On Field Work, Necromancy, and Loving Someone Through the Dark
- Erin Vander Stelt
- Apr 20
- 4 min read
On Wednesday, I wandered through a Missouri pasture toward a stream, hat flying off in the wind and Munsell pages escaping their binder, and suddenly dozens of dime-sized toads began hopping around my boots.
I hadn't expected that. I'd expected a trampled cow trail, compacted soil, maybe a degraded drainage ditch. Instead I found spring beauty blooming brave and paper-thin in the spring sunshine. Willows pushed out their first tiny leaves. A water snake threaded silently through a pond at the base of a concrete pipeline corridor. The trees weren't awake yet, but the sedges stretched their long leaves into the warm air.
Everything was reaching.
Dust filmed my skin. Cows lowed gently to the south. I stood there in the middle of it, muddy and windswept, and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
I've been holding a lot.
In the past few months, I’ve sat in a nurse's office with someone else’s suicide note in my hand, the pen smudging from the sweat on my palm. I held my child while she wasn't quite all there, and I told her it was going to be okay, that she didn't have to carry it alone. And then I left her in a psychiatric ward. Shoes surrendered. Room bare. I left my baby where I couldn't follow, where I couldn't stay, and I drove home.
I wept the whole way. Ugly, broken, gasping sobs. Because I am meant to hold her. I am meant to be enough. And I needed more help than I could give.
A few months later, I learned that my youngest's brain works differently than I'd understood, that the storms and the struggles had names. There are finally words for what we've been swimming through (and sometimes drowning in) for years.
This season, I have carried my three children in my chest, tight and aching with fear. I've carried them in my shoulders, leaving me with six weeks of a frozen left shoulder while I kept showing up. In my jaw, clenched against the things I couldn't say until my head ached and my vision swam. In my hands, trembling, until Bryce took them and told me we could do this again. Together.
Here's the thing about Ren'wyn that I can’t stop thinking about.
She’s a botanist and a necromancer. She tends living things with mud-covered, wondering hands, tucks herbs in her pack, wades through cattails, and gets on her knees for a plant she's never seen before.
And she holds the dead. She listens to them. She gives them dignity. She refuses to look away.
When I first gave her both of those things, I thought it was just magical world-building.
But it wasn't. It never really is.
Real healing, the kind that doesn't mean forgetting or dissociating, asks us to hold both life and death. There is death within us survivors: grief, trauma, the pictures of the future we had to let go of. And there is life within us: the part that still notices toads; still chases a floral scent across a field wondering is it the spicebush? the ginseng?; still feels something finally release at the sight of a brave green sedge in early spring.
Death and botany are not separate for Ren'wyn. They arrive from the same place in her: wounded and gentle, resilient and sad, hopeful and awestruck, all at once.
They are not separate for me either.
A field botanist catalogs what's there. The dying and the thriving alike. The invasive and the rare. There is no judgment, just presence, attention, documentation. This is what is here. This is what is true.
I've been trying to bring that same gaze to my own life.
What is here: three kids who are fighting hard for themselves. A marriage held together with a man who takes my trembling hands. A shoulder that's finally healing. A blog I keep returning to, even after long silences, because I need to put the inside of me somewhere people can find it.
What is also here: exhaustion that has no bottom. A grief that doesn't resolve. The false voices of cPTSD whispering that I am too much, not enough, a burden. Days when I believe them.
What I say back: I am good just for being me. I am fighting for something better through the messy, slow, exhausting process of healing myself and helping my children. I am good at my core, even in the hard season, even when no one can see me growing.
When I crouched in that Missouri pasture with the toads, I wasn't thinking about any of this. I was just there. No makeup, no performance, just Erin and the world, dirty and alive and full of things I hadn't expected to find.
That's what field work gives me. It reminds me that adventure lives even in a cow pasture. That life is thriving in every corridor and drainage ditch and neglected hedgerow, if you get close enough to look.
That the world keeps greening up, whether we're watching or not.
I keep coming back to the field, to the page, to my children because there is so much inside me that needs somewhere to go. Because I need the people who feel like too much, people who feel like burdens, to see someone else struggling and continuing to live. I want them to know they can survive too.
And I want to know I'm not alone either.
If you are loving someone through their darkness right now, if you are the one holding the note, making the drive, surrendering the shoes, I want you to know something.
Nothing takes away the day-to-day anxiety. No amount of positive thinking makes it lighter. Sometimes it's just hard, and it's just too much, and you need to scream in the car or weep unexpectedly over Chinese takeout. That is allowed.
You are not failing because you can't fix it. You were never meant to fix it alone.
This is a season. The next one will come.
Hold on. Keep going. Reach for help when you can find it.
And if Ren'wyn were here, I think she'd say what I'm slowly learning to believe:
My love is endless. But my existence is finite. Both of those things are true, and neither one cancels the other out.
Keep growing your roots.
Even underground. Even unseen.
The bloom will come.
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