The Atlantic: First My Mother Died. Then My Home Got Hit by a Tornado

[Dennis Donovan]

The Atlantic - (archived: https://archive.ph/HqhbN ) First My Mother Died. Then My Home Got Hit by a Tornado.

My street got leveled by 150-mph winds. Why do I feel somehow at ease?

By Ian Bogost
May 22, 2025, 10:38 AM ET

The wind was whipping up, but I ignored it. I was at my house in St. Louis, on the phone with the rabbi who would officiate my mother’s funeral, a thousand miles away. We spoke about her life, her family, the service, and other matters both material and spiritual. Mom had been sick for well over a year, but she started declining rapidly in December. Late last month, she was admitted to hospice. Along with her nurses and aides, I helped tend to her frail form as she slowly ceased to be able to eat, to speak, to breathe. Finally relieved of pain, she allowed comfort to overtake her.

When the emergency alert blared on my smartphone, I told the rabbi that we should probably finish talking later. My wife had just raced down the stairs to the basement, calling for me to follow. I did, but also I lingered: The sky was so dark. I had never seen a storm like this before. Later I’d realize that’s because I had never been inside an EF-3 category tornado with 150-plus mph winds, like the one that tore across metro St. Louis on Friday. But on my way to the basement, I didn’t know that. I took in the surreal, terrifying sight of a full-grown shingle oak scraping the ground. The storm seemed gentle to me in that moment, as it laid the tree to rest inside my yard. I saw it cradling the oak to its now-certain end, as I had done for my mother the week before.

My feeling of repose was gone by the time I reached the basement and heard windows shattering. Glass is a human invention, and its breakage is inevitably associated with human violence or a human accident: a burglar’s incursion, a child’s wayward baseball, a pogrom. I knew in my head that nature, too, can impose itself on the built environment, but still I was unprepared for the sensation of its happening.
As a midwesterner in the age of anthropogenic climate change, I have spent many hours in the basement waiting out tornado warnings.

Normally, it’s boring to be down there in storm isolation, even though we all bring phones and tablets, and the power usually stays on. We might express frustration at the fact that official warnings rarely come to much. The tornadoes never pass through here, we say. They always move west of the city. As of Friday morning, I understood that tornadoes were unlikely; baseball-size hail was the greater concern. But when a tornado has begun to whirl around your home, a sense of smallness overtakes you. Who are you to think you know how any of this works?

In the basement, my wife held my daughter tightly, begging me to stop wandering toward the walls and windows. I didn’t do so out of bravado or even apprehension. I was enrapt. To watch the storm was to be a party to a power much greater than myself. As one gets older and more experienced, novel encounters become more precious. This one, embossed by the force of the powerful mph winds, was new to me. The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that appreciating the sublime requires the safety of distance. Now I wondered whether he was wrong. Perhaps the sublime has to be confronted viscerally to be made complete, just like one cannot truly appreciate vertigo by watching roller coasters from the ground.

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