“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature: the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” – Rachel Carson

A grove of women grows outside of my house.

Deeply rooted in the arid, dusty soil of California, they contort their bodies, stretching and yearning towards the warm, honeyed sky. Whenever we drive past the grove, I would stick my head out of the car window. I want to see the faces of the women, but no matter what angle I take, their features remain unintelligible. Their roots extend endlessly into the earth on which we roam, with their faces clouded by light.

54 years ago, at a house 40 miles away from mine, a series of murders took place. They will later be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders to the public, committed by the notorious California cult, led by a man with the chilling name of Charles Manson. Among the victims was the French-Polish director Roman Polański’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant when she died at the age of 26, after being stabbed 16 times. 

A year later, on October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin died from a heroin overdose on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Los Angeles, a 20-minute drive from the house on Cielo Drive, where the murdered happened. She was 27.

On March 11, 1977, Roman Polański was arrested at his hotel in Beverly Hills, California, for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey. He would continue to assault and rape multiple women in his career, yet he remains at large.

On December 8, 1980, American photographer Annie Leibovitz took the last photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono together, five hours before Lennon was shot and killed. 24 years later in 2004, the year that I was born, Leibovitz’ partner Susan Sontag passed away. Joan Didion died two years ago. Sacheen Littlefeather died last year. A month ago, Elvis’ daughter Lisa Marie Presley passed away. Four days ago, Yoko Ono turned 90.

The lives and deaths of these women loom over me like a shroud. I’m beginning to get a premonition - a vague unshakeable feeling that the world is ending, but that the end just hasn’t happened yet. The women who created history are dying. Their youth is not my youth.

My parents are children of the seventies. They grew up listening to Bob Dylan and The Beatles, watching Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather. Reading The Rolling Stone and playing frisbee in the park. They craved excitement but protested wars, they resented God, but followed the hippie lifestyle religiously. I live in a time where people are constantly telling us that we have thirty years left to prevent climate change from swallowing our planet whole. Less than half a century before the sky starts to crumble and the ground begins to cave in. I live in a time where it doesn’t rain in California anymore. The temperature crawls up our backs and weighs on our juvenile spines. The suffocating heat waves wrap around our bodies like a fisherman’s net. The wildfires get closer and closer to our home each year.

My mother believes that the sixties ended abruptly on that night of August 9th, 1969, at the exact moment when the word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like bushfire through the community. As I sit in the corner of the dining room, watching my parents wipe wisps of dark ashes from our dinner table, trying to reassure us that the fire wouldn’t burn our house down, I realized that there is no certainty in their voice.

If the Tate-Labianca murders marked the end of the beginning, I suppose we’re currently living in the beginning of the end. Like my parents, I don’t believe in God. The grove of women growing outside of my house is the closest thing to God that I can imagine. A massive and mysterious higher being resistant to droughts and fires. If the world is about to end, I wish to live vicariously through it.

My mother says that it is a symbol, for what I do not know. I only imagined that the grove is a group of women, with their faces blurred and their names forgotten, like a warm summer day, stretching on forever at both ends. I know that the grove will end somewhere, its growth halted in mid-air perhaps, but that’s all I know.

I wonder if that’s what California felt like on that fateful August night in 1969, the night that ended an era, yet seemed so endless in itself. I imagine that the people felt the same way as me when the murder on Cielo Drive permeated their homes like flames. They must have felt, at some point, that the whole world was going to end. But then nothing happened. Fall came around, then came winter and spring, more viscous and golden than ever, but it came.