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.

Scarlett O'Hara, Grief Counselor

I wrote this before going to my mom's to tackle the house. Now that we're in the during/after phase, I've got more thoughts, but I wanted to share this.

*

Now that I am staring down the packing up of my dead mother's things and the selling of her house, a task that's petrified me since the beginning of her illness, The house tasks glom together into what feels like an insurmountable mass, and that mass sometimes shines, mirage-like and as falsely, as worse than her death.

It's not.

Nothing in my life has been worse than her death, except the fact of the wall it put her behind, and the fact that I can't break it down.

But it's a hard task. It'll be like cleaning out her office times who knows what. I don't really want to think about it. So I'm not. Like the formerly unseen grief counselor Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about it tomorrow. Another day.

Dwelling on it won't really help me handle it better, I don't think. I'm sure I dwelled the last time we went there, and that time, I utterly fell apart. I fell apart in a way I didn't in the days after her death. It felt like the house itself was suffocating me. Being there without her was worse than being haunted - it was utterly empty, except when it wasn't, and those two feelings alternated with me between them like a buffeted sapling.

There's no sense in being buffered more than you already are if you can avoid it.

Not thinking about things was a tactic I used when she was sick, too, though sometimes I'm not sure I realized it. Looking back at it now, I didn't spend a ton of time worrying about what would happen (or at least not putting the fear into thoughts or words). I focused on hoping, and when I wasn't focused on hoping, I was focused on doing. Taking buses to be with her. Living in yoga pants in her room in the ICU. Being forced by well-meaning nurses and family and sometimes Mom herself to go outside.

I thought about everything else another day. Today, and tomorrow.

Shyness, Bravery, and Compassion

I'm often struck by the perceptiveness and compassion that (comedian) John Hodgman shows in his rulings on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. The latest episode, The Right to Remain Silent, blew me away. The show is described this way: "Chris wants his daughter, Sophie, to get over her shyness and show more confidence in uncomfortable social situations. Sophie believes she is making progress in her own way and doesn't need any pushing from her Dad. Who's right and who's wrong? Only one man can decide." In these terms, the episode centers around a chance encounter Sophie and her dad had with comedian Eugene Mirman, one of Sophie's favorites (who happens to be one of my favorites, too). In an attempt to encourage his shy daughter to talk to Mirman, Chris pushes her forward, when she's already starting to cry from, it sounds like, sheer overwhelmedness. (It can be a word. Hush.)

Twelve year-old Sophie is much like I was at that age. She's the child of an outgoing academic type (difference: her dad is vice president of a college, my mom was a professor). She's shy. (I was incredibly outgoing through my early teens, and then took on shyness until early college. Now, I'm an outright extrovert.) I was firmly on her side for much of the episode, feeling like her father was pushing her too quickly and too hard to be someone she isn't sure she wants to be (yet).

Thing is, I do empathize with Chris. I can tell from what he says about his kid that he's genuinely proud of how smart and articulate she is, and how much he wants that to shine out for the world to see. (He also shares that he was even more shy than Sophie when he was a child - I wish he had elaborated on what that means.) His daughter writes poetry, and he wants her to participate in a poetry reading at his college. (As a faculty brat, I never would have submitted to such a thing. Even now, my poetry is winsome at best, and it's written for me, not for students six years my senior.)

What bothers me, other than the actual pushing, which Sophie said had gone too far, is his attitude that her shyness is something that can be "fixed." I'm not a parent, but as a formerly shy kid, what worked for me was having a parent who let me be who I was when I was it. My mom encouraged me to speak up and to try new things, but she also let me pull back when I needed to. The extrovert that I am today is shaped by the three decades of choice I got in that matter. I was never not enough for my mom. I don't think Chris' feelings about his daughter are that simple, by any means, but I think it's an important realization for any child to have. They are loved just as they are. They're encouraged to make changes, and to challenge themselves, but they're always loved, and the developmental stage they're in is (assuming nothing abnormally dangerous is happening) respected.

In the limitedly short glimpse I got of everyone's interactions with Sophie, I much prefer the way the comedians talk (to her) to the way her father does (about her). Mirman, in a surprise call-in appearance that initially breaks Sophie down, is gently funny in his typical deadpan manner, zeroing in on the problem with the pushing as he witnessed it. Hodgman puts it more bluntly - "Chris. Don't shove your daughter" - and talks to Sophie almost like she's a peer. He nudges her toward telling Mirman how much she likes his work, pointing out that "almost everyone in the world appreciates a polite, 'Hello, I think you're great. See you later.'" Bailiff Jesse Thorn, similarly empathetic to the girl, asks if she has "any plans to break out of [her] shell on [her] own time." The ruling Hodgman gives is in Sophie's favor, and in a lovely twist, the punishment Chris receives is just what he initially wanted his daughter to do: read poetry in public.

Moving (E)Motions

On NPR earlier this year, Sebastian Junger discussed the death of his friend Tim Heatherington, a journalist killed. He used a phrase to describe the pace of fear in combat - "[combat is] scary beforehand, the anticipation is very scary, and afterwards the fear catches up with you." The idea of an emotion catching up with you fits exactly with my experience of grief. I didn't have a lot of time to grieve when my mom was sick. I did it alone, at home, when I wasn't with her. I cried in hospitals, but I mostly tried not to, and tried to send all of my energy to helping her and hoping for her recovery.

Now, a little over nine months after her death, I'm grieving. (I could say I'm still grieving, but I hate the implication of "should be ending" that that little word adds. I'll grieve for the rest of my life - in healthy and productive ways, to be sure, but it will never end. The only way grief ends, I think, is if you don't love the person anymore.)

Compare Junger to this line from Fitzgerald's "The Crackup": "The world only exists through your apprehension of it." The first time I read that, I defined the second noun - apprehension - as understanding, as I think he intended. The second time, I thought of fear. Fear certainly creates worlds for some people. We talk a lot in yoga about letting go of fear, but it's not always so easy. When I was faced with the prospect of losing my mom's physical presence, I was more afraid than I've ever been. Now, just like grief, the fear is still with me - because the world without her is a scary place.

What fear and grief both do over time, rather than disappear, is shapeshift and change. They mold themselves to changes I'm making in my life. They shift a bit to the background, hovering, when I share happy memories of my mom or think of how earthshatteringly proud she'd be of me and all that I'm managing to handle without her.

Just as my fear and grief are unending, so does my mother surpass all boundaries. She is in the air, the sky, the sun, my smile. This isn't what either of us wanted, but it's what we have to handle, and I'm handling it in all the ways she taught me.

Collapsing of Past/Present(ation)

I've had an academic interest in temporality since I took Emily Apter's class on periodization during my master's at NYU. Now, the personal side is coming in: my mother's death is sparking an examination of my childhood and my family history. That history is also intertwining with my theoretical interests in developing ways (more later on this).

Personal history comes up in my dreams a lot. My mother is usually there, sometimes sick, sometimes healthy, always recognizable. (This isn't surprising, according to grief literature. She was there a lot before she died, too, but now it's almost constant.) When I am stressed, I tend to dream that she is angry with me. more often, though, she's part of the fabric of my unconscious. Last night i dreamed that she was retrofitting a van to give herself a place to get ready for work. Two night ago, there was a grandma in my dreams: she looked like mine, but was mean instead of adorable. (When I dream that my mom is mad at me, its much the same feeling of displacement - not that I didn't ever misbehave and make her angry, because Idid, but because for much of my life, i have been my own worst critic and she has been my defender.) I realized today, with a bit of a jolt, that I want to talk to my dead-for-ten-years grandmother about the loss of my mom. I want to know how she handled her own mother's loss. 

I'm wondering if part of this is a trace of my extreme unease and anger that my mother wasn't given to chance to see me achieve more of the things I planned on. (She knew me as a master's student, but not as a PhD student, for one.) Both she and my mother had careers and children (and in my grandma's case, grandchildren) when their parents died. 

Even sharing this information in a relatively public forum is a decision I didn't expect. When my mother got sick, I decided, somewhat consciously, to post a lot of information about my feelings and the trajectory of her illness on Facebook. This was in part so I didn't have to explicitly tell people things and also, I think, because I wanted to vent and let off steam. (My mom often read and commented on those posts, including on some about my fears of her death. It was heartening and painful all at the same time, but I wasn't going to keep it from her.) Now that I'm working on my book and writing so personally in a wider online forum (for the four of you who read this and for the countless millions who could), I'm struck both by how reticent I am to air my grievances and what I consider defects, and by how necessary it is. I think my academic work and writing will always carry the stamp of who I am, and I think that's the way I want it.