Learning How to Mourn a Burning World
Updated: Feb 23
Written by Sophie Reyer, Author
Sophie Anna Reyer is an Austrian author of multiple theater pieces and publications. She was born in Vienna, Austria. Reyer discovered her various profound talents in the arts at a young age as a child prodigy.
I remember asking, “Why does the sky look like this?” I was eight. It was summer. The sun hung low and swollen, copper-colored, too heavy to lift itself back into blue. The air smelled wrong, sharp, metallic, as if something electrical had snapped. My throat burned when I breathed. “It’s just heat,” they said. “Just smoke from far away.”
Far away. As if distance could soften disaster. I pressed my face against the window and watched ash drift down like lazy snowflakes. I didn’t understand then. I still don’t. How can something be alive, forests breathing, rivers moving, seasons arriving on time, and then suddenly not? How the world can be there one moment and altered beyond recognition the next.
Whenever I think about climate collapse, I am always a child again, standing at the window, sensing that something vast had cracked open, even if no one around me yet had words for it.
Later, I learned the numbers, parts per million, degrees Celsius, deadlines already passed. But numbers don’t smell like smoke. They don’t itch in your lungs. They don’t make birds disappear from places where birds once sang every morning. And still, we cling to them, as if quantification could contain loss. I wonder if we rely on data because grief feels too large, because mourning an entire planet seems obscene, excessive, almost hysterical.
You are allowed to grieve a person, perhaps a species, maybe a single forest. But to grieve systems? Oceans? Futures? That feels inappropriate. Unproductive. And yet the crack opens anyway.
A few years ago, I met a woman from an island nation that will likely disappear within my lifetime. She said it casually, the way one might mention an upcoming move. “We will have to leave,” she said. “Our ancestors will stay.” I didn’t know how to respond. There are no polite phrases for submerged graves.
Later that night, I watched tourists dance barefoot on the same beach, phones glowing in their hands, filming the sunset as if sunsets were guaranteed, as if land were permanent, as if memory could float. From mourning to tourism, again, a short distance. Too short.
We are told to stay optimistic. Hope is marketed as a moral obligation. Recycle. Innovate. Stay positive. Buy the right products. Say the right slogans. But where is the space for despair? Where do we put the rage that comes from watching governments calculate acceptable losses, from hearing that entire regions are “collateral damage” in the pursuit of economic growth?
Why must grief always be privatized, softened, transformed into motivational posters and greenwashed optimism? Perhaps because grief is dangerous. Grief interrupts productivity. Grief refuses timelines. Grief does not promise solutions.
“Grief is political.” Judith Butler’s words echo here, too, even if the context shifts. Whose losses are acknowledged? Whose futures are considered grievable? A flooded European city becomes a tragedy. A drought devastating African farmers becomes a statistic. Certain landscapes are mourned. Others are expected to vanish quietly. Life that is not framed as worth saving becomes expendable. Life that is not mourned is erased twice.
And so, climate collapse is not only an ecological crisis, it is a crisis of recognition, a crisis of whose pain counts.
We perform rituals anyway, climate summits with choreographed apologies, minutes of silence followed by business as usual, symbolic tree plantings while entire ecosystems are auctioned off. Like funerals, these performances help us pretend that closure is possible, that if the right words are spoken, the loss will be contained. But the crack remains. It spreads through generations, through bodies that carry anxiety they cannot name, through children who learn early that the future is negotiable.
Today, the air is unusually warm for this time of year. The seasons have lost their discipline. I sit by the window and practice mourning. I mourn glaciers I have never seen, languages that will disappear with the land that held them, animals whose names will only exist in children’s books labeled extinct.
I mourn the arrogance that taught us mastery instead of belonging, the slowness of our response, the speed of our denial. I do not need optimism right now. I need honesty. I listen to the low hum of the city, to the sound of systems still running, still consuming, still insisting on normalcy, and I allow myself to feel what that costs. The crack does not close. But maybe, if we dare to sit with it, without entertainment, without distraction, it can teach us something. Not how to fix everything, but how to care, finally, for what is still here.
Read more from Sophie Reyer
Sophie Reyer, Author
Sophie Anna Reyer is an Austrian author of multiple theater pieces and publications. She was born in Vienna, Austria. Reyer discovered her various profound talents in the arts at a young age as a child prodigy. She is a writer of theater pieces (S. Fischer) and novels (Emons) and was shortlisted for the Austrian Book Award in 2019 and 2021.
