Midwifing Death

My grandfather’s eyelids flicker, and my grandmother says, “Look! He’s opening his eyes!” There is a crowd of family gathered around my grandfather’s bed to witness this wonder, and there is delight in my grandmother’s voice.

I am struck by how much shepherding a man out of life is like welcoming a child into it. I saw the same thing just a few months ago, when one of my cousins died. At the viewing, my aunt fluttered around his body, stroking his hair. When she saw me, she asked, “Jess, have you seen him yet?” and it was like she was asking me if I’d had a chance to hold the baby. Her grief was incalculable and uncontainable, but, in her last moments with her son’s body, she fell into a pattern that mirrored the one she discovered when she first took him in her arms.

I have encountered the concept of midwifing death before, but I always figured it required some sort of conscious, distinctly New Age process—possibly including the burning of sage bundles. Now I see that it is what families and communities do organically. And, now that I have become a mother and tended an infant myself, I can see that caring for my grandfather is not all that different from caring for my baby.

Frances was, for all practical purposes, helpless when she was born. But she came into this world with a will, and Ted and I found our lives reordered by her cries, reacting to her forceful presence and preparing for a future that, all of the sudden, stretched beyond our own span of days. My grandfather is helpless now, too, but he is past crying. We are guided instead by the full weight of his lived life, by our experience of him and our knowledge of his wishes, and by our desire to ease his passage if we can.

 

 

My grandfather died a month ago. He died at home, surrounded by his family. He died in the house where he had lived for 50 years. He died in a bed that had been set up where the sofa usually sits, which is to say that he died in the same spot where he had watched a million PGA tournaments and taken a million naps.

During one of his last lucid periods, a nurse asked my grandfather a series of questions—the names of his children, the year, the name of the President—to test his coherence. He passed her test, and then he offered her twenty bucks to take him home. Kidding on the square was my grandfather’s signature comic motif. He was unconscious most of the time during his last days, and, before that, he had been mostly incoherent for awhile. But, to the extent that he communicated at all, he communicated his wish to be at home. When he was in the hospital, he would ask for his shoes, telling my grandma that he needed to get to work. He suggested that they sneak out down the back stairs. I realize that his mind was disordered by dementia, but I think it’s worth noting that his confused thoughts all tended in one direction: home.

My grandmother did not encounter any death panels. What she encountered instead was a social worker who was absolutely scornful of my grandmother’s insistence that she and her family and neighbors could care for my grandfather at home, a social worker who refused to even tell my grandmother about the incredible hospice support available to her. So, if we’re going to talk about bureaucrats pressuring old people to spare their loved ones the expense of living, we need to also talk about the contrary pressure exerted by contemporary medicine. It’s not easy to let someone die naturally when there are so many means of intervention, so many ways to keep a body going. It’s not easy to stop feeding someone when IV drips and feeding tubes are an option, and not when you’ve been feeding that person for more than fifty years.

We also need to talk about the fact that the modern American way of dying is an aberration. Death has—much like birth—been medicalized. My grandma’s insistence that my grandfather die at home—so repugnant to the social worker—was completely consistent with human practice across time and across cultures. The hospice nurse was impressed that my grandmother knew how to change a bed with a patient in it. My grandmother explained that it was something she learned in Home Ec.—in Akron, Ohio, in the 1940s. My great grandmother probably knew how to wash a body for burial.

So, the idea that acknowledging and planning for death shouldn’t be a part of health care makes me angry in a raw and visceral kind of way right now. But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about how proud I am of my grandma and my family. I am so grateful for their courage, for their steadfast determination to take my grandpa home and let him die.  I also want to thank them for giving me a new way to understand death. I have always feared its infinitude, but now I know that death can also be homely, small enough to fit into a suburban living room. Now I understand—for the first time, really—that death is a part of life, and I am so glad that I was able to be there for that part of my grandfather’s life.  

Reductio ad Glennbeckium, or, Shut off His Mic!

I was a religion major as an undergrad. I found that, when religious people discovered that I was majoring in religion,  they often wanted to talk to me about religion. It didn’t take many of these encounters to notice a pattern: Ostensibly friendly conversation would quickly turn to argument, and the debate would be one I was destined to lose. At some point, my interlocutor would present something as fact that I found dubious. I would ask for the source of this position, and the response would be, “It’s in the Bible. The first few times I had this experience, I would opine that my debate partner was offering an interpretation of Scripture, at which point I would be assured that, no, the other party was giving me a “literal” reading—that is, she wasn’t telling me what she thought the Bible meant; she was, rather, telling me what it actually said. This is why I was destined to lose these debates: I was arguing against God.

I find that a similar dynamic pertains with fans of Glenn Beck. To his loyal viewers, he is a fearless champion of the truth, while the nation’s paper of record and similar news outfits are exemplars of liberal media: craven, self-serving and fatally compromised by a leftist agenda. How can mere facts compete with such belief? How is it possible to engage in rational discussion with someone who can watch, say, this and still maintain that Glenn Beck is a serious  journalist and a patriot committed to healing an ideologically divided nation? How is it possible to engage in rational discussion with anyone who can watch, for example, this and still maintain that Glenn Beck is anything other than a slandering, hate-mongering douche bag peddling half-truths and outright lies for his own aggrandizement?

Just as I once forswore talking to religious people about religion, I must now forgo talking to Glenn Beck devotees about Glenn Beck or any of the positions he advances. I wasn’t altogether happy about the former, as I was interested in the varieties of religious experience and would have enjoyed the opportunity to engage in a discussion of religious belief that didn’t devolve into homophobic, sexist, or anti-choice bullshit (and I mean bullshit from a fairly informed theological perspective). Similarly, I am saddened by the realization that trying to engage Glenn Beck’s fans in civil, rational discourse is doomed by the fact that Glenn Beck is, himself, apparently incapable of—or inimical to—civility and reason.

So allow me to suggest a new rhetorical principle—let’s call it reductio ad Glennbeckium—which states that anyone who takes Glenn Beck seriously automatically forfeits any claim to truth or respectability. I’m sorry that it’s come to this, but, fuck it: I’m tired of losing.

A Worthy Adversary

I read this article on the closing of Dr. George Tiller’s clinic yesterday and I can’t get it out of my head. It’s the final two paragraphs that I can’t stop thinking about:

As he explained himself, Mr. Gietzen did something unexpected. He spoke admiringly of the man he reflexively referred to as “Abortionist Tiller.” He said he was “very smart” and a “great businessman.” He said that if he had been in town he would have attended Dr. Tiller’s funeral to pay his respects.

“A worthy adversary,” he said. “He was right back at us.”

 

Mark Gietzen is the chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life. He made it his organization’s particular goal to shut down Dr. Tiller’s clinic. Speaking of his own work and that of other anti-choice activists, Gietzen said, ““We wanted it to get to the point where it was no longer feasible to stay open.”

Here’s my problem: If you think that abortion is murder, and if your objective is to eradicate it, shouldn’t you want an opponent to simply surrender?

Gietzen’s appreciation for his “worthy adversary”—not to mention his devotion to elaborate stagecraft and publicity—suggests that he is more invested in waging his battle than winning it. This, to me, unconscionable. I don’t have reason to suspect the sincerity of Gietzen’s opposition to abortion, but his comments make it seem very much as if his activism is not just about saving the “unborn”, but also about power and control.

Even a cursory look at the anti-choice movement shows that many—if not most—of its leaders are men, and that there is significant overlap between anti-choice groups and Christian churches that espouse a theological basis for the subordination of women. I will not be the first to argue that this is no coincidence.

Our Babies, Ourselves

When I first saw the cover of November 28 New York Times Magazine, I was eager to read Alex Kuczynski’s story about having a child via surrogate—not so much because I am especially interested in infertility, but because Kuczynski is a writer I love to hate. I was pretty sure that her first-person narrative was going to give me plenty of fuel for my antipathy.

I was pretty much right, but, after a couple of pages, though, I thought to myself, “This is only going to make you crazy and filled with spite, and then you are going to feel guilty and conflicted about the spite because you don’t actually know what it’s like to want a baby and not be able to have one, and that’s just no fun at all.” (I still have not processed all my thoughts and more instinctive reactions to Sarah Palin; indeed, I doubt that any feminist has, and I believe that there could be a whole women’s studies conference devoted to collectively navigating that cognitive and emotional thicket). So, I closed the magazine, but not before I looked at all the photos, which were—as has been noted by the Public Editor and others—outrageous.

I did read the letters to the editor in the latest issue of the magazine, of which there were many. I found this one to be the most interesting, as it raised some substantive, philosophical issues that hadn’t been addressed elsewhere:

In words that echo Aristotle’s view that a woman is a receptacle for the life force implanted by a man through intercourse, the author refers to Cathy Hilling as “the woman who carried our child” and explains, “Strictly speaking, she was a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby.” The title of the article, “Her Body, My Baby,” engages in the same obliterating action, with the author as the stand-in life-force impregnator, situated outside the nine-month process of creating a child but claiming responsibility for and complete ownership of the result. And Kuczynski perceives Cathy as participating in this reduction of her role when she likens herself to an Easy-Bake oven.

That simplistic formulation of so-called gestational surrogacy (“organ rental,” per Kuczynski) may have helped two strangers leap over chasms they couldn’t have traversed otherwise. But it is a shortcut that relies on denigrating concepts, concepts that have historically led to inhumane treatment. As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word “mother,” we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts.

A woman’s body and the growing being inside her participate in an astounding symphony for about 40 weeks to build from egg and sperm a human that can survive outside the woman’s body. The woman’s feelings, thoughts, meals and actions influence that symphony, helping create what the growing being experiences at every moment. Yet Kuczynski literally reduces Cathy’s whole self to her uterus. This is a disturbing denigration of a beautiful, astoundingly complex phenomenon that builds life and that bonds most living beings and their offspring for life.

JANET BENTON
Wyncote, Pa.

After reading this, I wondered what my favorite fertility-challenged blogger would have to say about Kuczynski’s article, and I was surprised—and somewhat chastened—by what I found. It was salutary to be reminded that, while Kuczynski’s wealth made it possible to afford 11 IVF cycles, it probably didn’t do anything to relieve the pain she experienced when those attempts to become pregnant failed. And I know that money didn’t help her overcome the grief of 4 miscarriages. I thought about this, and I also thought about the most elegant line from that very wise letter I quoted above: “As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word ‘mother,’ we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts.” My dislike for Kuczynski—which is, if I’m honest about it, mostly sour grapes—allowed me to take a shortcut through her story. It allowed me to dehumanize her, to ignore her very real pain and the complexity of her situation—a situation I have never had to confront. I like to think that I’m better than that, and it’s good to be reminded that I should be.

Why Americans Are Fat

From a Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon ad in the Sunday, August 17, edition of the Lansing State Journal: A never-ending serving of our tender steak medallions cut into bite-size pieces, hand-breaded, golden-fried then tossed in your choice of spicy Sidewinder BBQ, Buffalo (mild, hot, or Texas hot) or plain Texas Traditional. Served with choice of ranch or bleu cheese dipping sauce and bottomless steak fries.

Still Blue about Obama

I have not burned my “Mama Loves Obama” T-shirt. My “O” badge is still affixed to my messenger bag. Nevertheless, I keep discovering new levels of unhappiness with my candidate.

Yesterday, I posted a response to Barack Obama’s recent comments about women who seek late-term abortions. While reading the complete interview from which his initial remark was drawn, I discovered this exchange:

Strang: You’ve said you’re personally against abortion and would like to see a reduction in the number of abortions under your administration. So, as president, how would do you propose accomplishing that?

Obama: I think we know that abortions rise when unwanted pregnancies rise. So, if we are continuing what has been a promising trend in the reduction of teen pregnancies, through education and abstinence education giving good information to teenagers. That is important—emphasizing the sacredness of sexual behavior to our children. I think that’s something that we can encourage. I think encouraging adoptions in a significant way. I think the proper role of government. So there are ways that we can make a difference, and those are going to be things I focus on when I am president.

The first part of this answer is great. I’m all for reducing the need for abortions and for giving teenagers the facts they need to make smart, healthful decisions about sexual activity. But you will note that, right in between “education” and “good information”, Obama slips in a reference to “abstinence education”.

Obama has been accused of pandering to the right with some frequency of late. I don’t yet have a fully-formed opinion on FISA or government sponsorship of faith-based programs, but I can tell you for sure that I certainly hope that Obama was pandering when he mentioned “abstinence education”, because the thought that he would actually support any such program as President is alarming.

There are no reliable studies suggesting that abstinence-only education works, and there have been several indicating that they do not. Given the evidence we have, government-funded or government-mandated abstinence education programs are like government-funded or government-mandated programs based on phrenology or mesmerism or the healing power of magnets—except that those might be kind of funny, whereas there’s nothing funny about abstinence-only education.

Furthermore, while I’m in favor of teaching kids to respect themselves and their partners, I’m not sure public schools should be responsible for educating kids about “the sacredness of sexual behavior.” That seems like a job for parents and clergy, not public servants.

I loved Bill Clinton when I voted for him in 1992, and I was slightly heartbroken when he jeopardized the most important job in the world for a blow job. I guess I should be glad that I’m getting my disillusionment out of the way early with Obama. But I can tell you for sure that I’m going to be a whole lot more disappointed if the comment quoted above represents his real views on sex ed.

Feeling Blue About Obama

I will be voting for Barack Obama in November. Everybody—well, everybody who cares—knows this already. Nothing Obama says or does between now and then is going to make me vote for John McCain or—saints preserve us—a third-party candidate. However, I must voice my current displeasure with the presumptive Democratic nominee’s suggestion that women sometimes get late-term abortions because they’re “feeling blue”. I feel honor-bound to say something largely because, had a conservative made the same suggestion, I would have been all over that shit.

And shit it most certainly is. I realize that Obama was engaging in some extemporaneous backpedaling, rather than offering a prepared statement, but his words were dismissive and insulting and ignorant, and, unfortunately, his original remark in an interview with Relevant (a magazine that describes itself as a publication for “twentysomething Christians”) isn’t much more reassuring:

...I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.

Both comments show a distressing failure to appreciate the real, lived experiences of most women who have late-term abortions. If you’re interested in understanding this reality, I suggest that you pay a visit to Uppercase Woman, where—with bravery, candor, and understandable weariness—Cecily Kellogg continues to play the role of Internet Poster Girl for Partial-Birth Abortion. The abbreviated version of her account of losing twin sons—prepared, long before Obama made his remarks, for the edification of presidential candidates—will probably make you sad and angry. The long version, which begins here, will devastate you.

If you’re thinking that Cecily’s story is somehow exceptional, that her experience of late-term abortion was atypical, then you may want to read a similar—and similarly heartbreaking—account Lynda Waddington contributed to RH Reality Check in response to Obama’s Relevant interview. Lynda’s story is terrible enough, but this excerpt from the comment thread is possibly even worse:

Your story broke my heart. I too have had two pregnancies which had to be terminated. The first one was at 12 weeks and the fetus was dead and the 2nd was at 9 weeks but the fetus was dying a little bit every day. My doctor at the time refused to terminate the pregnancy until the fetus had died. I was forced to go in day after day and watch my baby’s heart rate get slower and slower…. Finally a nurse practitioner seeing the absolute distress this was causing me offered to fib to the doctor and tell him the heart beat had stopped.

I don’t like abortion. I think that, for most women who choose it, it’s an unhappy and unwelcome choice. And I know that there are people—smart, sincere, well-meaning people—whose views on abortion rights differ from my own. But “partial-birth abortion” is a manufactured issue. I don’t know how any thinking, feeling person would want to compound a grieving mother’s sorrow with laws based on bad science and disgusting—if effective—marketing. And I think it’s unconscionable that an ostensibly free society would jeopardize the emotional, mental, and physical health of it’s female citizens with measures that will not save one child’s life.

I have never been a single-issue voter—and, if I were, I suppose I would be even less inclined to vote for McCain than Obama, since the former’s record on the right to choose is consistently awful. I continue to believe that a Democrat in the White House is immeasurably preferable to a Republican. But, surely, Mr. Obama, you have more respect for women, their powers of reason, and their individual autonomy than the quotations above demonstrate. You need to put your oratorical gifts to work making that clear to those of us feeling a little blue about your recent unfortunate comments.

Myface.com

So, at the last meeting of my class, Seminar in Critical Problems, we discussed an article about hypertext and its literary implications. While commenting on a related article, one decrying the electronic overexposure of today’s youth, the professor mentioned “Myface”. This spoonerism provoked smiles of delight on three faces. Mine was one of them.

After class, I approached one of the other amused students and said, “Hey, I keep meaning to send you a link to my Myface profile.”

He replied, “Cool. You should check out my Spacebook page.”

Myface. Spacebook. That really captures the essence of social networking sites, doesn’t it?

The Unhinged Celebrity as Economic Engine

I worry about the economy of the future. I worry about it because it seems to be based not on Americans making things that other Americans need and will, therefore, buy, but on Americans providing other Americans with pedicures and restaurant meals. This is to say, it seems to me that the economy of the future is not based on anything real and that it will all fall apart if one day everybody wakes up and cancels her appointment for a hot-stone massage. (And, of course, now that I’m a parent, my anxieties about the future have taken on a whole new terrifying urgency.)

Now it seems that, in addition to personal coaches and women with exotic accents who specialize in shaping eyebrows, a new class of service-providers has entered the unreal workforce: the celebrity scapegoat. This person does not need to produce music that we want to hear or movies that we want to see. She doesn’t even have to sell her name to clothing manufacturers or cosmetic companies. Rather, she graces us with the spectacle of her personal derangement. I am, of course, referring primarily to the Britney-Industrial Complex, but I can foresee a whole class of semi-famous lunatics who entertain us with their antics while providing us with a rock-bottom example against which to favorably compare ourselves. I can foresee it because, while I have never purchased a single note of music by Ms. Spears, nor have I even smelled her perfumes, I did buy Us Weekly, People, OK!, and Star last week when she was on their covers.

[THANKS TO C. FOR THE LINK.]

Reading Aristotle While My Sick Baby Naps

I have a daughter. She’s eighteen-months-old. She has a runny nose and a terrible cough, and she’s had then for awhile. She’s sick. Her illness is not life-threatening, but it’s serious, and it might be the start of something chronic, something persistent and time-consuming and sad. It requires multiple medications. It leaves me weary and worried—by which I mean more weary and worried than usual.

While she naps, I read Aristotle. I read the Poetics. As Aristotle describes the qualities of good poetry, he demonstrates many of them in his text, and just as pleasure is one of the effects of good poetry, so do I find that it is one of the effects of reading the Poetics. Learning, as Aristotle argues, is gratifying, and it’s simultaneously humbling and uplifting to recognize that the features of compelling narrative that the philosopher identified more than two thousand years ago still pertain today. This treatise is large enough to be grand in scope, but the whole is still comprehensible. Aristotle arranges the elements of art neatly by genera and species, and one thought follows logically from the one preceding it.

The world of the Poetics could hardly be more different from my own world when my daughter is awake. At the best of times, life with Frances is one of barely contained chaos, and, while her illness has added regularity in the form of medicines to be administered at set intervals, it has disorganized her sleep and her eating and, certainly, the schedule that my husband struggle to maintain so that we can get some work done. And there’s snot everywhere. Everywhere. To read the Poetics is to be released into a type of harmonious order that does not exist elsewhere in my life.

It occurs to me, while I read, that my daughter and I do not make for good poetry. The relationship between mother and child can be an appropriate subject for drama, but the boring fact is that I love my daughter, and her illness has not tested or transformed that love. It has not twisted it into something dark and deadly. There is an inescapable hopelessness to mother-love—it is never perfectly requited—but, thus far, my love for Frances is not suitable for tragedy.

It occurs to me, also, that, our lack of artistic appeal is just one aspect—and hardly a vital one—of our general imperfection. It occurs to me as I write about my daughter and the Poetics that the fact that I have given birth should, as Aristotle has argued elsewhere, exempt me from assaying his work at all. My child is the sign of my permeability, my changeableness, my incompleteness, my lack of reason. Just as a good poem must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so must the ideal human be finished, self-contained, and well-ordered. I think about Frances’s incessantly runny nose and I think about our pitiable wetness, our lack of vital heat. I think about the mess a child creates, and the bodily excrescences are the least of it: Frances and I are entangled in an emotional mess, too, an intense interdependence that will never be resolved and that is, by all the aesthetic metrics that Aristotle defines, grotesque. It is, if I’m being honest, appalling to me, too, sometimes, and, even though my thoughts on the Poetics no longer echo Aristotle’s stately calm, I can return to the text and find that it is still as soothingly rational as it was when I left it.

My daughter wakes up, and I leave the Poetics with a pang of longing and a brief flash of annoyance. And I realize that the Poetics is so appealing to me—at least in part—because I can, in fact, leave it. The Poetics exists outside of me. It exists without me. It doesn’t need me, and, really, I don’t need it. My daughter, on the other hand, exists because of me, which means that, now, I exist for her. I hear her cry, and I go.