Reflections

I'm writing on a train, and it's a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don't recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete,  and to edit it, I'd need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can't see what I'm writing, and then I write anyway. He's got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin's great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don't have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don't travel this way that often, there's an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus. 

On the other hand, I've been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I'd call my mom on the way and she'd be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle's house. Sometimes I'd chatter with her, and sometimes I'd be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It's now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We'd moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could. 

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That's when I thought I'd go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don't remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn't the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I'm not crying. I'm still. I'm cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It's very interesting, I'm finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother's loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it's like she's behind a wall, and I can't reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine. 

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he's probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I'm doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra Perl's Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you're not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for a professor the previous term, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of "oh g-d, am I prepared enough" and "oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people." I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester. 

I try another version of one of Sondra's questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about - I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There's a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it's almost as though there's no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn't have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don't seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees' outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin's edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there's no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven't been there before. (I haven't.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn't want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She's not worried about someone else's coughing. She's like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There's a bit of me in her somewhere. 

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I'd reached the edge of my strength. I didn't know how much I'd need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don't, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.