Flying over the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps, Lauren Markham found herself searching for a word to describe the experience. The ice was melting, and the damage irreversible. “I wanted a space to remember and mourn the vanishing future,” she writes in Immemorial, her new book-length essay on the climate crisis, memorials, and language.
When I read the book, I had already been thinking a lot about grief and where to place it. My father died in September 2024, but I had mourned him for years before. Like Markham, I asked myself: How do you mourn something you are in the process of losing?
A novice in climate literature, I eagerly took up Markham’s text. From within the confines of grief, my mind yearned to go wide, craving insights into the immeasurable problem of environmental catastrophe. Instead, I encountered uncertainty and exploration. In Markham’s approach to abstracted loss, I found salves for my own personal grief.
Immemorial takes a loving last look at the dying world. Shores of rotting fish. Extinct birdsong. Fading whistling languages. California fires. Sinking cities. Packed with luminous sentences and piercing examples, from floating islands under California’s Bay Bridge to miniature cities made of mud, the text becomes something you want to reach out and touch. The physicality of Markham’s language gives shape to that amorphous loss, a temporary holding place for ineffable feelings.
Though it is a slim volume, Immemorial catalogs a decades-long conversation between artists, writers, and designers about how to memorialize a declining planet. The book establishes a conduit between private and global grief. Markham sees her grandmother’s face in the pale bark of expiring Atlantic white cedars. In a Copenhagen plaza, people hug a hunk of melting glacier “like one might a dying friend.”
Markham maintains that how we remember is just as important as what we mourn. “Memorials are the battlegrounds of truth,” she writes. Drawing from Maurice Halbwachs’s philosophy of memory, she positions collective mourning as a form of critical thinking, a way to reinterpret both the past and the future. She warns against the violence of nostalgia—for a person, for a totalizing national identity, for racialized power—and its whitewashing of oppression. She asks us to think about what we are making as we grieve. As we memorialize, can we form new futures amid the ruins?
These questions gesture toward the tension between permanence and impermanence in memorial rituals. Markham describes a grove of cherry trees planted in East Potomac Park, in Washington, DC, that will eventually be consumed by rising sea levels, a memorial “designed to erase itself.” Elsewhere, she considers designer Maya Lin’s desire to provide both “a physical and psychic space for feeling” in her work on memorials. I think here of scattering ashes. When we hold the dust of a person whom we loved in our hands, they turn from material to immaterial, but their memory is not lost. Instead, it is briefly resurrected.
When words fail her, Markham documents her climate dread. On an idyllic trip to Mexico, she stumbles upon a shore of bloated fish. All she can do is take pictures. Later, she understands this need to document as “a gesture toward action—something to do rather than just something to feel.”
For Markham, cataloging alleviates the pain of disappearance. In the weeks following my father’s death, I relied on film, my own moving memorial. I zoomed in on his wonky smile. I laughed at his obnoxiously loud sniff. I remember the tiny moments that made him my father. In rewatching the film clips, I learned new things about him. I both regained intimacy and acquired insight, a temporary link between myself and my own lost world. “If grief is a condition of estrangement,” Markham writes, “ritual is an enactment of relation.” Can we perform ritual not to yearn for the past, but to cultivate new connections—with the environment, our communities, and ourselves? Through these gestures of remembering, we can reconfigure the possibilities of grief.
Publisher: Transit Books Page count: 136 Price: $17.95 Key quote: “Memorials are spatial storytelling about the past, but they are also mandates to face the future and attempt its ethical redesign.” Shelve next to: Lacy M. Johnson, Jessica J. Lee, Aisha Sabatini Sloan Unscientifically calculated reading time: 140 Olympic laps
