As the planet continues to warm and change, people around the world will face more large-scale natural disasters. Rescuing survivors is a priority, but in resource-strapped countries like India, putting processes in place to manage the dead is also crucial.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami “laid bare India’s own lack of forensic infrastructure,” writes Deepa Padmanaban. In this Fifty Two feature, Padmanaban details what improvements the country must make to better prepare teams in times of emergency — not just first responder training, but victim identification and, as a result, more support and compassionate care for victims’ families. Padmanaban notes that Argentinian grandmothers in the late 1970s were the first people to suggest forensics as a way to identity victims — their abducted daughters and grandchildren — and goes on to describe how fields like forensic odontology (looking at the teeth of the dead) can be a reliable process of victim identification in India.
Prioritising the living over the dead is a given. But the dead have an afterlife, particularly for their families, and ignoring them has terrible consequences, both in the matter of emotional closure, and other, material ones. In the absence of a positive identification and death certificate, families can only report their loved ones as “missing.” Their lives can, quite literally, be put on hold.
This is at the heart of the humanitarian approach to forensics, a shift from the more traditional approach that deals with criminal investigations, law and order, and evidence. For survivors, humanitarian forensics helps provide closure, and a chance to face the future with a measure of peace. For state agencies and record keepers, it offers a chance to plan for and protect the fragile future of all humans.
This week, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers, was convicted of sedition for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. No one knows better how dangerous Rhodes is than his eldest son, Dakota. This is the story of how Dakota, his mother, and younger siblings escaped Rhodes’s grasp:
Standing outside one of the family’s previous homes, a modest dun-coloured house opposite a row of trailers, it’s clear the place brought up uncomfortable memories for Dakota, who had spent his early teenage years there.
He recounted one incident in particular, sometime around 2012. A beloved pet dog named Yeti was in ill health and eventually died inside the house.
“Stewart was busy with [Oath Keepers] conference calls and emailing people and he put off taking my dog to be cremated,” he said.
It took three days for Rhodes to finally take the dog away. He joked about the smell of the carcass and teased his teenage son about his emotional attachment to the animal.
Dakota was furious.
“I was struggling with the impulse to jump out and circle around to the driver’s side door and yank my father out of the car to beat him in traffic,” he said.
Throughout hours of interviews, in tweets and in posts on their blogs, Dakota and Tasha recounted numerous similar incidents of verbal abuse and neglect. A few stood out – like the time Dakota described Stewart choking one of his sisters on the family’s front porch.
“Until I was an adult man,” he said, “I lived absolutely under the thumb of an emotional terrorist.”
The latest issue of Stranger’s Guide is dedicated entirely to Ukraine. In this essay, Anastacia Galouchka dances deep inside a burgeoning rave scene to examine the evolution of the connection between art and politics in Kyiv:
Clubs like HVLV, Closer and Keller often hire security guards to man their doors — in itself, not that unusual. But they’ll often stop aggressive youngsters from going inside, as they might create problems for other party-goers, such as members of the LGBT community. In a country where it’s customary to pay off a bouncer to gain entry into a club, this the idea of making basic decency the coin of the realm — “How open-minded do you seem and how likely are you to start harassing girls or beating up same-sex couples?” — was a radical concept. This safe space has allowed people to experiment with self-expression without fear of judgment or risk of oppression. It drew in more and more people from Ukraine’s middle class, and organizers rapidly saw their public double or triple.
That’s what makes the underground scene in Kyiv so unique: none of the people who frequent it have a simplistic “fuck the system” in mind. Instead, they are more nuanced. They believe in a brighter future for Ukraine. And they seem to be building a foundation for it within the confines of this underground safe space, where they can be who and whatever they want to be. The Podil scene is instrumental in uniting these people, allowing them to express themselves and subsequently spread the liberal values they encounter here through all of Kyiv, a city that is now learning to thrive in this new sense of openness and creativity. It has coaxed Kyiv out of the memories of dictatorship and oligarchy into something more modern and open-minded.
Lisa Bubert | Longreads | November 30, 2022 | 11 minutes (3,072 words)
When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short man with a thick north Texas accent and a handlebar mustache who finished the training with the advice to “treat each resident like they’re your grandmama.” The course lasted two weeks and came with the stipulation that I stay for at least six months. Employee turnover was high.
This job, caring for grandparents around the clock, paid $7.25 an hour — above minimum wage, the hiring manager boasted, which at the time in Texas was set at $5.15. This really was a great job, the other aides told me. It was steady work that came with a lunch break and health insurance for your kids, things that were lost on me. I was an anomaly in that job: a teenager, in college, white.
None of my friends understood why I wanted to work there. Young people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of death. Death hung over the place like a ghost, the hospital smell embedded daily in my clothes. All I can say is that I wanted a real job and I liked old people. I’d already seen my share of dead bodies, thanks to the slew of open-casket funerals that came with a childhood spent in an aging rural community. Also, the home was the only place that called back when I applied.
The facility was broken into seven distinct hallways, with two aides assigned to each for their shifts. Each hall housed 15 or 20 residents, making each aide responsible for eight to 10 residents. There were no firm state or federal regulations on what the resident-aide ratio should be (and still aren’t), but 10-to-1 is considered easy street in most facilities. To be clear, this is still a terrible ratio. Imagine having to wake, bathe, dress, and hand-feed 10 elderly patients who need total assistance: buttoning shirts, brushing dentures, changing bedsheets for those who will have inevitably soiled the bed in the night. Imagine having to complete it all in an hour or less. It’s an impossible task. Which is why dentures don’t get brushed, baths don’t get offered, nightgowns are worn at the breakfast table. Now double it to 20 patients; this is what you have in many facilities across the country.
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Hall One was for rehab patients, those who had suffered strokes or broken bones and were simply there until they could regain strength and rejoin the world (if they were lucky) or move to another wing (if they were less so). Hall Two was reserved for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They were mostly ambulatory, which was great for those residents who liked to wander and terrible for the aides who had to keep track of them and everyone else. Halls Three and Four had a mean reputation, old folks who bit and scratched. One resident in that hall was a literal shit-flinger, known to keep her hands hidden until an aide was close enough to smear. Many of the Black residents were placed on these halls, creating a racist chicken-or-egg situation where the care was poor because the residents were difficult and the residents were difficult because the care was poor. Hall Five was a tale of two extremes — people who either needed a ton of help or none at all. Any aide was happy to get that assignment, though, because the extremes averaged out to something sustainable. Hall Six was for the bedridden.
It was a toss-up whether Hall Three, Four, or Six was the worst assignment for aides — it depended on whether you felt like taking insults or blowing your back out. But Hall Seven was the hall everyone wanted: elderly people who were mostly lucid, mostly independent, who just needed a little help and some company. Hall Seven was heaven. And because I was young, too small to lift alone, and white, I got assigned to Hall Seven every time.
I loved working Hall Seven because Hall Seven felt like home. I had grown up in the presence of old people, my grandparents some of my earliest caretakers. My father drove truck; my mother worked at the hospital by day, and had nursing school at night. She would dress me as I slept and shuffle me off to Granny K’s house at five in the morning, where my grandfather, Papa, was always awake and waiting, the local weather news segment on the TV glowing blue in the front window.
Granny K would make the meals, play with me, pick me up from school. We watched One Life to Live and General Hospital every summer day at 1 and 2 p.m. She was small and short, shrunken in her big, pink armchair. Papa was large, big-bellied, farted often, and smelled of peanuts and sweat. Granny K was sweet to me and harsh to everyone else; Papa was a teddy bear, grown soft in his old age.
Papa died just a few years prior to my stint at the nursing home. The first sign of his illness was the loss of his round belly. He shrunk, then shrunk some more until he was confined to the hospital bed Granny K kept in the living room. Pancreatic cancer. We didn’t even try to fight. After he died, Granny K sank into a sullen, depressive loneliness I couldn’t understand, so I visited less and less until I moved to college and got work in the home that let me pretend everyone was my grandparent.
Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity.
There was the lady who covered herself in beaded necklaces and split her secret stash of chocolate with me as we watched game shows and talked about boys. There was the man who wore a daily uniform of plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and Reeboks. There was the teeny tiny woman who couldn’t remember shit moment to moment but still thought all of this was pretty funny anyway. I’d take her to dinner with the other ladies who couldn’t remember shit and we’d sit and laugh about god knows what. She had no teeth so everything had to be pureed. I remember feeding her from piles of color on the dinner tray — green for peas, yellow for potatoes, brown for meat.
Some of the residents refused to leave their rooms for dinner and would have their meals brought to them on a meal cart. Some of them had to be fed or they wouldn’t eat. Most of them refused even that, hell-bent on starving themselves out of existence. Take the food yourself, they’d tell the aide. You weren’t supposed to take the food, management said. That would be wrong. But things moved so fast that lunch breaks could pass untaken, and on days like that this was the only chance for food. An untouched butter roll, stale French fries, cold steak fingers, unopened cartons of juice. The chart truthfully updated — resident refused meal — the food in an aide’s mouth. Some wrapped the food to take home to children. You would take the food too, you just would.
The entire elder care system operates on a mantra of out of sight, out of mind. Medical residencies feature little to no geriatric training; the profession experiences an annual turnover rate of 60 percent. A 2021 study found that turnover in nursing care facilities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the average annual rate in 2020 at a shocking 128 percent. In other words, if you apply for a job at a nursing home, you can pretty well count on getting hired. For someone with little access to education living on the edge of poverty, this fact is a godsend. Yet, caveats lurk. There are countless reports of understaffing in nursing homes, underfunding, limited regulations where it matters (staff pay, patient ratio) and reels of red tape where it doesn’t (hours of required paperwork that detail how many ounces of water the resident drank, but not how they cry at night for their children). And while you may be trained on how to wipe from front to back, there’s no training to prepare you for the psychic toll of watching your people suffer until they die.
There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places, and I’m sorry to say that my experience working in one did not change this perception. But I can also say that the perception has less to do with staffing, funding, and regulations (or lack thereof) and much more to do with our country’s fear of death, its rejection of vulnerability, and its subsequent inability to see the inherent dignity in people — especially in their vulnerable moments.
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Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that?
Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity. Our friends pass on, our families visit less and less, we spend more time alone, helpless to arrest the breakdown of our own bodies. It’s no wonder the elderly — and those who care for the elderly — are steeped in a hot tea of shame. And because shame repels, it is no wonder our policies and priorities for eldercare are so lax as to be nearly criminal. Out of sight. Out of mind.
Granny K and Papa were both het up about “not being put into a home.” Papa didn’t have to, on account of the cancer. But no cancer came to save Granny K. She just got older and older and lonelier and lonelier until she couldn’t care for herself and my parents couldn’t leave their jobs to do it for her like she’d done for Papa. She went into assisted living, very reluctantly — though not until after I started working in my own facility. And by then, I’d seen how the sausage was made.
I visited Granny K at the facility every time I came home. Short, quiet visits in her room that smelled of cough drops and Kleenex. The hum of her oxygen tank. The humidifier on high, turning the air wet. She would never say much past lamenting how terrible it all was, how she just wanted to die and be done with it. My visits grew shorter and shorter and then I took to calling her on Sunday mornings where I would hear more about how terrible everything was and how death would be a welcome ending. I called my mother crying, who then called Granny K and told her she couldn’t tell me those things anymore. My conversations with Granny K dwindled and dwindled, both of us playing a morbid waiting game to see how long it would take to get what we both wanted.
Christmas 2012, I sprung Granny K from her facility for family dinner. As we drove home, the sun was setting across the fields in a dazzling display of purple and pink and rustling prairie grass and open, open pasture with room to run as far as the eye would allow. Live oaks with massive curling limbs cast long shadows in the hazy light. It was, by far, one of the more beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen, in a place that’s no stranger to such spectacle. Granny K sat up straight in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed out the window, taking in every sight, committing it to memory, presence. I wanted to say something, but stayed quiet. The moment was hers.
Granny K sat up straight in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed out the window, taking in every sight, committing it to memory, presence.
We had Christmas dinner. We opened presents. My father offered to take Granny K back and the four of us — my mother, father, brother, and me — all went out to the car to see her off. It was the first time it had been just the four of us in years. A memory flickered to the surface of us eating around the dinner table when I wasn’t yet in grade school, before my brother got his first job and my mother worked nights. We said our goodbyes, watched Granny K’s small head disappear in the window as the car drove off. I already knew when I watched her watch that sunset that this would be the last time.
It was; she died a week later. Just before, my mother called me and placed the phone at Granny K’s ear. I said I was glad to know her, that I enjoyed our time together. I could hear a clicking, the soft rattle in response. That was our last moment. But I prefer to remember the sunset.
I worked at the nursing home until the six months were up and then I left. I’d had enough of the hours, the lifting, the side eye from the other aides who knew I wouldn’t stay. I didn’t need the job like they did. I was just a college kid. I was playing grown-up.
A decade later, though, my training came in handy. May 2020, the height of the pandemic; my other grandmother, Granny Nawara, lay dying in a hospital bed. My mother had tried to keep Granny Nawara in her own home to care for her there, knowing the moment she went into a nursing facility would be the moment we could no longer sit with her. But it grew to be too much. My mother was a veteran nurse at our rural hospital; when the administration heard about Granny Nawara, they transferred her to a room there. I took my chances and flew to Texas to be with my mother as we watched Granny Nawara’s last days.
For three days, we sat together in that room — my mother knitting a lovey for a new baby, me burying my head in work, Granny Nawara lying in bed, just breathing. Mom and I would trade off. Mom would check Granny for bedsores, sop a watery sponge to her cracked lips. I would rest a damp towel to Granny’s forehead and she would open her eyes for just a moment, see me, and smile. Mom spent the nights at the hospital, unwilling to leave. I went home to sleep in my childhood bed. The last night I told Granny good night, she gripped my hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks, pulled it to her chin, and wouldn’t let go. She blew a kiss and I stood there, letting her hold me until it grew late and I had to pry my hand out of her grasp. She would still be with us the next morning; she would only die after her older brother said his goodbye. Granny Nawara did always like to get permission.
The last night I told Granny good night, she gripped my hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks, pulled it to her chin, and wouldn’t let go.
I have a hard time writing about this, not because it’s a traumatic memory, but because I got to do something so many others couldn’t in this pandemic. I sat with my grandmother as she died. And there is no act of love greater than to sit with someone as they face their deepest moment of vulnerability — an act of love denied to so many these last few years.
There’s plenty to be said about the ways the pandemic has laid bare the failures of our eldercare system, how our fear of weakness has driven our entire healthcare system to the brink, how we exorcise this fear through a cycle of abuse that directly impacts our old, young, and poor at alarming rates. How our abject terror of vulnerability robs us all of dignity. Dignity requires witness, to see and be seen; if we are too afraid to look, it slips away.
All I want to focus on now, then, is the sunset. A terribly beautiful sunset, one we all know is the last, one from which we cannot tear our eyes away. Commit that dazzling display to memory. Watch the light as we fade.
One of my favorite tasks at the nursing home was supervising the 4 p.m. smoke break. Many of the residents were lifetime smokers and no nursing facility was going to curb that habit, so after breakfast and before dinner we’d wheel everyone to a small, glassed-in room off the corner of the dining hall. It stunk like only a room solely used by smokers could stink. Staff hated covering smoke time because of it. But it was also 15 minutes in which all you had to do was light cigarettes and make sure nobody burned themselves. I volunteered every time.
Everyone’s assigned cigarettes were kept in locked cabinets. The families were responsible for keeping them stocked; no begging or borrowing loosies allowed. I’d separate the packs from their cartons, hand everyone their brand of choice, light them all with the management-issued lighter. Residents would relax back in their chairs, stare out the glass enclosure as though it was a window that looked outside, and drift off into some other beautiful world.
I loved smoke time for the pure peace and bliss of it; not just mine, but theirs. You could see their younger selves when it was smoke time, slouched back like a bunch of hoodlums, yakking and jawing like they were kids getting away with something. The muscle memory of the ritual — inhaling, holding, flicking into ashtrays, stubbing the smoke out when they were finished — transcended dementia. A few might forget, long lines of ash dangling at the ends of their lit cigarettes. But that’s why I was there. To remind them.
Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.
It’s that time of year again! Our annual year-end series has evolved over the past decade, but our aim remains the same: to share and celebrate the best in longform nonfiction storytelling across the internet, and to honor writers and journalists publishing exceptional work. We’re thrilled to kick off our Best of 2022 collection with today’s list of our 10 most-read essays and reported stories.
The digital publishing landscape is uncertain, and continues to change. In 2023 we’ll continue to curate our favorite reads on the web, and publish original essays and reading lists from both established and emerging writers. Thanks for reading and supporting us!
Lisa Whittington-Hill | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)
Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy.
Krista Diamond | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,342 words)
There is risk in the wilderness — even in mild adventures — and yet we still seek to reason with it, to assign order to it, to control it, and to tempt it.
Colin Dickey | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)
Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.
Devin Kelly | January 2022 | 27 minutes (7,394 words)
Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.
Browse all of our year-end collections in one place.Follow along as we publish this year’s lists:
These days, animals can receive excellent veterinary care, ranging from blood tests and X-rays to ultrasounds and surgeries. It’s become easier to save or prolong an animal’s life, though it also depends on how much money you have — and are willing to spend. In this piece, Sarah Zhang speaks with human guardians of cats who’ve received costly care — including a kidney transplant, which is considered controversial — and asks important questions around pet ownership and the bond between humans and animals.
For decades, Americans’ collective spending on veterinary care has been rising—it exceeded $34 billion in 2021—a sign of a broader shift in how we think about pets. Our grandparents might have found it indulgent to allow pets on the living-room couch, let alone the bed. But as birth rates have fallen, pets have become more intimate companions. (In my own household, our cat Pete is really quite insistent on taking up the full third of the bed that he believes is rightfully his.) Cats and dogs now have day cares; health insurance; funerals; even trusts, should an owner die an untimely death—a proliferation of services that implies new obligations to pet ownership, turning it into something more like parenthood.
Joey Ayoub offers a hopeful look at Solarpunk, a genre that emerged in response to Cyberpunk, and a movement focused on positive futurism and community-building that’s utopian yet pragmatic. “Solarpunk is a recognition that the modern world is oversaturated with despair and helplessness,” writes Ayoub, “and in that context hope can be a radical act.” Doomscrolling and denying the planet’s big problems are easy to do, but Ayoub’s inspiring essay shows people that there can be other paths for us — and the Earth — if we can tackle them together.
After successfully entering the building and kicking the guard out, they let in 200-odd homeless people to find shelter from the cold. When the police inevitably arrive, the activists trap them between two of the gates and use the building’s heating control to increase the temperature to 115 F (46 C). This forces the cops to remove their armor or risk heatstroke. At that moment, ten activists who were waiting in a different, cooler room, allow the cops to enter in small numbers at a time, disarm them, destroy and throw their weapons away, then let them go out in nothing but T-shirts and underwear. The irony of the situation is hard to miss: In the Boston winter cold, the cops cannot survive without going back to their homes, a right denied to the homeless. Only through direct confrontation was that made apparent.
The Solarpunk element of the story is the idea that climate-related challenges are going to increase, yet by thinking and organizing together we are able to arrive at concrete solutions to specific problems. Unlike the more common climate-related apocalyptic stories we’re all familiar with, agency is given back to humans who, when sufficiently organized, are able to change their living conditions.
