Disappeared

It is a different kind of loss, this disappearance: not death, opaque, finite, and inevitable.

The last two evenings we’ve been listening to a barn owl in the campground from dusk to dawn, a repeated one-note refrain: Who! Who! Who who! In the wee hours this morning, I finally heard a far-off reply. The pair called back and forth to each other, a solo in four notes over and over, one tenor voice, one alto. Then, for a spell, I only heard her. The hoots offered a counter tempo to the gentle percussion of the rain on our trailer’s metal roof. It was a contemplative tune: a steady beat beneath the call and response of two pitches. A music simple in tones but rich in rhythmic counterpoint. 

My mother-in-law crossed over three days ago, but it’s not her voice my ears seek. Cranky until the end, she was so eager to leave the nursing facility that was her final (not)home that she repeatedly threw her body out of her wheelchair, hoping to somehow kill herself — breaking skin and bones and vertebrae instead. I miss her mischief and mirth, but Bettie lived a long, full life, and I won’t ask for more.

It is the relative whose presence was taken unexpectedly, violently, cruelly, unjustly whom I seek in the night. A traffic stop, a fine paid late: minor infractions with major consequences, if your skin is dark or your name Spanish. Theirs is not a death but a removal: an act of intimidation perpetrated by a government — my government, a nation that was supposed to be of the people, not against the people — that is so frightening in its bullying authoritarianism, I cannot tell you my family member’s name, identity, or gender. We are that wary of causing them further harm. Besides, this is not about one person, or one family: It is about the tens of thousands — probably hundreds of thousands, by the time you read this article — whose lives have been plucked from our lives, most of them for no good reason — or no reason at all.

We have a migration problem in the United States, yes. But it is not about foreign-born residents taking jobs from citizens; except for a spike caused by COVID-19, the unemployment rate has been healthily below 10 percent since 2010. Many immigrants work jobs that Americans can’t or won’t: high-skilled technical professions or low-skilled farm and construction labor. Nor are people from other lands committing violent crimes any more than native-born Americans; in fact, crime rates are lower in immigrant communities, as numerous studies have shown. Right-wing media and politicians have whipped up a hysteria around a few tragic acts of violence to demonize millions of “bad hombres” and deflect public attention away from actual problems, such as grotesque income disparity and the drug industry’s criminal role in creating the recent fentanyl death and crime waves. The immigrant problem in America is about demagogues scapegoating the most powerless among us, rather than holding the most powerful accountable. 

Like my kin, the majority of people detained under the current regime have been convicted of no crime, violent or otherwise. Many of them, including my relative, violated no immigration laws. They were driving while brown to work on a day when foot soldiers had been ordered to fill the body count quota of a ruler seeking to demonize the vulnerable in order to make himself seem strong. Or their doors were kicked open by officers who maybe had the correct papers, or maybe did not: There is little rule of law in this madness. Or maybe they simply exercised their First Amendment right to free speech and asked for the killing of innocent people to stop. They are crowded in filthy jails with dangerous felons, fed gruel and sour milk, given scant medical care, and denied visitors, due process, and the basic civil liberties on which the United States of America was, once, founded. Or they are sent to an internment camp in El Salvador, a deadly place with apparently no return, simply because they have a tattoo. Three detainees died during the first month of Donald Trump’s second term, the first time that has happened in five years (i.e., the last time he was president). Under military dictatorships in Latin American countries in the 1970s, tens of thousands of dissidents were abducted, never to be seen again. “Los desaparicedos” they were called; the disappeared.

It is a different kind of loss, this disappearance: not death, opaque, finite, and inevitable. Instead, an inscrutable vanishing, an absence with no known end. It’s similar in nature to the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II, but perhaps even more inhumane in its division of families and brute force. It has been happening for years to people without the right papers, not to mention to Black men in America. But its scale is monstrous under this regime. The uncertainty is its own form of terrorism: Will they be gone forever or will some day they be reunited with their mate, their children, their home, their livelihood, their life. It’s a loss of humanity, of decency, of justice, of faith. These missing persons are holes punched in the moral fabric of civilized society, perforating it until it falls apart. 

We all know the famous 1946 poem about staying silent when they came for the Communists, the unionists, the Jews, until there was no one left “to speak out for me.” They already came for my family. We are fortunate that after two months and thousands in lawyer fees and bond payments, they are no longer detained. But — confused, traumatized, cell-shocked — they are not free.

Family meant everything to my mother-in-law. She started hers when she married at age 14 in Arkansas and soon thereafter began having kids. Bettie was American in every fiber of her brittle bones, and last summer, as she cursed her failing body, she also cussed the TV news. I’m relieved she died before she knew about this assault on her kin. I lie awake with her memory, listening to the music of the earth — the loved ones calling, the sky weeping — wondering who, who, indeed.

Evelyn McDonnell, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University. Her eighth book, “The World According to Joan Didion,” comes out in paperback in July. Her “Joan Didion’s California Odyssey” appeared in the winter 2023 issue of LMU Magazine. McDonnell’s essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.