Two years after Hurricane Helene, the water is gone. The devastation is not.
September has a different weight here now. I feel it before I remember why. The light shifts. The mornings cool, and the mountains begin their slow turn toward fall, and somewhere inside me, my body starts to listen.
To the rain. To the rivers. To the sky.
Two years. It is strange how enormous and how small that number feels. Two years since water rearranged our understanding of home. Since roads vanished and rivers left their banks, since trees came down and buildings filled with mud, since phones went silent and people began searching for people. Two years since we learned how quickly the ordinary can disappear.
And now, so much of it looks ordinary again. The roads are mostly open. The great piles of debris are gone. Water runs from the faucet, and lights come on when we reach for the switch. People sit outside with their coffee. Restaurants hum with conversation. Tourists stand downtown and photograph the mountains.
Yet, those of us who were here know how to see the ghosts. We know which roads disappeared, and where the water reached. We know the buildings that aren’t there anymore. We notice the trees missing from familiar ridgelines. We drive past an empty space and our eyes still expect something to be standing in it. There is a muscle memory to belonging to a place after disaster. The landscape remembers. So do we.
I have spent much of my life as a therapist sitting beside grief. I have witnessed people survive deaths and divorces, betrayals and diagnoses, endings they chose and endings they never would have. I have learned that grief is rarely tidy. It doesn’t follow the stages we once tried to fit it into, and it does not care what the calendar says. There is no morning when grief looks at the date and decides it has overstayed its welcome.
Two years does not mean finished. Two years does not mean healed. Two years does not mean we should be able to speak of it without our throats tightening.
Grief moves into the body and makes a home there. Sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. We can go weeks without noticing it, and then a smell, a sound, a particular slant of light brings it back into the room. Collective grief is the same. September arrives. The rain falls harder than expected. A weather alert lights up a phone. The French Broad rises a little. Someone says where they were that morning, and the body remembers before the mind has finished making sense of why.
I understood this as a therapist long before Helene. But understanding grief and living inside a grieving community are two different things. After the storm there was no dry shoreline from which I could reach out to someone else in the water. I was wet too. My people were wet. My whole community stood in the same changed landscape. There is humility in sitting across from someone when you have both heard the same rain, stood in the same grocery lines, wondered about the same people you could not reach. During this time therapy was not about insight, it was only about witnessing. Yes. This happened. It was enormous. You do not have to make it smaller here.
Two years later, I think we still need that permission.
The calendar says September 2026. Sometimes the body says September 2024. That doesn’t mean we haven’t healed. It means healing is not forgetting. It means the body remembers what it had to survive, and maybe part of the work is turning toward it with tenderness instead of frustration. To notice the fear and say, Of course you remember. You were there.
Before Helene, water was uncomplicated for me. I loved it: the ocean, the rivers, the swimming holes tucked into these mountains, the sound of rain on a roof. Water meant movement and cleansing and play and life. Then I learned its weight. I learned that something you love can become something your body fears. Rain sounded different afterward. The French Broad looked different, and so did the Swannanoa River. A creek was no longer only a creek. The mind says, this rain is not that rain. The body answers, But I remember.
For a while I thought healing meant returning to the relationship I had with water before. I don’t think that anymore. Sometimes healing is learning to love something again while knowing more about it. To stand beside a river and let awe and fear live in the same body. To hear the rain and notice the part of yourself that listens differently now. To say: I know. I remember. And right now, I am here.
After the storm, I wrote that it felt as though the typography of our landscape had changed. I still think about that. The words were the same: mountain, river, tree, road, home. But they meant something else. The mountains had always felt permanent to me, ancient and protective, as though living among them meant being held inside something older and steadier than ourselves. Then we watched pieces of them move. Trees were torn from the earth, roots bare as anatomy. Rivers refused the boundaries we had given them. The land acquired a new grammar, and two years on, we are still learning to read it.
There are places I drive where my body notices what is missing before my mind does. Something feels off, and then I realize: there used to be trees there. There used to be a building. The road curved differently. That was someone’s home, someone’s livelihood, someone’s ordinary Tuesday. Grief does this. It makes negative space. You walk into a room and see the person who is no longer in the chair. You look toward a mountain and somehow see the trees that are gone. Absence becomes its own kind of presence.
There was a time after Helene when Asheville felt like it was on life support. Alive, but barely recognizable. Breathing, but differently. Somewhere between the pulse and the flat-line. The systems we had relied on disappeared, and almost at once, people became systems for one another. Water moved from hand to hand. Generators hummed. Extension cords stretched toward neighbors. People with chainsaws cleared the roads, and people with four-wheel drives went looking for those who couldn’t get out. Parking lots became distribution centers. Clinicians became crisis workers. Artists became organizers. Restaurants became community kitchens, cooking whatever they had and passing it across counters. No reservations. No carefully planned evenings. Just: Are you hungry? Here.
There is something deeply human about feeding one another in a disaster. Someone places something warm in your hands, and for a few minutes your body remembers that it is a body. You eat. You sit. Someone asks if your people are okay. Someone fills your cup. For a moment, survival becomes shared. I never want to forget that. When so much failed, care became infrastructure. Food became infrastructure. A folding table stacked with bottled water, a stranger’s outlet, a text that finally went through, I’m okay, strong enough to hold an entire family.
I find myself constantly returning to thoughts of the River Arts District. The studios and restaurants, the old buildings full of things people had made by hand, the place where we wandered without needing a reason. It has always felt like where Asheville tells the truth about itself: a little strange, a little beautiful, old and new, all rough edges and lovely things.
Then the river came through. Mud where there had been art. Waterlines on the walls. Empty spaces where studios and livelihoods had been. Now, rebuilding. Fresh lumber against old brick. New paint beside scars. Open doors near spaces still waiting. Artists returning, relocating, beginning again. In places you can feel the before and after occupying the same square foot of earth. River. Art. The thing that devastated us, and the thing that helps us survive devastation.
After Helene, I kept thinking: art is saving us. Not sentimentally. Art cannot replace a home. A painting cannot rebuild a bridge. A poem cannot raise the dead, and a ceramic bowl cannot restore a business. I don’t believe loss needs to become a lesson. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. Some things are simply devastating. Yet, art gives grief somewhere to go. It gives shape to what would otherwise stay shapeless inside us. We paint, we write, we stitch, we photograph, we gather scraps and broken things and arrange them into something we can hold. When language fails, we make. When we cannot repair what was broken, we create beside it. Not to replace what was lost, but to honor that it existed. This happened. This mattered. I was here. I remember.
I am more careful with the word resilience now. We have heard it so many times. Western North Carolina is resilient. Asheville is resilient. These mountains are resilient. And we are. But sometimes resilience becomes one more expectation laid on grieving people. Look how strong you are. Look how much has reopened. Look how far you’ve come. Yes. And look at what it cost. A community can rebuild and still grieve. A restaurant can reopen while its owner watches the weather differently. An artist can make art again and still mourn the studio that disappeared. A family can move into a new home and still miss the one the water took. A therapist can hold space for someone else’s grief and then sit quietly in her car, holding her own. Strength and suffering are not opposites. Neither are grief and joy. Maybe resilience is not returning untouched. Maybe it is making room for what changed us.
In my healing process and getting know nature in a new way, I keep coming back to the trees. Some bent. Some broke. Some were pulled whole from the earth, their roots exposed to daylight after decades in the dark. Others still stand beside enormous gaps where their neighbors used to be. The forest does not pretend nothing happened. It reorganizes around what was lost. Light enters differently. Water moves differently. New things grow where the canopy has opened. Sometimes a fallen tree becomes shelter, then soil, then nourishment for something new.
I don’t say this because I believe every loss must become something beautiful. Some losses remain losses. Some things should never have happened. But life has an extraordinary ability to grow alongside what cannot be repaired. Not instead of grief. Alongside it. That distinction matters to me.
After disasters we say back to normal, back on our feet, back to business. I understand why. We need the restaurants full and the art purchased and the hotel rooms occupied. We need musicians playing and children running and people sitting outside with their coffee. There is something beautiful about ordinary life after you have watched it disappear.
But I don’t think we went back. I don’ think we ever will. There is no road to September 27, 2024. The Asheville that existed before Helene lives partly in memory now, and so do versions of us. Maybe returning was never the work. Maybe the work is learning how to belong here again: to these mountains, these rivers, these changed roads, to the places rebuilding and the places that never will, to each other, to ourselves. Belonging before the storm could be unconscious. Afterward, it becomes a choice.
You look toward the scarred mountain and say: Still. You stand beside the river with your complicated love and say: Still. You walk through the River Arts District, seeing what was, what is gone, and what is slowly emerging, and say: Still. Still ours. Still home. Still becoming.
Maybe year one was about remembering what happened. Year two feels like learning to live with the remembering. Grief has no finish line. It changes shape. It softens in some places and surprises us in others. It makes room for laughter. It sits quietly beside joy. Sometimes it sleeps, and sometimes September wakes it.
As a therapist, perhaps this is what I understand most clearly now: healing is not the moment the past stops hurting. It is the gradual widening of our capacity to carry what happened without it becoming the only thing we carry. So we make room. For devastation and anger, for gratitude and fear, for survivor’s guilt and beauty and laughter. For the people who fed us and the strangers who helped. For what disappeared, what survived, what is being rebuilt, and what never can be. We do not have to choose between grieving what was and loving what is becoming. We can hold both.
Grief lives in us. But so does everything else.
Anniversaries like this need more than words. Humans have always made ritual around what is too large for language: birth, death, love, loss, beginnings, endings. So sometime around this anniversary, find a place outside. Beside the French Broad or the Swannanoa, if water feels safe to you. Beside a creek, under a tree, in your backyard, on a trail. Somewhere in these mountains that has held you.
Bring three small things: a stone, a leaf, and a piece of paper.
Hold the stone first. Let it be what you are still carrying. Not what you think you should be done carrying after two years, but what is actually still here. A person. A home. A business. A tree. A feeling of safety. A version of Asheville, or of yourself. A moment from those first days your body has never forgotten. Feel its weight in your palm. Don’t rush to release it, and don’t search for its lesson. Just say: This is what I carry.
Then hold the leaf. Let it be something that has grown alongside the grief. Not because of the storm, and not as justification for it, but simply something that exists beside the loss. A friendship. A neighbor you know now. Someone who brought water. A deeper bond with these mountains. A tenderness, a clearer sense of what matters. Say: This grew here too.
Finally, take the paper and write down something you do not want forgotten. A name. A place. A road. Old Europe. The Marquee. A tree that no longer stands. The person with the chainsaw. The stranger who handed you water. The friend whose text finally arrived. Or simply write: We took care of each other.
Fold the paper and set it beneath the stone. Sit for a while. Listen to the mountain, to the trees, to the water if you are beside it, to your own body listening. You do not have to release anything. You do not have to move on. You do not have to be finished grieving. Just breathe beside what happened.
When you are ready, leave the leaf on the earth. Keep your paper, or place it somewhere meaningful and safe. Then pick the stone back up.
This part matters. You don’t have to leave everything behind. Some things are meant to be carried, and maybe healing is learning to carry them differently. Take the stone home. Set it on a windowsill, in your garden, on your desk, beside your bed. Let it be a small monument to what happened, what was lost, and what remains. To the hands that passed water. To the artists who began making again. To the people who showed up before anyone knew what rebuilding would ask of us. To strangers who became infrastructure. To the terrible and beautiful truth that we needed one another.
The landscape is still writing itself. So are we. The grammar has changed. The rivers have drawn new sentences through the earth. There are words missing now, and sentences we never wanted written, and blank spaces where something beloved used to be. And still, the mountains keep holding what they can. The rivers keep moving. The trees keep reaching toward the light. We keep making things. We keep feeding one another. We keep gathering, remembering, grieving, and loving this wounded, complicated, beautiful place.
Not as we did before. As we are now.
Stone in one hand. Leaf in the other. Our pockets full of names and places and stories we refuse to forget.
Still here. Still grieving. Still loving. Still becoming.
Still belonging to these mountains. Still breathing with them.