The Watcher
A brief transmission about Renee Good, cancer-induced isolation and hope
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I am a 40 year old woman undergoing aggressive treatment for triple negative breast cancer.
Your donations help cover the costs of my work: research materials, web hosting, subscriptions to online archives, and my time.
Your donations help cover the compounding costs of cancer: therapy for my kids, medical bills, gas money for the people giving our kids rides, lost income from my freelance work, lotions for my raw, flaking skin and more!
Every dollar helps. Thank you so much.
My cancer treatment has taken me out of our world. I’m isolated on a small rock, far from the sun. This rock's core is cold, its atmosphere too thin. If the pressure increased a little, my body would boil and freeze simultaneously. I would exist as solid, liquid and vapor all at once, eternally. There’s too little gravity here. The air is full of dust that rarely settles. Moments become swirling particulates before they can be tethered by memory. I am always disoriented, but I still know how to look up. I keep my eyes on the sky, searching for our world.
Sometimes it appears on the horizon as a point of light, my evening star. I can’t find a lens strong enough to help me focus on the details. I panic about what I can’t see. But then I remember that if light can reach me, information can too. And so I let myself spin, hoping I’ll hit upon the right frequency. When I’m positioned just right, I can receive signals broadcast from our world. Sometimes they make me afraid.
Renee Good, a mother, prize-winning poet, and volunteer legal observer, was killed by an ICE agent while peacefully observing ICE operations in a Minneapolis neighborhood.
I let my head tip down and close my eyes against my evening star.
When I was kid, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, was one my favorite books. It's a collection of short stories about Americans who leave a warring earth to colonize Mars. The humans try to remake Mars in America’s image. They open schools, delis and luggage shops.
Towards the end of the book there is a short story called The Watchers. In The Watchers, the colonists look to the sky and watch a nuclear war break out on earth. By the next morning, the luggage store is sold out of luggage. Everyone returns to earth, it's where their people are. They want to grieve, protect and hope in our world, even with the fallout. At the end of the book, a world-ending nuclear war erupts on Earth. A few refugees get into rockets in time to survive the apocalypse. They travel to Mars to begin the humanity’s story again.
Published in 1950, The Martian Chronicles is not a love letter to Mars, it’s a warning about nuclear war. But it was published in an era when colonization of Mars still seemed possible. When Bradbury wrote the Martian short stories, we’d still never seen a close up photograph of Mars. A few scientists still thought it was hatched with Martian-made irrigation canals. Many others hypothesized that if Mars was not a “civilized world,” it was certainly a “botanical world.”
During the first half of the 20th century, scientists observed a “wave of darkening” across the planet every Martian spring. They thought it could be vegetation blossoming across the planet as the Martian winter thawed. Like the colonists in Bradbury’s stories, some people believed a blooming Mars could save us from the world we’ve created.
In 1971, Mariner 9 sent back the first images of Mars from orbit. We learned there are no canals, there is no vegetation. The “wave of darkening” the scientists observed wasn’t spreading bloom, it was a “systematic redistribution” of dust. Mars has a cold core and thin atmosphere. If Bradbury’s refugees landed on Mars, their blood would boil. Mars is a planet but it can never be our world.
I spin again, with my eyes closed, listening, listening, listening,
Renee Macklin Good’s wife, Becca Good, said that the 37-year-old poet and mother of three was made of sunshine. “She literally sparkled,” Becca Good said in a statement. “I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores.
But behind that light was a well of deep values that Macklin Good lived by, including a conviction that every person — regardless of “where you come from or what you look like” — deserves compassion and kindness.
“Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Good said. - Minnesota Public Radio
I open my eyes, lift them to the sky and let them fix on my evening star once more. That beautiful point of light, built and protected by care. I open my mouth to shout, "I can care!" The sound doesn't carry beyond my chapped lips. Everything still feels so far away. I want off this rock. God, I want to return to our world, it’s where my people are. I want to grieve, protect and hope in our world, even with the fallout.
I’m still looking up. And I’m sending these words at the speed of light, hoping you are there to receive them.
Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome. - Tressie McMillan Cottom
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Support my work.
I am a 40 year old woman undergoing aggressive treatment for triple negative breast cancer.
Your donations help cover the costs of my work: research materials, web hosting, subscriptions to online archives, and my time.
Your donations help cover the compounding costs of cancer: therapy for my kids, medical bills, gas money for the people giving our kids rides, lost income from my freelance work, lotions for my raw, flaking skin and more!
Every dollar helps. Thank you so much.
