It’s a Sunday morning in April 2021, a few days after Earth Day. I’ve just arrived at the Gateway National Recreation Area, a narrow crescent between the Sandy Hook Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s drizzling, and the Twin Lights Historic Site is barely visible through a scrim of fog. I’ve signed up to volunteer with the Plastic Wave Project, a small grassroots organization here at the Jersey Shore that raises awareness of microplastics and their effects on our waterways, and by extension, on the human and nonhuman animals that depend on these for our survival.
Volunteers pile onto the beach. We’ve come from all over New Jersey, representing a vast range of ages and experiences. Some of us still wear face masks, a vestige of the pandemic from which we’re only now emerging. We’ve brought rain gear, trowels, work gloves, buckets. Overhead, gulls swoop down to shore in a tousle for fresh fish. At our feet, scores of dead menhaden languish at the tide’s edge. The mass die-off would continue throughout that spring and summer, causing a nauseating stench that suffused our coastal communities. As I would later learn, mass fish die-offs of fish are a direct result of the vibrio bacteria that thrive in our warming waters, as well as pollution from sewage and stormwater runoff. Events like these are what brought some of us here today, to protect our bay and shoreline in whatever small way we can.
Our group leaders, Nadia Serghis and Erika Bernal, provide a brief introduction. They and a third colleague, Rita Hjelm, started The Plastic Wave Project several years ago to raise awareness about the harmful effects of plastic on our waterways, and to inspire more people to live sustainably on their own terms. Their goal is to get people outdoors and connected to nature, to build awareness of their environment and the microplastics that pervade it, so tiny that most of us don’t even know they’re there. Since its inception, The Plastic Wave Project has run educational programs, art exhibitions, and beach cleanups like this one.
Our purpose today is to collect microplastics—pieces, Erika explains, of less than five millimeters in length, or about the size of a sesame seed. These include secondary microplastics—pieces of a plastic bag or water bottle, for example, that have broken down over time with the help of wind, waves, and sunlight—and primary microplastics, the smallest units made by the manufacturing company itself. These pellets and fibers, Nadia adds, are the most insidious because they cannot be seen, and so cannot be easily cleaned up. We are eating them, drinking them, breathing them in continuously, and we don’t even realize it.
Listening to Erika and Nadia’s explanations, we kneel or squat among rocks and clusters of dune grass. Using a trowel and sieve, we sift sand into jars or buckets, picking out tiny beads and threads of plastic and setting them aside. Over the soft murmur of the bay foaming onto shore, I hear the whistles of migrating birds and the wind rustling through copses of phragmites and salt cedar, which I’ve only just learned are invasive species. I find myself wondering if the first people to manufacture plastic—or anything made from fossil fuels, for that matter—knew what they were doing. Then I realize I am asking the wrong question. A far more interesting one is, would it have made any difference if they had?
I don’t know where to place blame, if blame is even necessary. Only that the damage is done. We consume the plastic seascape even as it consumes us. Plankton absorb microplastics; oysters and other shellfish ingest them. This disrupts their normal behavior patterns, leaving them unable to find food, or unable to reproduce, or with offspring that have a higher mortality rate. Humans, of course, eat these creatures. We swim in the water; we breathe the air. On average, humans ingest about a credit card’s worth of plastic each week. Microplastics have been found in fetuses, as well as babies who drink milk from plastic bottles. We are constantly, both literally and figuratively, immersed in a sea of plastic.
In my perinatologist’s waiting room, thirteen weeks pregnant, I grab a plastic clipboard and a plastic pen. My husband and I sit in vinyl chairs as I fill in a patient information form. On the TV, a woman is sobbing with the force of a coastal flood. Her college-aged daughter has gone on vacation and come back in a body bag, dismembered. I rub my swollen belly and try not to see this as an omen. I look away. It is easy to look away, when it’s not your child, not your grief.
I am escorted to an exam room, where I put on a polyester gown, lie face-up on an exam table with a plastic covering, my feet in the plastic stirrups. The technician wraps a plastic ultrasound wand in more plastic and slides it into my body. As an image of my unborn daughter appears on the screen, she falls silent.
“I—” she says finally. “I’m . . . going to get the doctor.”
“She was unfriendly,” I say to my husband after she leaves the room.
How did I still not know?
The doctor walks in brusquely, a whirlwind of white coat, paperwork, and equipment. “Well,” he says, “I don’t like what I’m seeing.”
A surge of panic courses through my body. I don’t like what I’m seeing? Was there a kidney too big, a ventricle too small? Did I need to up my protein intake, or iron, or folic acid? Buy an organic brand of soap?
Whatever it is, I can get us through it, I tell myself. I’ll do whatever he says. And for a moment, my panic subsides, briefly overtaken by the illusion that I can control what happens to my daughter, my body, my life. Even now, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to be able to hold that illusion forever—or at least a few more minutes, days, weeks, years.
The doctor begins to speak. The walls close in. The world stops spinning. Time stops passing. My ears are ringing and my heart is in my throat.
Over the ringing I can faintly hear the doctor as he explains what’s missing: not a kidney, not a ventricle, not vitamins or supplements or organic soap. What’s missing: a heartbeat.
Grief has a body like the bay has a body. You stand in the middle of it, waist-deep, boots sinking into the mucky bottom, water filling the crevices of your clothing and skin. You can’t see it clearly when you’re in it, or when it’s inside you. The waves shift to accommodate your shape, parting around you as you remain motionless, letting the current take you. If you’re not careful it can swallow you whole, until you’re nothing but a hand breaching the water’s surface, reaching in vain for a lifeline. Even if you’re not pulled under, you’re left standing there, unsure of how to get back, tangled in someone’s plastic fishing net, the shoreline so far off, impossible to see through the fog. You see only the shape your body makes of the water, and not the water itself. By the time you manage to get out, if you do get out, you can no longer communicate, or even remember, what it was like.
My daughter, too, had a body. You couldn’t see it from the outside, but it was a body. I was not given the remains. I did not know I had the option to ask for the remains, because no one had told me. The great injustice of it all was that the world, of course, did not stop spinning. Time did not stop passing. Wildfires ravaged swathes of California; oysters were cooked alive by the thousands in unprecedented heat waves. A pandemic raged, killing millions, while we watched from behind locked doors. Ice storms in Texas, hurricanes here on the East Coast. Meanwhile, friends and relatives had children who would have been my daughter’s age, and kept on having and having. Meanwhile, the plastic tap did not stop running.
What to do with all this grief? What to do with all this rage?
In Greek mythology, it is Demeter who moves the seasons, who provides the harvest, who makes all the fruit of the earth abound. The word “meter,” rooted within her name, is the ancient Greek word for mother: mother of all that grows; goddess of birth and health. Mother of Persephone, whom the earth opened up and swallowed whole.
Demeter, in her grief and rage, blighted the land so that no crops would grow, plunging all of humanity into famine. The earth had betrayed her. Without Persephone, there would be no grain, no fruit, and the world would starve. Finally, Zeus was forced to intervene: Persephone would spend half the year on Olympus with her mother, allowing the earth to grow and flourish, and half the year with Hades in his underworld, during which time the earth would wither and die. The ancient Greeks believed this was where the seasons came from.
How alone Demeter must have felt those six months out of every year, condemned to wander the earth in her grief-rage, ravaging all that stood in her path. Here, on this beach, even surrounded by dozens of other volunteers, I feel just as alone, walking to where each wave carries more and more microplastics onto Plum Island, absorbing the rhythm of the bay’s rising tides. Again, it is easy to look away, when it’s not your child, not your grief.
Microplastics wash up on the beach in a multitude of ways. Plastics are shed from shipping containers, fishing equipment, polyester clothing, storm runoff, car tires, food containers, and pieces of garbage left on the beach. Microplastics are now part of the beach the way toxins are part of the body—so small they often go unnoticed, so ubiquitous as to be inseparable from the landscape itself. They are difficult to see, and near impossible to pick up without a trowel and sifter. One can see why sea creatures mistake them for food, why we mistake them for food. At first glance they could be pebbles, seashells, berries, plant fibers. They look like they belong here, less out of place on this beach than I am—in my polyester clothing, my unwieldy, broken body.
Once you know how to see them, though, they’re everywhere. Scrape across the sand’s surface, and you reveal an entire layer of microplastics, their unnatural shapes and garish colors. You can’t help but wonder: How did I not notice them before?
In the thick of the pandemic, I am pregnant a second time. My “morning” sickness lasts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—bearable only, paradoxically, when I’m eating. I am ravenous, consuming entire vegan pizzas, saltines by the sleeve. I have a recurring dream where I’m trapped in a house made of dizzying black-and-white tile, running up and down a spiral staircase that neither ends nor begins. I am convinced that my baby does not want me. That she somehow knows I will never love her as I had loved her older sister, with the blind abandon of someone who believes they will never get hurt—and that she will resent me for it for the rest of her life.
I have a new doctor, a kinder one. He assures me that all of this is normal. “Your first pregnancy was very sad,” he says. “But this one won’t be. This one is healthy and strong.”
I know he is wrong when, one morning in week ten, I wake up before sunrise. My lower belly hurts like a motherfucker.
I wait until 7:30 a.m. for the doctor to arrive at his office. “Liza, I am so, so sorry,” he says, the worst words in the world. The ultrasound image resembles the thick, colorless soup of a plastic ocean more than a tiny person who once had eyes, a head, a beating heart. Cruelly, I am still sick to my stomach, my body refusing to accept that what is gone, is gone.
He then says the second-worst words. “You need to seek emergency care immediately.”
The emergency room is a loud sea of masked, coughing patients clamoring for their turn. This is peak-Covid, and my husband is not allowed in. At some point, someone gets me onto a gurney. Hours later, an elderly woman doctor with sympathetic eyes notices that no one has brought me a hospital gown, and ushers me into a changing room. Other than that, I am alone until late evening, a barrier island, the reality of the pandemic swirling around me. Back on the mainland, the “new normal” goes on, my colleagues chatting in Zoom meetings, their children safe and dry.
Collecting microplastics is a thankless, Sisyphean task. After two hours, there is no visible change to the landscape. The tide will bring more plastic tomorrow.
Beach cleanups like this one are not a real solution, Nadia explains. They are, instead, a tool to introduce the issue to volunteers, to show people how prevalent microplastics really are. “Until we turn off the plastic tap, we cannot solve this issue through cleanups,” she says. She likens it to filling a bathtub with water and walking away, then allowing the tap to run as you try to mop up the spill.
Not long after my emergency surgery, I am diagnosed with several types of autoimmune thyroid disease, a class of illnesses with known environmental triggers, such as flame retardants, pesticides, and PCBs, the latter of which is found in and ingested through plastics. In an interview in The Sun, Dr. Shanna Swan, one of the world’s leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists, explains, “pregnancy failures of various kinds have been linked to endocrine-disrupting chemicals.” These chemicals are in the water, the soil, the air we breathe, the products we use every day. In The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O’Rourke’s astoundingly well-researched book on autoimmune diseases, she asserts that although there are genetic predispositions, “it is also clear that environment plays a major role: cases of autoimmune disease are rising at almost epidemic rates in affluent Western countries. Indeed, studies of twins suggest that autoimmune diseases are one third genetic and two thirds environmental.”
Plastics and other environmental contaminants are only one possible explanation for my diagnoses, but it was the one I latched onto. I latched on because I needed an answer, and this one made the most sense. I latched on because I needed to feel like there was something I could do about it, the way all of us volunteers needed to feel like there was something we could do in the face of multiplying environmental catastrophes, that we could do our small part for one Sunday afternoon on the beach. I latched on because a diagnosis, and a clear external cause, meant I was not at fault, that my own grief-rage was not at fault.
Other people would find other reasons. O’Rourke discusses illness as metaphor; she observes when dialoguing with other patients, “Poor personal choices, they all believed, had led them to this forcing ground of autoimmunity, a period of reconsidering who they are and what they have become.” People blame themselves, they blame others, as if illness is a sign of moral weakness or evidence of sin. There’s a long history of this in Western tradition, which O’Rourke details at length. “We turn poorly understood illnesses into symbols of other things,” she writes. It’s why people try to explain away my grief and loss with comments on age, diet, lifestyle. That some bodies just don’t make babies. Even people who are fully aware of my diagnoses have said these things.
I can choose to be defensive: I was well under thirty-five when I lost my pregnancies. I am an avid walker and runner. I am on an elimination diet. I am not on any medications. I don’t smoke or drink or use drugs. I can repeat these things ad nauseam. But it won’t matter. People will always find a way to blame you. They will find a way to rationalize why it happened to you and not them. This is how they distance themselves.
Invisible Kingdom, indeed. I live in my own invisible kingdom, unknown to all but a very select, unlucky few. Like Demeter, high on Mount Olympus, in her kingdom of the gods. I think of her whenever I hear of another so-called “natural” disaster, of which there seem to be more and more each year. With every hurricane pouring down on unprepared cities, every putrid orange sky, every chemical wave destroying ecosystems that took thousands of years to build, I imagine her anger roiling like the ocean itself, swelling with each season her daughter does not come home. I know this grief-rage all too well.
Eliminating plastic from one’s life is nearly as impossible as removing it from the beach. As Erika points out, this is especially difficult to do with children. Plastic-free items are too often not affordable or accessible to most. Also, life is busy. Seeking out plastic-free or reusable products can be difficult and time-consuming, more so when you’re raising a family. Often, despite our best intentions, we will make the more convenient choice.
Is it a paradox, then, that children are the ones who motivate people like Erika and Nadia, people who inspire countless others to care about the environment, people who care so, so much?
Erika says her greatest motivators have been her daughter and two younger sisters. She also works with teenagers at Newark City Hall on an environmental justice program. “Kids were inspired to do more within their communities,” she says, to “make a connection and want to do something about it.”
As for Nadia, she cites “eco-anxiety,” saying, “I can’t sit back and let things go the way that they are.” While the environmental crisis makes many people feel hopeless, she insists it’s not too late, though we are running out of time to change course. She, too, wants to eventually raise children in a world where life and nature aren’t destroyed.
So many people instinctively think of their children, or the idea of children, when taking care of their environment. I am coming to terms with the fact that, in this sense, my future on this earth is no longer assumed. But then, the same is true for all of us. In the face of environmental destruction, no one’s future is guaranteed. Why else, then, do we do this, if not for our collective, no-longer-implied hereafter? Why do I keep coming back to the beach, in the rain, my clothes dirty, household chores left undone? When there is no visible change to the landscape, when I can’t even say I’m doing it for my children? Why get up early to clean the beach on a rainy Sunday morning while the plastic tap continues to run? Who, exactly, are we doing this for?
If environmental contaminants are the cause of my illness, this means I have a place to channel my grief-rage. Rather than feeling helpless against it, I can do something. Unlike Demeter, I cannot move the seasons, cannot strip the trees bare, scorch the grasslands, or freeze the crops. Instead, there is caretaking. Because there will be no diapers to change or fevers to quell, I pull plastics out of the earth. Because there will be no body to bury, I bury dune grass in the sand. Because there will be no funeral, this slog along the shoreline is my procession. Because I cannot be with my daughter in the invisible kingdom of the dead, this beach is where I need to be.
We are driven not only by the future but also by the past. Nadia describes being drawn to the ocean from a very young age, always wanting to be in the water. Having spent most of her life in this area, she grew up surfing, fishing, and clamming. She remembers one particular day, surfing with friends—perfect, picturesque. They even saw dolphins, as we do every so often at the Jersey Shore. And then, she recalls, “as the tide began to come in, so did everyone’s trash.” From then on, she recalls, “It felt like plastic was literally following me.” In some ways, past memories can be as motivating as looking ahead to the future.
I wonder if some form of intrinsic motivation plays a role in all of this. After all, we evolved on land. We are supposed to want to take care of it; we’re wired that way. Not long after losing my second pregnancy, I am called self-centered, for not wanting to lead a group activity at the elementary school where I had thought my daughter would be a student one day, by someone who is supposed to love me. This is infuriating, as it should be. Of course taking care of the earth and sea is just as much a part of tending to the community as taking care of children. Of course one is no more self-centered than the other. But maybe this person has a point. Maybe we are more self-involved than we thought, and we are doing this not for the hereafter but for the here and now, or for an imagined or remembered past. Maybe there is something self-involved about all of this, the empty gesture of cleaning the beach knowing the same trash will reappear in the same place the next day, the gesture of running frantically out of the flooded house carrying buckets of water while the tap continues to run, just to prove a point.
Maybe tending to the earth is an end in itself. For my part, I find there is a meditative quality to these walks on the beach, picking up things that don’t belong, though it’s difficult to discern, these days, what belongs to the earth from what doesn’t. There is comfort in pushing my trowel into the sand time and time again, combing through with my fingers to see what will come back up.
It is becoming more and more probable that motherhood will look very different for me than for most. I am not like Demeter, whose love and grief for her daughter could move the earth—could bring her back to life, if only for half of the year. My grief-rage will end when I die, but hers will continue forever. Persephone, too, will rage and grieve forever, trapped in a life she did not want, consigned to the underworld for all but a few months of the year, forced to marry her rapist. I shudder to think of my own daughters down there. I prefer not to think they’re living in some underworld without me, their watery bodies floating down a river of dead souls. I prefer to believe they are finite, like I am, like we all are.
If other bodies were like mine, there would be no illusion of an implied future. But it is precisely because the future is not guaranteed—neither our own nor that of our descendants—that we do this in the first place. We don’t know how long we will remain on this earth, or who or what we will leave behind. What we do know is the earth we have now, and the very real and present dangers that are already here, regardless of what might come later.
Motherhood is as connected to our grief-rage over what is past as it is connected to our hopes for the future that bring us to the beaches time and time again. It is the idea that there is something worth clinging to, even when the damages cannot be undone. Maybe Demeter speaks not only for the mothers whose children are lost to them, but for all the mothers, and for all of us collectively grieving and raging across the planet, hoping to channel our grief-rage into something productive rather than destructive, trying to restore these shores and waterways, if not fully back to what they once were, then to a place where something, at least, can grow again.
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Rumpus original art by Dolan Morgan
