Hold Fast:
Navigating Personal and Climate Grief with a Reconciled Heart
A memoir and healing guide that draws on the sudden death of Wendy’s husband in 2016 and her decades of environmental ethics work to offer a model for navigating and reconciling both personal and climate grief.
Looking for the companion Workbook?
Opening to Climate Grief puts these ideas into practice.
In 2016, Wendy Sarkissian watched her husband Karl drown in a river at twilight. From that devastating loss and fifty years of work as an environmental ethicist, she developed a range of heartfelt approaches to navigating both personal and climate grief.
Hold Fast is her account of that journey: through acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, and service to others, toward a life that honors both the dead and the living Earth.
This passionate book is for anyone who has loved and lost, for people grieving personal and ecological losses, and for those who need to know it is possible to survive and thrive in the face of massive losses.
The Reconciled Ecological Self
And then I saw it.
What lay between the Ecological Self and the Reconciled Self was a new figure forged not by aspiration but by loss. Not by the expansion of identity toward Nature, but by the grief of what has happened to Nature. And the Acceptance, the full embodied undefended Acceptance, of that reality.
After I wrote the words Reconciled Ecological Self on McGuire Trail, I sat very still. Then I searched. Thoroughly, the way you search when you suspect you have found something and are terrified of being wrong.
The grief literature.
Environmental philosophy.
Deep ecology.
Climate psychology.
Every combination I could construct.
Nothing.
And here I want to say something about the Latin. Res. The thing itself. Not a representation, not a discourse, not a theory dressed in new language. The thing itself. I am not a philosopher in the way that Næss was a philosopher. I am a community planner, an environmental ethicist, and a grieving human being who has been asking the same question since before she knew it was a question.
Sitting there with my drawing of an ecotone and fifty years of accumulated searching, I found, in the threshold between two great thinkers, the thing itself.
Reconciled: We have accepted and made peace with what is true.
Ecological: We are embedded in it, part of it, kin to it.
Self: It is not a program or a policy. It is who we can become.
Res. The thing itself.
I offer my discovery here with two open hands, with gratitude, with the humility of someone who knows she is standing on the shoulders of giants. It is my contribution to the question that has occupied me all my life: How do we live, as humans, on this Earth, in the time we have left?
Like this.
Exactly like this.
The term Reconciled Ecological Self came to me as a way to name something I had been living toward for many years. I offer it here with gratitude, in the hope that it may serve others who are seeking language for their own love of the Earth.