Radio Silence

To describe tragic events we use words like “unspeakable”, “unimaginable”, “unbelievable.” The truth is that – if you’re like me – you keep yourself awake at night imagining all sorts of horrors, as if imagining them might mean that somehow one can prepare for them. Or that by thinking them, somehow they will never come to be. But they do. And we can’t prepare for them.

Setting off with Deb in front.

Deb Todd Wheeler, her husband Andrew and son Eli have lived through such events, involving death and disease afflicting loved ones. The details aren’t mine to tell, you are welcome to go to Deb’s website debtoddwheeler.org to learn more. During our walk today she said “2017, that was the beginning of the Dark Thread.” From 2017 – 2020 Deb and her family received a series of blows that individually would have been knock-outs for many. Each member of the family has dealt with these experiences in their own ways. Deb, as a multi-media artist, has created a shared experience from it.

Deb’s masterpiece of site-specific, geo-located art is called Radio Silence, also the title of one her haunting songs that accompany a participant on this journey. From her website, she writes “RADIO SILENCE is a guided, geo-located walk through the trails of the Lost Pond. It is also a soundtrack, a book, and a site of reclamation.” I experienced RADIO SILENCE today, with Deb, and it was transformational.

Here’s what happens. You schedule a walk with Deb through her website. Then you download an app to your phone. You bring your earbuds and your phone with you and meet Deb at the trailhead in Newton, Massachusetts. Then the two of you go for a walk through the woods and around Lost Pond. Along the way, triggered by where you are in your walk, a sequence of songs written by Deb and performed by her and her friends is played. You stop and talk. Maybe you cry. It takes about 90 minutes.

I have known Deb’s husband Andrew since 1977. He and I went to high school together. I was at their wedding. In 1996 the four of us went to Scotland together to produce a play I had written at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Also on the trip was my future wife, Susan. Susan and I and Andrew and Deb all had kids about the same time. For years we formed a fun combined family on vacations and visits to our relatives in Massachusetts. Their oldest, Lucas, and my oldest, Griffen, were almost exactly the same age. I say “were” because Lucas is dead. He died on my birthday in 2017.

Since that day I have peeked into Andrew and Deb’s lives. I went to Lucas’s memorial. But separated by distance and overwhelmed by my own challenges, we drifted apart. From her social media, I could see that she was up to something. And in the way of many arrogant artists, I said “Oh yeah. I see what she’s doing.” But I did not. The other awful truth is that I was afraid of them – these dear friends. Afraid of being in the blasted presence of survivors, stumbling through wreckage, not having the words, afraid of what I might feel. Of the many awful aspects of grief perhaps this one needs more notice: that survivors can be made to feel like lepers, as if proximity to them will infect you with their bad luck. I see now that it’s because I love them so much that my fear was so paralyzing.

Also – there is nothing to say.

But there are things to do. And this is one of the miracles of RADIO SILENCE. It is a walk: gently up and down, in and out of woods, over occasionally rough terrain, to a dock by a pond, and then back to where you started. In one of her songs Deb sings “I can’t go under it, I can’t go around it, I can only go through it.” RADIO SILENCE is an embodiment of going through it – whatever “it” is to you.

Deb makes sure participants understand that the piece can mean anything to anyone. While its origin is as a journey through grief, that grief can be about lots of things: your youth, the dream you are letting go of, a missed opportunity, a pet, a memory. And it doesn’t have to be about grief either. Going on the walk, we are looking, smelling, hearing, feeling the earth under us and sky above us. An exquisitely successful experience of RADIO SILENCE  might be: “Life is a journey, and we are on it together.”

I, on the other hand, started crying the moment Deb and I started walking as I told her why I was so determined to take this walk with her on a grey day under threatening skies, hovering around 42 degrees. 2023 was tough for me, and although Deb already knew most of the details, I recounted the headlines. But why, suddenly, the tears? Deb handed me a small pack of tissues and we turned into the woods as Gone, the first song on the soundtrack began. Deb asks that during the songs we don’t talk – just keep moving. I noticed that during the songs she walked about five or ten feet ahead of me, protecting our unique experiences.

Deb at Lucas’s shrine.

I knew that midway through the walk we would come to Lucas’s shrine – the gorgeous and spontaneously created teepee assembled just days after his memorial by family and friends. Visitors are invited to decorate it, and I brought an offering: a small stuffed bear, which I hugged to myself as I leaned against a nearby tree, crying. I didn’t know Lucas well, but part of why I wanted to come today was that I knew that I had never really felt the shock of his loss. I had never really mourned him.

I told Deb that I had brought a bear for two reasons. I knew that the song that accompanied arriving at the shrine is called Bear Hunt, and also because I have adopted the bear as my spirit guide, “patronus”, totem. Then Deb told me something I never knew.  “Bear. That’s what Andrew called Lucas. I never knew why.” Just then, an enormous St. Bernard came bounding through the woods having left his human shouting at him from the trail. He was fixated on the shrine, then on me. “Careful! He may give you a hug!” his human shouted. And sure enough he ran up to me and held me between his arms smiling and panting, wagging his tail furiously, nearly as tall as I am. “What’s his name?” I asked her as she struggled to get his leash back on. “Grizzly,” she said.

Deb and I talked about meaning. “We are meaning-making machines,” I said, and shared a point of view I heard once that these tragic events that befall us have no meaning. None. They are simply random acts in the cosmos. She agreed: if an event is said to have meaning, we are the ones that make the meaning. “That’s what art is, after all,” she said.

So here’s the meaning I create: that “bear” was today a thunderbolt of spiritual connection across time and space, and that Lucas hugged me through that beautiful big dog named Grizzly. Go ahead. Roll your eyes. I don’t care. Spirituality is a choice we make, not a fact we observe. It’s more opinion than evidence. How do you want to live your life? What meaning will you apply to the events of it, terrible and glorious? I prefer my invented meaning to the yawning void.

The Lost Pond conservation area is “reclaimed” wilderness, portions of it built by backhoes and earth movers over formally toxic landfill. Just after Lucas died, Deb and her family observed the clearing of the old forest, and the planting of the new one. “So these trees, these saplings, grasses and plants are exactly as old as Lucas is dead.”

Make some meaning – go ahead.

We got to the pond, a small body of black water enclosed by reeds, forest and the other side, a rolling hill that arrives right at the edge. In the pond today were two Mallards, one male and one female, a mated pair. I thought about Andrew and Deb and how for years I have envied their love, devotion and partnership, especially after my divorce, wishing that I could finally, finally end my string of failed relationships and settle on a pond with my mate. But I also imagine the nearly unbearable pain they went through, the trauma that almost broke them, the mutual emptiness they must have endured. A wise person once told me: if you and a bunch of people put your pile of troubles on a table in front of you, after looking around at the others, I guarantee you you will take yours back.

RADIO SILENCE was born not only from Lucas’s death, but also the death of Deb’s brother Rob a little less than a year later. Sitting on the dock by the pond, Deb told me about Rob. He was an astonishing artist, like his sister, and I wish I had known him. I stared at the still, dark pond and reflected on a way Deb thinks about her life now: before, and after. Then we got up and we kept moving.

We wound around the transfer station, and then we were back on the road, headed to our starting place. Eventually we arrived back at our cars and I was faced with the task of speaking something I didn’t have the words for: what RADIO SILENCE had meant to me. What I ended up saying was something like this:

Deb, I am so moved by the way you have taken these events in your life and turned them into an experience of connecting, feeling and moving through the world. To me the miracle of RADIO SILENCE is not only in your creativity – which is extraordinary – but also the way your community of family, friends and fellow artists supported you, followed you, celebrated with you. Perhaps this is the lighthouse of RADIO SILENCE - shining: don’t stay still, move; don’t be alone, connect; don’t be silent, speak, sing, weep, mourn, rage and wail. The earth, the trees and rocks, and the people you are with will give you the space you need, and hold you when you fall down. Yes, there is nothing to say – but say it anyway.  

It’s not unimaginable. Imagine it.

It's not unspeakable. Speak it.

It’s not unbelievable. Believe it.

And then connect . . . and keep moving.

***

Please visit www.debtoddwheeler.org for more information about RADIO SILENCE, her other artistic projects, and her community. Also – please buy the gorgeous Book of Walks, the companion to RADIO SILENCE, chronicling a series of walks around Lost Pond and the history of this project. All proceeds go to The Children’s Room in Arlington, MA.