Susan J. Tweit, a plant biologist and award-winning author, has rehabbed urban streams, removed invasive weeds in Yellowstone, re-wilded blighted industrial properties, and designed bird-friendly landscapes in parks and gardens. When she and her fellow naturalist husband learned he had terminal brain cancer, they were able to turn to their deep understanding of the earth and all its creatures to find the courage and grace they would need to go forward. We were thrilled to sit down with Susan and learn about Bless the Birds, her beautiful memoir documenting a journey of love, life, and death.
Bless the Birds is about so many things. How would you describe it for our readers?
Bless the Birds is a love story, a tale of how we humans can rise to be our best selves when the world goes crazy on us, whether because of a pandemic like COVID-19, deadly racism, or the crisis of our planet burning. It’s about finding a way to act with love when the worst happens and learning to appreciate our imperfect selves, along with the miracle of life on this numinous earth. It’s also a journey story chronicling the sometimes scary, sometimes funny times in the 4,000-mile road trip along the Pacific Coast my late husband and I took as our belated honeymoon when we learned Richard’s cancer was terminal. That trip was our chance to reaffirm our vow to live with love and kindness no matter what came our way. And we did!
Tell us about the birds in the title.
The birds in the title are both illusory and real. The illusory birds appeared when my late husband Richard’s brain misfired, taking our marriage of nearly 30 years down a terrifying and unimagined path into terminal brain cancer. We were heading for a two-week artist-writer residency at a remote cabin in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, when he suddenly asked, “What’s with all the birds?”
I looked around with eyes trained by growing up in a birdwatching family and saw no birds. As Richard described the thousands of avian forms he could see—tiny birds perched on each blade of grass along the roadside, birds wing-to-wing crowding the barbwire fences and utility wires, giant birds on the rims of distant mesas—my skin crawled. His birds were not real. They were, we learned later, hallucinations produced by a deadly tumor growing in his brain. Those birds sent us to the hospital in time for him to be diagnosed and for us to have more than two years of living before he died. If we had not heeded them, the traumatic brain-swelling that caused the avian hallucinations would have killed him within days. So I bless the birds for giving us time to learn how to live with the end of his life. Richard also watched birds, so the visions were very appropriate to who he was.
You have described your book as being both personal and political. How so?
“The personal is political” is a feminist slogan from the 1970s. Meaning that how we live our lives affects the culture and society we are part of. The personal part of Bless the Birds is the time of dying it chronicles, both Richard’s death from brain cancer and my mother’s death from rheumatoid arthritis. I was the primary caregiver for both of them through their deaths in the same year. “Midwifing” two good deaths taught me a lot about how to live through our endings with as much grace and compassion as possible.
The political part is a re-envisioning of how we handle natural death, of learning how to, if not embrace it, at least stop fighting or denying it. We will all die. Death is part of the cycle of life, and learning how to live with it with some modicum of grace will help us learn to live with the other massive changes shaping our world and our lives, from COVID-19 and our tardy reckoning of racism to the climate crisis that will shape our time on this planet for many generations. If we can rise to be our best selves and live generously in the worst times, the outcome will be better for all of us.
What is terraphilia and why is it important to your story?
Terraphilia is a word Richard and I invented to describe what motivated our work, his sculpting, and my writing and land restoration. It is an intrinsic affection for and connection to the earth and its community of lives. As I wrote, “Without this bond, we are lonely, lacking, no longer whole.” Terraphilia framed our approach to Richard’s brain cancer and our whole lives: acknowledging and drawing on our affiliation for the rest of the living world kept us grounded in the hardest moments and inspired us in the best. Making time to get regular doses of “vitamin N”—time spent outside in the wildest settings possible—brought us the physical and emotional benefits that helped us be our best selves through the worst of the journey.
Richard was a sculptor. When he looked at a rock, he saw its potential to become a work of art. Did this deeper seeing stay with him even though the operations and procedures?
Yes. He filled a notebook with sketches and ideas for abstract sculptures using native (local) rocks through his time with brain cancer. I still have the notebook; sadly, life didn’t allow him time to finish that work.
Why was it important for you and Richard to take “the Big Trip”?
The 4,000-mile road trip that frames the narrative in Bless the Birds was both our long-delayed honeymoon and a raised middle finger at the fate that gave my always robustly healthy husband a shortened life span. Richard and I married in graduate school when we had neither time nor money to take a honeymoon, and then were preoccupied with starting our careers and raising Molly, his young daughter, so it wasn’t until Richard was given a terminal diagnosis that we “found” time to celebrate our nearly 29 years of marriage. That trip represented freedom—time away from brain cancer treatment, which by then had taken over our lives—and an honoring of the love we had nurtured through the years and moves and miles. We were determined to live all of his days, however many we had left.
Caretaking is an awesome responsibility. How did you learn the essentials?
I’m female. I’ve been caregiving my whole life, from carefully digging up and transplanting wildflowers from vacant lots scheduled for bulldozing to tending stray dogs to midwifing my loved ones’ deaths. It’s all part of loving this life with a whole heart, the darkness, and the light
So much of your book is about “holding gratitude for what you are losing in the same heart space with grief and anger.” How difficult is it to stay on that path?
Very. But it gets less difficult with practice. It’s a mind exercise really, and spending time each day finding space to love oneself helps enormously with learning to embrace the contradictions—the yin and yang—that are inherent in life.
You chose to end each chapter with a haiku. Can you talk about the place of haiku in your life and in Bless the Birds in particular?
I started writing haiku in my head about 20 years ago as a way to remember bits of beauty or interest I spotted on long road trips. I could capture the moment in that brief three-line form when I couldn’t get Richard, my lead-footed-love, to slow and stop. In time, the haiku became a daily practice of awareness and my offering to others on social media. As I wrote in Bless the Birds, “I turn to poetry the way I suppose some turn to prayer, as a way to express wonder and gratitude, explore what I do not understand, and comfort myself when the vastness of existence becomes overwhelming.”
You’ve written numerous books, many of them award-winning. Can you give us an overview of your body of work?
I’m a botanist who writes about humans’ place in the living world as a way to reconnect us with our relatives large and small—the community of species who make this earth home for all of us. I’ve written memoir, narrative nonfiction about nature and science, gardening, travel, and kids books. All are hymns of love to this numinous green planet and we who share it.
You’re about to launch a podcast. What will it be about?
The title says it all: “Living with Love — Cultivating Earth Sense.” It’s a series of conversations with other authors on themes in our work that illuminate how we can be our best in these times, and how the crises of our age, whether personal or global, can shift our understanding of what it means to be human. We’ll explore topics of kinship with other species, living with grief in times of extinction, the poetics of wonder, walking meditation, and birdwatching. We’ll laugh, love, cry, and learn together.
How can readers learn more about you and your work?
Visit my website: susanjtweit.com. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. And come to my book launch May 6th, a Zoom conversation on living on the edge of death with acclaimed memoirist Kati Standefer, author of Lightning Flowers, a story of the environmental and human cost of advanced medical technology. The event is hosted by Collected Works Bookstore of Santa Fe and will start at 6 pm MT, and the recording will be available afterward.
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