Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still.