushed for as we explored our six-acre plot dominated by mixed forest. He made me crouch behind bushes to watch birds, handed me petals of sweet bee balm to taste. On summer nights, he dragged me away from the TV to lie on sleeping bags in the grass, pointing to the sky and tracing constellations with his index.

Born on a stormy March 22, my father was inversely quiet. My husband, Aaron, described him as an Ent tree person from The Lord of the Rings with his gentle but imposing six-five stature. In the woods, our silence stretched out between the coarse bark of maples, fiddleheads popping up in May before unfurling into ferns, a woodpecker that made his search for insects known loudly. My dad broke the quietness to name them, pointing a huge index covered in bark-like skin swollen from carpentry. He showed me I could simply be there without launching into the air or collecting vistas on a checklist. It took me years, until after he was gone, to realize that those excursions were play. He died days after Aaron and I rushed back from California where we’d been celebrating our friend Toby’s thirtieth birthday, cheersing in Sonoma. When we got home, my father’s limbs were all but gone, and his mind was following. Cancer took him on April 23, 2017.

Toby was one of the first people I called that day, after my father left the world as gently as he walked through it. Over the phone, he played a mournful song I’d shown him in California, “Demon Host” by the Montreal band Timber Timbre. We listened to it together as I mourned from the floor. There’s an expression in French, perdre le nord. It means to lose your way or go crazy, but literally, it means losing north, like a broken compass. In the wake of my father’s death, at the age of 29, I was teetering at the end of a decade, about to crash into my thirties. I sank into my catacombs while searching for north. Time stopped and spun in my father’s house as we prepared to sell it, which felt like ripping flesh from bone, leaving me a ragged skeleton.

The only thing I could do to stop the needle from spinning was to go outside, eat flowers, and listen to frogs filling empty nights. Two years after my father died, on May 27, Toby was biking up a hill in San Francisco and stopped because of chest pains. He died long before the ambulance got there. A widow-maker heart attack, they called it, though it took him from all of us. I listened to “Demon Host” from the floor, alone. Toby’s death meshed with my father’s, and the death of my uncle John, my mom’s younger brother, in 2013. John was the person I did voices with during camping trips and was known for his catchphrase “Don’t get blood on the carpet” when my cousins and I roughhoused. He’d died for eight years, cancer taking him bit by bit.

No less painful was the need to surface and be normal, dragging out gregariousness to wear as a full bodysuit that held me upright, while surrounded but alone. My immediate family felt far away. We rarely speak about the isolating nature of loss, how mourners grieving the same person grow more distant rather than united. Helen Macdonald puts it best in her book about raising a goshawk after her father’s death, H is for Hawk: “Imagine your whole family is in a room. Yes, all of them. All the people you love. So then what happens is someone comes into the room and punches you all in the stomach. Each one of you. Really hard. So you’re all on the floor. Right? So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you’re too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone.”

During the COVID-19 summer of 2020, Aaron and I bought a house in the Eastern Townships where my mom lives. The purchase was possible due to the sale of my dad’s house, which had become a ghost limb. I reintroduced native plants around the new house under my mom’s guidance and wrote about learning to listen to frogs. In October, heading back into isolation loomed large as warm days turned cold. I searched for connections and places to breathe in the shut-down world. I drove to Lennoxville to see my friend Alexandre Bergeron, a musician and filmmaker who layers natural sounds into his work. He took me out to listen, as leaves withered on branches. We walked along the Massawippi River until he stopped next to a cornfield and turned down an empty row.

Once we were surrounded by dried stalks, he took a recorder and microphone out of his backpack, put on headphones, and smiled before handing them to me. Silence turned into a swell of empty rustling corn husks. Earlier that year, I’d interviewed soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause for an article about amphibian die-offs, part of what scientists call the sixth mass extinction. Unlike previous extinction events, this one is driven by human activity, diseases spread by us and our encroachment into habitats. Krause explained how spaces open up when you listen through equipment, and that these recordings are a form of conservation. Krause has over five thousand hours of soundscapes from around the world, more than half of which have been altered or silenced by development. Immersed in the barren cornfield, plunged into the loudest emptiness I’d ever heard, I felt the connection to an unassuming place opening up and the friend who led me to it.

The following summer, Aaron gave me a recording kit for my birthday. I started using it regularly in April 2023, when an itch arrived, born from an untenable status quo. It was a month after the death of my mom’s older brother, Bob, a columnist for the Vancouver newspaper The Province. He’d encouraged me to become a writer, left jokes on my answering machine, and congratulated me on successes once my dad was no longer around to do so. Bob died two days before the ten-year anniversary of his younger brother’s death. Spring months have become filled with the birthdays and death days of men I love who disappeared, their ghosts lurking in thawing ice. Each loss punched a hole that widened to join the others, forming a pulsing mass. Loss of loved ones eventually merged with grief about our climate, erratic storms breaking trees, heatwaves and torrential rains destroying my painstaking rewilding efforts.

That spring, my pain turned physical. Stabbing jolts emanated from my three lower discs that had slipped, bulging between my vertebrae. The injury might have happened due to falling on icy sidewalks, genetics, working from my couch for two pandemic years or, as a meme informed me while doomscrolling from said couch, thirty-five is the beginning of middle age. Regardless of having just found out I was old, the bulging discs pressed on my sciatic nerve, thick as a two-inch rope.

April 16 was a warm day that would have been Toby’s thirty-sixth birthday had he finished riding up that hill. Pain pushed me outside to walk. After a long amble, I sat in a quiet spot in my mom’s backyard, and plugged my mic and headphones into a recorder. I tried to breathe into my throbbing nerve, desperate to relieve the pain for even a second. I flipped the recorder’s switch and, rather than escaping, I was hyper there. The mic picked up sounds of species waking up from winter, flooding me to the point that I no longer focused on pain. I heard the nearby rushing stream, newly awake birds chirping in trees. Listening to the backyard animated by winter wrens and hermit thrushes, it struck me that this busy patch of land, like many other once-wild spaces, could go silent.

My grief-gouged heart swelled, punctuated by electric shocks from my nerve. Sciatica was a pain I could finally point to, saying “this hurts,” filling the amorphous space left by my dead. Soothing these interwoven pains ultimately came from a single source. My father had given me the answer long ago: “va jouer dehors.” As I started to go outside without a purpose, I found a conversation that continued with him, his voice alive in the species he’d named: meriser, rainette, chanterelle, monarde, buse. I started seeking out knowledge about the places I inhabit, beyond what he told me, picking up my end of the conversation.

It’s easy to understand why we’re out of whack, faced with fast-approaching climate tipping points teetering on the edge of a diving board overhanging an elusive abyss. We’re in continuous mourning for things we didn’t even know we were losing. The truth is we’ve already teetered off plenty of edges and are in the after. We’re thrashing in the sixth mass extinction that, with every lost species, pushes us into a new after.

Last April, I read biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, struck by the hope rather than doom it sparked. This book, published in 1962, details how powerful insecticides and herbicides developed during the Second World War wreaked havoc on natural spaces being sprayed indiscriminately via planes manufactured during that same conflict. The powers that be were kicking off another global crisis, wagging war against nature rather than rival countries, leading to another massive loss of life. The book was a crucial part of spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Unites States in 1970, laying the foundation for the environmental movement, and banning the use of DDT and other insecticides and herbicides two years later— poisons that humans and animals store in fatty tissues. The threat of silence she described is still there, but nature has yet to be hushed entirely. There is hope in Carson’s triumphs and we are in her after, a world in which her detailed account of mass death from chemicals caused tides to turn, eight years after she herself died of breast cancer.

When someone dies, we find ways to continue, to honour their legacy by building on what they started or making something new, fed by their inspiration. Being in the after isn’t an ending, it means figuring out our present and how we can fight to prevent more afters. Caring and solidarity are alive in countless forms, as people everywhere go through the same hardships in their unique way. They’re the amateur biologists who comment on iNaturalist, the volunteers sharing information about pollinator-friendly flowers, the new friend who finally gets you into birds, the older friend who takes you out to listen, the older-still friend who follows you into familiar forests to name its tree species. They are the loves who drive for hours to see belugas or who point to the stars, knowing that the person who used to do so is gone. When grief lodges in my throat, I listen to those dead words. Va jouer dehors. I don’t fight the feeling; I reach out rather than turn in. I let anger live and morph into energy that makes me identify plants, count frogs, rip up grass, lend books, listen to night creatures, and write about it like I do about my dead. The friendships I’ve made by sharing fears of destruction have become stabilizers. They’re forged out of necessity, shared anxiety and awe at the world that continues to beat to billions of pulses.

The 2017 book The Right to Be Cold is written by the Kuujjuaq-born Inuk human rights advocate turned environmental activist, writer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Sheila Watt-Cloutier. She details rapid changes in the rugged landscapes of Nunavik, the Inuit territory that makes up the top third of Quebec. In her book, Watt-Cloutier describes how her Arctic home is warming nearly four times as fast as other places. She pulls on Carson’s thread as she dives into the dark discovery that Inuit bodies contain greater concentrations of the poisons detailed in Silent Spring even though they live on a land without agriculture. The region’s permafrost means that before colonizers brought southern food to the North, the Inuit ate only what they call country food. They survived healthily on the vitamins from caribou meat, seasonal wild berries, and the raw flesh of seal or beluga, covered in a thick layer of blubber that stores poisons that drift north with winds. Watt-Cloutier illustrates the tie between permafrost-hardened ground and its Inuit stewards: “Often when I prepared country food, my hands fully covered in blood, I would think that those who garden in the south must feel the same, their hands covered in the soil in which their vegetables grow.”

I understood that connection when I saw it up close. My photographer friend and fellow nature-lover, Alexi Hobbs, brought me onboard writing for Inuit Magazine, the publication stashed in plane seats onboard Air Inuit flights between southern Quebec and Nunavik. In February 2024, I stood facing open waters between Nunavut and Nunavik, outside the community of Ivujivik with Alexi and the town’s mayor, Adamie Kalingo. Kalingo participated in a project gathering traditional Inuktitut place names. He said about the waters: “This is aukkaniq. Sweat, like when you get hot and your forehead is getting beads of water, those are called aukkaniit.” The unfrozen water is semantically inseparable from the hot drops we shed. I heard Kalingo’s explanation about connections, but felt it deeply, too, from skin into flesh, nerves, bones, and marrow.

Reading Watt-Cloutier citing Carson, I saw links like a mad detective unspooling red thread. I pondered Carson’s descriptions of contaminants breaking down our body’s interconnected systems, reminding me of the ecosystems we live in that go haywire when one of its components is damaged. I imagined the person Carson described undergoing obesity treatments in the early 1960s. They were poisoned as they lost weight and insecticides stored in fatty tissues started to flow through their blood.

Watt-Cloutier’s account of damage made me realize we’ve tricked nature without being able to warn it about new threats. I remembered the bee lured to my bottle by the promise of nectar, unable to communicate that it was being deceived by a sweet trick that would cost it its life. The jolt its venom sent through my nervous system shocked me back into the present. Pain has long pushed me into reality, forced me to stop burrowing inward because my body demanded action. Now, I want to do better before pain twists my arm.

Though I can’t tell animals about the horrors we’ve committed, I can listen to them, count them, try to understand them and our entwined relationships. Learning more about the wild’s sounds, species, growth cycles, and networks is the kindest thing I’ve done for both me and my surroundings. I’ve become entwined with regrowth, a single voice in a communal chorus. As I dig, learn, rethink, and stand still, the world opens up, reveals its threads that have always been there. My pains still pulse sometimes, but less in tandem. Rather than a flood, they come in softer waves I can address individually.

We can let anger, sadness, and pain turn into actions that improve the forests, lawns, balconies, and shared green spaces that make up our villages, towns, and cities. We can become sentinels with rising voices. Anxieties can be channelled through limbs to listen in, read up, and rewild. We can fight to preserve what’s still here, reverse destruction and pay homage to what we’ve already lost. It’s the same as what we do for our deceased loves who have gone and taken pieces of us with them. We are all in the after, and we can go play outside to decide what comes next.

CAITLIN STALL-PAQUET

is a Montreal-based writer, editor and occasional forest dweller. She is the editorial director of Serviette, a magazine about all things food. Her writing has appeared in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Elle Canada, BESIDE, Canadian Geographic, enRoute, The Toronto Star, CBC, Chatelaine, Yolk, carte blanche, and Rewilding Magazine, among others.