Staying with the grief as we seek the path ahead
It's been eight weeks since Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, and this place and its people are forever changed.
This eight-week mark feels significant somehow, and I’ve been reflecting on what is left to say, and how to wrap words around the vast expanse of unfathomable experiences our community has lived into over the past two months. While part of me feels eager to turn the page and look forward, the truth is that our community remains in a liminal space. Unable to return to the hometown we knew, we lean with a guarded uncertainty toward the beauty we will ourselves to believe is still possible on the other side.
The wider world right now seems heavy too, and I know many people are similarly grieving the loss of the future they’d imagined for themselves and their children, without yet being able to access a hopeful vision for the new reality that’s still emerging. I find myself reading posts from friends and family outside this area who are also grappling with how to reorient themselves to a changing world, and I have to remind myself that this phenomenon of collective bargaining and reinvention is playing out nationwide, beyond Western North Carolina as well.
In many ways, it would be easier to bypass this heaviness, and forge onward straight into picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and attempting to chart a path forward — which, it must be said, many people are doing with admirable bravery, tenacity and fortitude. But today, I'm erring on the side of allowing myself and our communities to stay with the grief a bit longer. This, too, feels like a courageous choice, and respect must be paid to all that we've lost.
As more services have come back online in Western North Carolina in recent weeks, many of us have been privileged to resume some semblance of routine — school drop off, work, kid pickup; dinner, bath, bed; lather, rinse, repeat. Every restoration of services and each reopening of roads is a rite of passage as our community trudges forward bleary-eyed in pursuit of a new normal. A major milestone came just Monday as potable water was restored to the vast majority of the Asheville area’s homes, schools, and businesses after 53 long, arduous days without.
Still, for all of these hard-fought triumphs on the road to recovery, our community remains plagued by a gnawing sense of insecurity and uncertainty. Each of our individual and collective senses of safety have been eroded, and it's not clear when or how we'll ever get that ground back under our feet. This was starkly evident two nights ago, when our region sustained high winds and power outages as a cold front moved in. After temperatures dropped near freezing last night, Asheville awoke to a thin layer of snow this morning as power continues to flicker in the wind. Weather patterns that would have been of little note in the past are leaving many members of our community physically shaking and short of breath, exposing the often-invisible trauma each of us now carries in our own unique ways.
Several times over the past month, I’ve gotten caught up in the return to the daily grind just long enough to momentarily forget what our community went through — and then something reminds me. I come around the bend of a road I've driven thousands of times and am confronted with a dramatically different view. I approach the entrance to our neighborhood and see the scars the flood left behind on the earth — the previously gentle turns of the creek exaggerated into deep jagged cuts in the land. I still wince while driving my daily routes at the sight of roads lined with debris piles, dense with loss — a tangled mess of fallen trees that previously stood watch for generations, interwoven with the twisted metal and dusty concrete remains of people’s beloved homes and meaningful belongings. You confront these reminders and it all comes rushing back, taking your breath away and surfacing a deep ache at remembering all that is irrevocably gone forever.
The loss of community spaces and the reshaping of collective memory around these changed places hangs thick in the air. Closest to my home, a literal stone's throw from the entrance to my small neighborhood is Cane Creek — a normally shallow babbling brook whose gentle waters my children have played in from the time they could barely walk, which swelled in the storm to the size of a river that washed away homes and took the lives of our neighbors. The sight of this creek — which once evoked in me a feeling of familiarity and fondness in the thousands of times I previously crossed it on my way to and from home each day — now conjures up a starkly different feeling; this once familiar friend now distorted into a dark, unknowable force of destruction.
As recovery continues from the state’s deadliest and most destructive storm in history, the extent of damage is still coming into focus. More than 100,000 homes were damaged in Western North Carolina, with 2,300 of those structures completely destroyed or made uninhabitable. The state counted 1,400 landslides, and reported damage to more than 6,000 miles of roads as well as 1,000 bridges and culverts. The North Carolina Forest Service estimated 40% of all our trees in Buncombe County were damaged or destroyed, and the Blue Ridge Parkway was closed to traffic during its peak season for visitors as tens of thousands of fallen trees blocked its roads.
Hurricane Helene is estimated to have created 10 million cubic yards of debris in Buncombe County alone. For scale, that’s enough to fill more than 460 football fields stacked 10 feet high. Even after several rains, thick mud remains pervasive around town and we will be digging out of it, literally and figuratively, for a long time to come. As our community gathers its strength and resolve to rebuild, there is a long road ahead to begin to wipe the slate clean so we can work toward a fresh start.
Grief looks unique for all of us, and shows up in different ways on a day-to-day if not minute-to-minute basis. It comes in waves, and as the initial flood of adrenaline and cortisol starts to subside, many of us are just beginning to process what we survived and imagine what’s yet to come. As many of our neighbors sift through what remains of life as they knew it, so too are all of us exploring an unfamiliar inner landscape, cleaning house, taking stock of what is salvageable, and assessing where we need to start anew.
Especially when we’re not yet clear where we’re going, there is strength in numbers, and we can navigate this new world together. In the meantime, honor the tenderness, approaching yourself gently. Make space to mourn, staying longer and moving slower when grief arises. Trust that the path forward and beauty ahead will reveal itself, and don’t rush your healing.
