Love, Legacy, & Ecological Disaster: A Look at Jessica Gigot’s “To the Class of 2033”

The year is 2026. “I tried to love the world a whole fucking lot,” Jessica Gigot writes in “To the Class of 2033.” I honestly don’t know if I have. Sometimes it is too much and enough to love my children, my wife, my three cats, one dog. If the world were to end, I wouldn’t want it to go slow, glacier by glacier, forest by forest, over decades. I’d want it suddenly and all at once. All of us together.  

The year is 2020. “Your little face in a little box on a little screen.” Schools shut down. Workers went remote. All those Zoom meetings and readings that at first felt novel. I was worried about my aging parents; they already seemed so small and frail now. My wife, my kids, inside all day. During this time, I remember feeling a kind of terrible joy. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, together. Every break, every bedtime, every morning. My world had shrunk to the size of our townhome. This was a world I could love “a whole fucking lot.” 

The year is 1990. Captain Planet was in syndication. Where I lived, residential recycling was just starting though most people there probably “never believed those predictions” about ecological disaster. I don’t know what my dad believed but he did it regardless, his sense of responsibility buried under a layer of annoyance. I didn’t feel any sense of ecological disaster and hence, didn’t feel a diffusion of responsibility. Hole in the ozone. Oil spills. It felt like helping to cut every six pack plastic ring, crush every aluminum can. The feel of the can collapsing, the sound of the scissors snipping. Destroying something to save another thing. I think I believed in that. 

The year is 2023. A parent is simply trying to keep his child alive. He doesn’t care about the world. In fact, if it meant his son would survive, he would burn the “limitless” leaves. “Sulking still-birth Orcas, bumble bee bye byes”? The world was just word after useless word. But the stitches, the blood? That was everything. 

The year is 2033: “Let me weep and say I’m sorry. Oh the places you will never go. Creatures you will never see. Put on your shoes, grab your coat, comb your hair, we aren’t going anywhere.” 

The year is 2026. I still cut the plastic rings. I still crush aluminum cans. I don’t think it helps much. I do it anyway.  

The year is 2026. I am trying to love the world a whole fucking lot.