Erosion: An Exploration of Loss, Grief, and Hope in Chronic Illness

Inspired by the Aftermath of Hurricane Ida at the Bernadette Morales Nature Preserve in Flemington, NJ

 

I see it even before I reach the bridge, as I round the first bend to the sweeping curve of the stream.

I hear it even before I reach the bend, as I walk the first rise and fall of the trail. The silence, the stillness that unsettles, overturns, frightens.

Where’s the water?

A glance through the trees toward the streambed shows more bed than stream, only a narrow run of water to darken less than half the stones. The rest lie tumbled and exposed under the sun, white like bones.

Not enough water to create the musical ripple I’ve always heard. Instead, the breeze takes up the melody as it stirs the leaves—browning and falling—in a dry substitution.

Pink flags on metal twigs mark the end of the trail I’ve always known, redirecting me away from the mounds of stones, the splintered trunk half-embedded in the new ground, the frazzled ball of roots clawing at the air, the twisted sycamore limb lying yards away from the rest of its body.

The deep curve of the stream is gone. The dappled pool under the roots is gone. The flat bank beside the shallow flow—sometimes slowed by a friendly dam—is gone.

Some giant hand has swept along and heaped ground over here and scooped out land over there, as if this place were no more than a child’s sandbox.

For several yards there’s no stream at all, the flow cut off by one of the burial mounds.

And then there, at the far edge of the curve, a trickle leaves the hill and carries the small current onward, like blood from an old broken nose.

The water cannot be stopped.

I step into the streambed, stones clacking and leaves rustling where once water flowed. Is this what it was like for the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea, or the Jordan River?

Except there are no miracles here.

I stand where I had never stood before, grieving the change. The upheaval. The loss of the beauty and might that once was.

Could there be any hope of restoration for a place so broken?

Orange arrows on fresh logs point me away from the carnage, like a stern elder turning me away from my morbid curiosity. I obey the new trail back to the old, but the dried-out battlefield of water against earth doesn’t end. My slow steps carry me onward past the empty bed, the barren ground, the tattered threads all that remain of the once-mighty banner.

A few of the threads knot into a shallow pool, already rimmed with algae, cupping dead leaves on its surface, trapped with no way forward. Not enough momentum to carry it onward. Nothing but a stagnant puddle.

The worst kind of death for a body that knew only how to move.

I want to weep until my tears fill the bed, flow over the stones, and renew the life of this place. 

But an ocean full of tears could not undo what the mighty storm has wrought. Water cannot turn around, cannot retrace its steps, cannot start again. It can only move forward, finding new ways and chiseling new homes like the new trails cut around the old ones. The damaged ones. The impassable ones. No going back that way. Trail closed.

I keep going, past the hope, the life, the gift of the small but sweet chatter of water over stone. A valiant attempt to fill the silence, to remind of what once was, to prove what still is. The sound subdued but steady. The faint pulse of the moving body.

My feet stop where X marks the spot, the spot where bridge meets earth, where one more step will tumble into space, where the storm leaves behind another death.

Boulders sprawl between ripped-away banks and left-alone walls, cement hugged by the tangling arms of weeds and grass. Once a helpful guide over the current now a whiskered sentinel among dry rocks.

The space gapes between me and the bridge—and the rest of the trail beyond—too far to jump and too steep to climb. Not a closed door but a broken bridge, alone in the wreckage. A stalwart testament of better times gone like the water under its beams.

The land itself has been torn in two, earth from cement, flesh from bone in a wound too wide and too deep to be stitched. Jagged rocks stick out like broken teeth under trailing hairs of homeless ground ivy, life itself ripped out from under them. Waiting either to die or to reroot, whichever comes first.

I climb up the boulders and over the tree corpse and onto the abrupt cement of the bridge. A triumph as barren as the ground around me, with the stones littered across the planks and the sticks woven between the bars and the yellow tape sagging across the far end, a half-hearted caution. I don’t need the warning. The wreckage has taken my heart anyway.

Even if I could continue, what’s the point?

I sit and look and take a strange comfort in knowing I’m not the only place that has been ravaged by forces too strong to control. I too have been changed beyond recognition, damaged beyond repair, left barren. My body a broken bridge, my mind a dried streambed. Trail closed. Water gone.

There is no going back. The storm has ripped up too many trees, stopped too many currents, left behind too many deaths.

But the water cannot be stopped. There’s still a pulse, faint but steady, a trickle of life out of the stricken earth. Nothing like what it once was, but moving forward.

And I climb down from the bridge to follow.

Biography:

I have been part-time staff at Aims since 2022 as a tutor, and I now have the privilege of serving as part-time English faculty as well. Ever since I could put words on paper, I’ve turned to writing as a way to explore, imagine, and process both the world around me and the emotions within me—and give life to the worlds and characters inside my head. While non-fiction has been a constant outlet for me over the years, I also write fiction. My current project is a four-book YA series that combines elements of my favorite stories with some of my most shaping life experiences, including a season of chronic illness. It was during this season that I relied heavily upon the pen to help me understand, appreciate, and use for good the difficulties God allowed me to experience. “Erosion” was born during one of my lowest points of that season, when God reminded me that no matter how empty life feels, there is always hope.