Finally a moment to reflect on Ben’s new article about an end of life beaver story. This one about Brittany in New York. It was published this week in the writers blog “The last word on Nothing.”
Brittany and the Beavers
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have seen beavers build dams entirely of rock, who have watched beavers frolic like seals in the Baltic Sea. Just last month I received the unsolicited memoir of a guy who once resuscitated a drowning beaver. Yes, mouth-to-mouth.
Most writers, I’m sure, get some version of this correspondence. Still, there’s something about beavers — their human-like family structures, their penchant for construction — that seems to foster personal connection. They enter lives in unexpected ways. They channel joy and grief. Today, I want to relate one such saga, courtesy of a woman named Brittany. I’ll warn you that Brittany’s story is about illness and death. It’s also about life and love. And beavers. It’s definitely about beavers.
Every time Ben introduces a story line I start to relax and settle in for a nice long read. He has such a winding and familiar prose style that I couldn’t be more comfortable unless the subject was about beavers. Which of course it is. This time through the eyes of Brittany in Cuba New York.
In adulthood, the siblings drifted apart. Zach stayed at home, cycled in and out of college, worked at a cheese factory. Brittany, a high achiever, moved to West Virginia to teach at a university. Around 2010, though, she, her husband, and their kids returned to Cuba after receiving terrible news. Zach, at age 24, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, almost invariably fatal brain cancer. Brittany’s brother was going to die.
One day in 2016, Brittany, along with her sister, her niece, and her mom, took Zach on a final field trip. A lifelong animal lover, Zach had a special thing for turtles; he even owned a painted turtle, a female named Gary, that their sister brought back once from Myrtle Beach. (It’s still alive today, in the care of their mother). Zach’s dying wish was to visit Moss Lake, a turtle hotspot. “I can remember trying to get him in the car — it was so tragic but so funny,” said Brittany, who has a gift for smiling through pain. “It’s horrible because he’s dying, he can’t move. But at the same time, we’re all laughing because his gut is hanging out, he’s swearing, there’s a cigarette coming out of his mouth, his catheter is falling out of his pocket.” Alas, the turtles weren’t out, but it was still a lovely afternoon. In a photo Brittany sent me from that day, Zach sits flanked by his family, five backs to the camera, their arms twined around each other’s shoulders, the dark timber across the lake reflected in the water’s silver bowl.
Two weeks later, Zach died. Brittany’s family poured his ashes into Moss Lake — illegally, which Zach would have appreciated. The turtles surfaced and ate them all.
So the lovingly described brother dies, and the family builds a bench or him at the cemetery. And she like to go there to remember him. And the cemetery is in a wetlands which is where we all should be buried..
During one of her vigils soon after Zach died, Brittany spotted a V-shaped wake carving through the swamp. The wake was cast, she realized, by the head of a beaver, the first she’d seen. Brittany, a casual but enthusiastic nature-lover, was thrilled. When she next came to the cemetery, she saw beavers again, and again the time after that. Beavers are ordinarily nocturnal, but this colony was bold and active during the day, perhaps because it had habituated to the cemetery’s foot traffic. Soon Brittany was visiting five days a week, for hours at a time. “I’m at the cemetery trying to feel some peace,” she wrote in her journal one day in July. “And I saw the beavers and Zach would have loved them.”
Peace, at the time, was hard to come by. In the aftermath of Zach’s death, Brittany’s family melted down into chaos and drama; no need to divulge specifics, but suffice to say that, when she compares the situation to Jerry Springer, she may actually be underselling it. The beavers transcended the bullshit. “They were so majestic, so blissfully unaware of the horrors of everything going around,” she recalled. They were, it seemed to her, manifestations of our better natures. They lived in tight family units, like Brittany’s own clan, and they were fiercely devoted to their kits, as Brittany was to her children. But they were also blessedly drama-free, practical, industrious. They did not dread death; they did not betray each other. They were akin to humans, yet superior to them. They also led double lives — sleek and graceful in the water, clumsy and uncomfortable out of it — that seemed to reflect humanity’s own dualism, Zach’s own dualism, how we can at once be so generous and kind and callous and mean, how we all contain multitudes.
Yes, of course these are the very same thoughts I’ve had watching beavers. And maybe you’ve had too. Because there is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.
A few months later, Brittany’s health began to deteriorate. She felt dizzy and fatigued; she struggled to walk. At the hospital, a wild thought rushed through her aching head: that, although glioblastoma is not hereditary, she had contracted the same disease that felled her brother. She didn’t fear death itself, but she was terrified by the thought of leaving behind her four children. The next day, she received her diagnosis: an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. Another person might have grieved. Brittany, though, had expected incurable cancer. “I was so relieved,” she said. “I don’t think I even cried once. Like, whatever, I’ll get over it.” She threw herself into exercise and literature; although she occasionally requires a cane, her life has continued mostly unaltered.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the best beaver people do. Who knew I was a type?
Brittany and I spoke in late May, amidst an unprecedented societal lockdown. All over the country, people were adjusting to smaller, quieter lives, as Brittany had, and escaping their deepening depressions through nature, as Brittany once did. Gardening was ascendant; so was birdwatching. We were all trying to connect with forces deeper and simpler, to commune with creatures blessedly detached from a world that we’d ruined. That, in the end, was what Brittany loved most about beavers: “They’re so unaware,” she said, “of the shit that we go through.”
Yup.
