Accounts – Page 12

Living (not grieving) beside Judith

The majority of my posts on this blog about my mother, Judith Puotinen, have focused on grieving for her. This summer I hope to write about my memories of living beside her for 35 years. Of course, my grief still exists (it won’t ever end), but it should not be my only connection to her. I need to find ways to re-connect with her joy, creativity and fabulous troublemaking spirit.

Last July my sisters and I divvied up my mom’s journals and notebooks from my parent’s basement. Almost a year later, I finally have some time to look through them. In one notebook, I found a talk that my mom gave to a women’s club (I think she wrote and gave this talk while in remission–in 2007?) entitled, “Creativity and Weaving : A Journey of the Soul.” While I enjoyed reading the entire talk (before she got really sick I think she was hoping to give this talk to many other organizations), I was particularly struck by her discussion of the challenges of creating.* She writes:

In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about a character in her head that she labels, “The Censor.” The censor is a nasty internal and eternal critic who resides in our left brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as truth. Things like, “You can’t call yourself a weaver. That last piece was a pile of junk. What makes you think you can be creative?…” and so on.

The rule I try to remember here is that my Censor’s negative opinions are not the truth. One way I deal with this is to keep a journal. My journal might be on paper or it could be in the form of a collection of weavings that I just keep on producing. I have a record in front of me of what I can do. Another thing that is very effective is to personify the Censor and paste its picture on the wall and throw darts at it. I have done that as well.

I read this and laughed out loud (luckily I was by myself). I wonder if her audience laughed at this line about the darts?

I love what my mom writes about her weavings as a form of journal “writing” that enables her to prove what she can do. This line makes me think about my blogging and how and why I write. And I love her comment about the dartboard. I remember that dartboard. It was in our basement (well, at least in one or two of our basements. We moved around a lot). I also remember her telling me that she loved to play darts. She never said why…Now I know.

I do have one memory of her in the basement by the dartboard. Her lips are pursed and she is aiming the dart with quite a bit of determination and a playful twinkle in her eye. It’s a wonderful memory to have. To me, it speaks to her refusal to give in to the Censor and her great sense of humor.

*Note on may 21, 2011: My mom organized this talk around different shawls that she had made. Her section on the challenges of creativity involved her putting on a blue shawl. When I get a picture of this shawl, I will post it here.

Fragments of Grief, part 5

Here is the fifth and final fragment that I place beside the others in my experimental essay of living and grieving beside Judith. In the manuscript, I titled this final fragment: There is no conclusion, only another fragment to place beside the others.

There is a more general conception of the human at work here, one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself, and by virtue of our embodiment, given over to an other: this makes us vulnerable to violence, but also to another range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives, at the other (Butler, Undoing Gender 23).

Butler devotes her attention in Precarious Life, Undoing Gender and Frames of War to how the recognition of our vulnerability in the midst of others often results in very violent, yet always failed attempts to deny or conceal it. But, albeit briefly, she offers the possibility of another way of thinking about and responding to our vulnerability as caring for and being in loving proximity to one another.

The night before her big surgery, the one that would determine whether she lived (for how long?) or died (on the operating table?), my mom was scared. She really hated doctors and hospitals. And she didn’t want to die. My oldest sister asked her if she would like to cuddle with her three daughters on the bed. She agreed, and together we–the three daughters and Rosie J, still in my womb—laid beside Mom. We held her as we waited, not knowing what would happen next.

My living and grieving beside my mom Judith and my daughter Rosemary Judith has enabled me, through joy and sadness and life and loss, to bear witness to the potential of this second non-violent meaning of vulnerability and to imagine the ethical potential of grief to be found not so much in what we have lost—a loved one–but in what we have gained—the recognition that we have the potential to love and be loved, to care and be cared for.

My thoughts: Originally I had planned to end this essay with a (somewhat dry and straightforward) conclusion about what I had done in the essay and how I had used Butler. Somehow that just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the essay. It was too abstract and removed and I didn’t think I had the energy for or the interest in making sense (abstractly or meta-theoretically) of the fragments and their expressions of my living and grieving. I thought of the Butler passage (the one that I use above) and suddenly the story about the bed came to me. The idea of touch and physically being connected seems central to thinking about care (care-giving, care-receiving, caring about, keeping vigil) in relation to living and grieving beside those who are dying (and those who are living in the midst of death and dying). I know I have much more to write about these connections and what they mean for me, both in my struggles to make sense of how I cared/failed to care for my mom and/or my daughter and in my critical efforts to reflect on what care is and could/should be. For now, I will take a break from this project. I will place it beside me as I work through (and on) other ideas about troublemaking, care, blogging, curiosity and feminist virtue ethics.

To be continued…

Fragments of Grief, part 4

Here is the fourth of five fragments that I place beside each other in my experimental essay on living and grieving beside Judith:

…it becomes a question for ethics, I think, not only when we ask the personal question, what makes my own life bearable, but when we ask…what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable (Undoing Gender, 17)?

Butler connects her theorizing of grief to the question of what makes life bearable and livable. Distinguishing the livable life from the basic material conditions that make life possible, Butler wants to think about how and when lives are and aren’t deemed recognizable and worthy of life and of being grieved (Undoing Gender, 39).

I was never afraid to lose my mom. Okay, that’s not true. Before my mom was diagnosed I couldn’t imagine how I could ever live without her. Her death was the one I feared most, even more than my own. Yet once I learned she would die soon, it wasn’t her impending death that made me come undone; it was her life and what would it mean for her (and for me) if she lived, without half of her stomach, always haunted by death, not knowing when the cancer would come back or when she would no longer be able to walk. As sad as knowing she would die soon made me, I knew I could handle her death. I wasn’t sure that I could handle her painful, yet inevitable, journey towards it.

Butler contrasts her notion of the livable/bearable life with the good life and argues that the good life is only available to people whose lives are already possible and recognizable and who don’t have to devote most of their energy to figuring out ways to survive and persist (Undoing Gender, 31-32). For her, the question of the livable life must necessarily precede the question of the good life, because to strive for a good life, one must first be recognized as having a life (Undoing Gender, 205).

My mom started falling down a lot. It wasn’t safe for her to be alone. The decision was made to begin hospice care. She was no longer living with cancer; she was dying from it. She had entered the final stage. Any thoughts about a cure or remission—that hope for a good life to be achieved again in the future—was replaced by practical discussions of how to ensure that she continued to have a comfortable life that was free of pain. The good or even livable life were no longer possible for her. The best she could hope for was the bearable life. And what she could expect (and eventually did reach) was something that seemed even less than the bare minimum requirements of life. Yet, even as I witnessed her decline and the resultant shift from good to livable to bearable to unbearable life, I can’t really make sense of her experiences of those last four years (or even the last six months) as just surviving until the inevitable. Up until those last days, years after she was supposed to die, she lived and, in moments, however fleeting, flourished. She enjoyed life, she laughed, and she loved her daughters, her grandchildren and my dad.

What makes for the livable life? How do we distinguish that life from ones that are merely bearable or others that flourish? Who gets to make this distinction and how do they do it? My mother’s living and dying with pancreatic cancer pushed at the limits of my understandings of life and how and when it is possible.

Some questions prompted by this fragment: This idea of the livable vs the good life speaks to my interest in virtue ethics. What would a virtue ethics based on the livable life as opposed to the good life look like?

I am struck by the slippage in Butler’s text between the livable and bearable life. What are the differences between these two forms of life? How did my mom, as she attempted to balance her medications and struggled to cope with ever-decreasing mobility, slip between the livable and bearable life?

How does thinking about my experiences living and grieving beside my mom in relation to the livable life (as opposed to the grievable life) shift my perspective on the entire process? What links can I draw between the livable life and care giving and receiving? In the context of a person living and dying with pancreatic cancer, what types of care are required for the livable life?

Fragments of Grief, part 3

Here is the third of five fragments that I place beside each other in my experimental essay on living and grieving beside Judith:

I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, aproject, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled. …Something takes hold, but is this something coming from the self, from the outside, or from some region where the difference between the two is indeterminable? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? In what are we tied? And by what are we seized (Undoing Gender, 18)?

Central to Butler’s understanding and promotion of grief is the idea that grief interrupts life as we know it or as we think we know it. Hit by waves of sadness and loss, we come undone and are forced to recognize our own dependence on others and our vulnerability in the midst of those others. This recognition is described in relation to loss: the loss of certainty, loss of autonomy, and loss of control. Butler envisions these feelings of loss as having the potential for opening us to new ways of being human and of forming connections with others.

The social worker told us that we needed to let our mom know it was okay to let go. We needed to tell her that she had our permission to die. One of my sisters planned a big dinner for mom and the three of us readied ourselves for the painful conversation. Just before dinner I turned on some music–The Sound of Music. Spontaneously I, sometimes with my two sisters joining in, performed the entire musical. At one point, maybe when I was singing “The Lonely Goatherd,” I realized that this was one of those big moments in my life. My mom may have been dying, but she was laughing too. Well, at least her eyes were laughing. And we were all having a lot of fun. Towards the end of the album, when Mother Superior sings “Climb Every Mountain,” I hit the high note! I mean, I really hit the high note–vibrato and all. We laughed and laughed and then brought our mom her dinner, forgetting all about the painful conversation we were supposed to have.

Sometimes life interrupts grief, not the other way around. Our best intentions of properly grieving are undone. Our attempts at making sense of how grief is supposed to be are troubled by life’s persistent refusal to stop happening. To have our belief in self-mastery and autonomy be interrupted by someone or something greater than us doesn’t always just signal loss and demand that we grieve; it can also signal life and joy and invite us to laugh and to live.

My mom was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in mid-October 2005. I was about 18 weeks pregnant with Rosie. A few days before I drove to Chicago to see her, maybe for the last time, I had an ultrasound. I found out that my baby was a girl. When I arrived at my parent’s house, I told my mom that she was going to have another granddaughter named after her: Rosemary Judith. I was fairly certain that my mom would never meet Rosie J; the doctor had indicated that she might only have six weeks left. Six months later, my mom took a break from chemotherapy to visit us and meet her new granddaughter. From the moment she was born, Rosie exuded life and joy. Her spirit and joy of life were amazing and infectious; she compelled you to engage with her and the world, whether you wanted to or not.

There is something else that resides next to (beside) and in addition to (besides) grief as we struggle to make sense of our human vulnerability and the ways in which we are done and undone by others; joy is another “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way” (18). While Butler briefly mentions the importance of joy, in the form of pleasure, she focuses her ethical and political project almost exclusively on grief. As I found out the night I sang with my sisters and as I am repeatedly reminded as I look at Rosie J, grief and joy reside in the midst of each other and sometimes in spite of each other.

More of my thoughts on this fragment: For the past several years now I have become increasingly interested in the importance of joy/playfulness/laughter as forms of productive troublemaking, critical thinking, and resistance/transformation. I want to think about how joy functions in the midst of struggle/grief/resistance instead of thinking about it as either: a. as something that is not possible in spaces where one is merely trying to survive and b. as something that only exists to provide comfort or a respite from intense grief and/or struggle. [note: having written and read extensively about joy in relation to Luce Irigaray, and to a lesser extent Cixous and Kristeva, I am not so interested in thinking of joy as jouissance and reading it primarily as pleasure–although I do believe that that is a valuable project/set of projects].

In the case of the night I sang for my mother/with my sisters, I want to read the joy that we experienced as more than a survival tactic or something that could provide a temporary break from the harsh reality of my mom’s impending death and the conversation that we needed to have about letting go. It seems to me that something deeper was going on, something that speaks to the significance of joy as that which can and does exist in the midst and independently of grief. This joy doesn’t happen in order to lessen our grief or to cope with it, instead it just happens at the same time we are grieving.

Addendum from June 3, 2010: This summer I am fortunate enough to have two writing partners to work with/be inspired by. Yesterday I discussed this section with one of them and they (Z) had a great critical comment about the joy section. Z said that she was missing the joy in this section. Instead of showing it, I simply wrote about it. She also asked, what do you mean by joy? These were very helpful comments.

My idea of joy is somewhat akin to Audre Lorde’s vision of the erotic in “The Erotic as Power” and Maria Lugones’ notion of loving playfulness in “Playfulness, World-Traveling and Loving Perception”. I see joy as being fully present in life and living. To me, joy is oriented towards life, while grief is oriented towards death. More on this later…

Z thought I wasn’t able to fully convey joy in my Sound of Music fragment. I agree and I realized why. The joy in that passage still seems to be too much about grief–that moment doesn’t really interrupt the grief; it is a part of it and the process. My vision of life interrupting grief is much more connected to my experiences with my daughter Rosie J–experiences that are completely out of the context and not in proximity to grief. And they are connected to those experiences with my mom that were not about her dying, but connected me to her and how we lived besdie each other before her diagnosis. Maybe I need to connect the singing to my mom with the singing we used to do together and the singing I do with Rosie? Maybe I also need to add in another italicized fragment about Rosie-as-full-of-life?

Fragments of Grief, part 2

Here is the second of five fragments that I place beside each other in my experimental essay on living and grieving beside Judith:

The attempt to foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration, is surely also to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way (Undoing Gender, 23).

In Precarious Life, Undoing Gender, and Frames of War, Butler repeatedly emphasizes the importance of grief and vulnerability. She discusses the value of grief in relation to those who have been denied the right to grieve their loved ones and/or have had their own lives considered not worthy of grieving, and therefore not fully human. She also describes how grief, as a state of being and as a non-violent response to others, is urgently needed if we are “interested in arresting cycles of violence” (Precarious Life). Much of Butler’s discussion of grief is in the context of two specific historical, cultural, social events: the AIDS crisis and GLBTQ communities’ inability to grieve their lost loved ones and post 9/11 and the U.S. government’s quick and very violent response to the terrorist attacks in New York City. In these situations grief is the thing needed because grief has been so unjustly or unwisely denied and/or foreclosed.

But, even as Butler devotes considerable attention to specific contexts in which grief needs to be promoted, she has grander aims for how and why we should value grief. She believes that grief is a valuable state to be in and is an important part of what it means to be human. Grief, and the vulnerability and sociality of the self that it reveals, help to guide us as we struggle to develop less violent ways to exist in the midst of/beside others.

I was always so tired. I had been living with my mom’s impending death for 3 years and she was really starting to look bad. My dad warned me that it would probably get a lot worse. My daughter had just turned three and was entering a new phase, the “I hate you” phase. With no warning and for no apparent reason, she would matter-of-factly state, “I hate you.” It was really hard to hear. I wondered, how can I be a good mother when I am sad all of the time? What is it doing to my daughter to live in the shadow of this death and my grief over it? Were her repeated declarations of hate more than a phase that all 3 year olds go through? Was she trying to warn me that I was failing as a mom and remind me that I was more than a daughter losing a mom, but also a mother who needed to care for her daughter?

While I agree that being in a state of grief is valuable and can help to remind us of our vulnerability in the midst of others, it can also place unrealistic and unhealthy demands on us. It is difficult to balance the need and/or desire to grieve with the demand to care for others. Are there other resources, aside from grief, that can guide us as we navigate the difficult terrain of being a daughter losing a mother and a mother raising a daughter?

The first two years of my mom’s terminal illness weren’t too bad. Even though she had been diagnosed with a death sentence (6 months to live), she was able to qualify for surgery and undergo chemotherapy. She experienced a miracle recovery, welcomed two new grandchildren into the world, and traveled to Paris and Sydney. Then the tumor came back. Slowly she deteriorated. First one of her wrists became numb so she couldn’t do any of her artwork. Then her anxiety and the morphine she had been taking daily for two years already made it almost impossible for her to read. Then she started falling down a lot. Suddenly one day she couldn’t walk. My sisters and my dad arranged for hospice at home. We thought she was about to die, but we were wrong. She looked terrible. She couldn’t talk. She could barely eat. She slept a lot. Yet she continued to live. To me she was already gone. I wanted desperately to grieve her loss, but I couldn’t; she was still alive. I was tired of being in a state of grief, yet not able to grieve. Tired of witnessing her suffering and feeling helpless and unable to alleviate it. Four years of waiting, with uncertainty, for her death is a long time.

As someone who has spent the last four years grieving for a mother dying an excruciatingly slow and painful death, I am not interested in mining the ethical and transformative possibilities of grief. I don’t want to keep grieving; I want to stop grieving and I want to think about what other resources I have for guiding me as I attempt to recognize and live with my vulnerability. What about humor, joy or even wonder? Are there ways to think about risking uncertainty and our unknowingness that are not connected to violence and grief as something that is only negative and that always signals loss–-of control, of autonomy, of stability?