‘I’m imagining what my mother went through in her last seconds’ – This is climate breakdown | Extreme weather

• Location Saint-Martin-Vésubie, France

• Disaster name Storm Alex, 2020

Elisa is a women’s clothing designer who runs her own label in Montreal, Canada. She was born and grew up in Nice, France, where much of her family remained, but was in Canada with her children and partner when Storm Alex gusted towards France and the mountain village where her mother lived. The storm was a powerful extratropical cyclone that caused extreme flooding around the Mediterranean, killing at least 15 people. Three months’ worth of rain – 50cm – fell on Saint-Martin-Vésubie in one day, 3 October 2020.

My mom found this house that had a lot of charm in a small village called Saint-Martin-Vésubie. When she bought it with her savings in 2015 they did a lot of renovations. My dad helped her with the construction and contractors. For a bit, they were happy there.

It was a three-floor, chalet-type house with a wood roof and some wood on the outside. Her goal was that it be a family house. She wanted to be welcoming people and having big dinners. A couple years after, my parents were in divorce.

My mom always repeated to me that for retirement, she wanted to travel all the time. Have just a tiny apartment and travel, travel, travel. I remember tellingher: “If you’re divorcing anyway, you should just sell the house and get out of there.” She was like: “I don’t feel I had enough time in this house. Maybe I can enjoy a little bit more years?” She was always Skyping me from her little office: the background was a window with the mountain outside. It was beautiful. The land was pretty big. The house had two little rivers passing by it. That turned out to be a crazy thing.

I don’t really follow news, especially French news. I’m unaware of what’s happening on a daily basis. My brother called on a Saturday telling me there was a storm in Saint-Martin-Vésubie and our mom was not answering her phone as of about 4pm yesterday. My uncle called him the day before saying the last time that he had her on the phone, the water was up to the door of the car. She said the car was probably going to float away. The first thing I said was: “Why didn’t you call me yesterday?” I was pissed I didn’t get a call from one of my uncles. Being really far from your biological family, people always forget about you.

I said: “I need to look online.” We hung up. I started typing: “Saint-Martin-Vésubie”, “tempête” [storm]. My first reaction was: “No, no, no. It’s not possible.” That was what I was repeating out loud. I was saying no constantly. My partner, Mark, was like: “What’s happening?” There was not yet a lot of news articles. It’s when I started going on those Facebook or Instagram videos that I realised the amplitude of the storm. There was a couple in a house surrounded with water and huge waves, doing signs with a flashlight. After that, it was a video of a building half-detaching. It was surreal. In all those videos, I was trying to see if I was able to see my mom’s house. “Oh, that was close to her. No, I can’t see it. Fuck.” Every video was like: “Fuck, I can’t see it.” I was watching, again and again. I was seeing all that distress and traumatic visuals. I was taking it all in.

I called my brother and I said: “You have to go right away.” He was like: “Yes, I’m thinking to take a bus on Monday.” I was like: “No, you take the bus tomorrow. No matter what. If she’s alive, she’s going to need your help. You go. I can’t go.” I had my baby, Nash, in my arm. He was 15 days old. He was breastfeeding. I couldn’t travel with my newborn. If I catch Covid, I can’t come back. We were all in quarantine. It was impossible for me to go. I accepted that my reality will be to follow the whole thing through my brother. I remember waking up at 3am for months because it was 9am over there, trying to catch up on life in France.

There was no communication with Saint-Martin-Vésubie. Roads were impassable. Everything has been cut. Every two, three hours, I was calling to check a phone line in Nice that was for people that were rescued. I was continuing to check every list of missing people. My brother arrived in Nice the next day. The decision was made that my brother and one of my uncles, the young one, would go with the car to another village close by, climb up and down a mountain, and arrive in Saint-Martin-Vésubie. The whole thinking was: “Go to see if the house is still there, if she’s still in there, because maybe she can’t get out.” That happened really early on Monday.

My brother called when he was on top of the mountain, telling me he was going down to Saint-Martin-Vésubie. I was waiting, waiting, waiting. That was an awful wait. The most awful wait of my whole life. He called me back and said, and I can remember his voice. In French, he said: “Il n’y a plus rien” [There’s nothing any more]. I said: “What? No house?” He said: “Nothing. You can’t even tell it was a house before.” He said: “No foundation, nothing.” I was like: “What?” He sent me videos, and that was of a whole river where the house was, and no trace of any house being there before. I think that was when I was like: “Oh my God, that’s the end. She could have not gotten out.”

It was really long, long, long days because I was talking to my brother every hour or so and to my uncles, trying to reach anyone possible to push to find her body. When you don’t have the body, it’s hard for your mind to process that it’s real. There’s no body so maybe there’s other things that could have happened. She was not in the house. She’s somewhere in Mexico, living her best life. She was saved by a neighbour. She’s unconscious, and no one knows who she is. She’s in a hospital bed somewhere. I think this is the most traumatic part of the event, that missing body.

Eight or nine days after the storm, they found the body of my mom’s old neighbour about 26km [16 miles] away, down the river. I was like: “OK, there is really so small a chance we find her.” Wild wolves literally saved our ass in that case, if I can say it like this. A neighbour from the same part of the valley was coming back to grab his stuff from his half-destroyed house, and he told the rescue team that he saw, a few times, wild wolves smelling behind his house. The wolves smelled her body in decomposition. Thirteen days after the storm, a bunch of men with shovels took her body out.

She was about 100 metres from her house, literally right there, that whole time. My brother maybe even walked on that part a few times when he was searching for stuff. Someone took him to the spot and he sent me a picture. There were big rocks, dry mud, soil and trees. He was standing in front of that hole. I was able to see it was really deep down: probably six feet under. I was so thankful. I still feel really weird about that feeling because I felt so grateful to the wolves. I was like: “Thank God they smelled her body because she could have stayed there for years.”

Because I’m a really visual person, I’m imagining what my mom passed through in her last seconds, minutes, hours. After they found her body, that shortened my imagination of the event. There was an autopsy. They were able to tell us that she died by something falling on her head, maybe a part of the house. She didn’t drown. My brother asked to see the body. They said they can only show the hand. He put me on his phone. When he was alone in the room, he took his phone out from his pocket. She was under a white cover, and there was just her hand out. That was important for us to see a part of her body we recognised. If I was there physically, I would take her hand in my hand and kiss it.

For weeks, my brother basically transported me in his shirt pocket with the camera. I was there the whole time. He was taking me everywhere. When he was in the car by himself, we were talking the whole way. When he was going out to see people, he was hanging up and calling me back. At some point, I ended up in the hospital because it was too much to deal with. I was exhausted in every part of where you think exhaustion can be. I ended up in hospital because I had stroke symptoms: all numb in my arm and my mouth. It turns out it was a migraine. I think my brain was unable to take it any more.

After that, I really wanted my brother to come to Canada because we needed to be united. We needed that so much in that moment. When I took him from the airport to the Airbnb, he took out a couple bracelets from my mom’s body. My first thing was to open the police bag, plastic with all that tape, and smell. I thought maybe I can smell her, but I couldn’t. What I smelled was that storm: death mixed with nature. I still have that bag. Sometimes I open it and smell, just to give me a sense of reality.

My brother did his two-week quarantine beside our place in Montreal. I was bringing him food wearing a mask. After the quarantine, he was able to be with us for three weeks. We were able to pass Christmas together. He was able to meet his new nibling. It’s odd because I was passing through life and death at the same time. My newborn was being his little cuteness and just learning how to smile. I was still smiling to my kids, because I had to. I could not process my emotions the way I would have processed them if I was alone. I remember the face of my baby. Every time I was looking at him, I was thinking that my mom never met him and he will never meet her.

She was really lovely. She was a beautiful woman. When she died, she was 67, but not looking like 67. I remember the softness of her skin. She trusted me, but was judgy with a lot of people. She loved to sit on the bench and just critique everything. I actually really miss that. For a long time, I was scared because my mom had harsh words sometimes. We had a not-my-ideal relationship. When she died I was in the process of grieving the mom I would have wished to have. She believed in me way more than what she showed me. But I also know she meant well.

I started working again. I was just trying to keep the business together and trying to go back to a normal kind of life. I was finally able to go in France in June 2021. I had my first dose of vaccine for Covid, and my baby was not breastfeeding any more. I was able to go to Saint-Martin-Vésubie. I remember being shocked. I especially remember the size of the rocks: bigger than trucks. I think that helped because I was finding that it was unbelievable that a three-floor house can disappear like that. At that moment, I realised the house didn’t have a chance. I’m always asking the question, did she see that coming? Because she had windows on the upper part of the valley. Imagine that second of your life and you see that coming. It’s such an awful death. Oh my God.

I talk to so many people about what happened to me, to my mom, and it’s still really hard for people to understand how it’s linked to climate change. It’s not just a remote thing happening far away. It’s going to touch everyone. This is really one of the main reasons why I want to put my story out. I see that as putting myself naked in the public space because we need, as a society, to take action to stop or reduce those things happening. The help I want is everyone to recognise that this is what happened. My mom was a victim of climate change. It’s not a normal storm. It’s not a normal event. Fuck, why me? I don’t need to be confirmed that we have a problem. I don’t need the planet to confirm that exists. I already knew. But now I’ve been touched by it.

I went to her little one-bedroom apartment in Nice that was her spot in the city. We had six days to empty that apartment, and my mom had a lot of things. When all this happened, I told my brother: “Don’t touch anything until I come. I need this because there was nothing left in her house. Everything disappeared.” I went right away to the bedroom. I sat on the bed. I found a book she was reading: Traité de Morale Pour Triompher des Emmerdes. It’s vulgar, like how to triumph from your shit in life. She was probably reading that because she felt that her life was going all wrong because of the divorce and she was feeling so alone.

I think my mom was a person that never had the chance to grow emotionally. As someone close to my own emotions, I saw she had a lot of emotions she was unable to understand. I wish I could have helped her. In the months before she died, I was feeling I could go deeper with her and maybe have a new relationship. No matter. She was a really good mother. It still feels surreal, what happened with Storm Alex. But I know it’s real: that I passed through this and my mom died the way she died.

Today was her birthday. She would have turned 71. I feel it’s really nice to be able to talk about this on her birthday. I want to tell my kids that I did everything I could with my own terrible and traumatic story and put it out there just to see if that can help anyone else. We need more sharing in society. I think it’s how people can understand that we need change.