Truth Demands Our Attention

MURDER, INTRIGUE, CORPORATE GREED, CLIMATE CRISIS — THEY’RE ALL IN THIS REMARKABLE NEW BOOK. YOU MIGHT WANT TO CHECK IT OUT

Author Reyes onstage at Climate event (Fran Johns photo)

Your young partner is found murdered, his bullet-riddled body abandoned in a Venezuelan cow-field? You could be forgiven for falling apart, clamoring for answers and possibly seeking revenge . . . But after a few years, somehow putting your life back together and moving forward, the terrible darkness eventually receding into the past.

Not so Abby Reyes.

Abby was in her early 20s, just before the turn of the last century, when she met Terence Unity Freitas; both were deeply committed to environmental justice and to addressing the critical global crises that existed then and continue today. Terence was making a serious, complicated presentation on the day they met when he stopped, mid-sentence, and asked her for a date that night. Their love story underlies the larger story told in her new book, Truth Demands, and manages to make its unspeakable tragedies somehow more bearable to anyone who has ever loved.

In 1999 Terence was working in the Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia, listening to U’wa community needs and trying to help preserve the centuries-old ways of life that were being imperiled by multinational oil interests. As he and two companions, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee), and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian) were on their way to the airport they were kidnapped and subsequently murdered.

For decades there were no answers.

Reyes recounts her journey through the grief that was made more terrible over the next two decades for lack of justice. A still-youthful woman who is closer to the earth than most, she found healing through its trees and grasses and waters, and through spiritual practices of meditation and self-care. Moving back and forth in time throughout the book, she tells the story in a lyrical language that also keeps hopelessness, for the reader (as the pathway did for Reyes herself), at bay.

Twenty years after the murders, Reyes, alongside Terence’s mother, with whom she has remained close, became a central part of Case 001 of Colombia’s truth and recognition process. Now there were others who sought some sort of justice, who wanted to hear her stories and promised to seek answers for her questions.

Johns & Reyes (who had to be nudged to show the book) at the Climate One event (Fran Johns photo)

Truth Demands is newly released. It gives no linear pathway from tragedy to solution, and it would be a disservice to readers to share here what it does (and does not) reveal. It’s simply a story for our time.

Actually, a two-part story for our time. One part is the journey through grief that will resonate with — and offer gentle assistance to — anyone who has suffered loss. If sometimes similar, all such journeys are unique; Reyes’ is unlike any this writer has encountered in many years of working with end-of-life issues and people in pain.

The second, and clearly atop the author’s lists of concerns, is the work that needs to be done if the planet itself is to survive. Currently Director of UC Irvine Community Resilience Projects, Reyes has a unique understanding of the state of the planet and particular insight into the effects of multinational oil corporations on today’s politics and tomorrow’s health.

Reyes spoke of it all at a recent Climate One event at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club World Affairs building, interviewed by Climate One Co-host and Producer Kousha Navidar.

These issues — overwhelming grief, overstressed earth, and all the complex peripheral problems accompanying them — are not going to be solved tomorrow. Regularly, they get distorted by twists and turns and lies.

Truth Demands is on the side of truth.