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.

Chaucer Playing Tetris: Archival Interview with Lev Grossman

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Lev Grossman has a new novel coming out (it’s called The Magicians, and it’s wonderful), and I have decided to mark the occasion by dusting off this conversation we had when Codex was first released. Among the many, many author interviews I have conducted, this one stands out as a favorite. I love Codex, Grossman was a lot of fun to talk to, and—if I do say so myself—this is a fine example of literary interrogation: It enriches the reader’s experience of the book, and both interviewer and interviewer come off as pretty smart.

I did this interview while I was working for Borders, so there’s one thing I couldn’t say then—back when Dan Brown was basically signing my paychecks—that I’d like to add now: Every positive comment you’ve ever heard or read about The Da Vinci Code—e.g., favorable comparisons to The Name of the Rose—that are patently untrue of that work are probably true of Codex.

Interview conducted in 2004

Investment banker Edward Wozny is on vacation when his firm assigns him the task of helping a powerful, enigmatic client organize a personal library. This mildly irritating and seemingly innocuous job lures Edward out of his mundane existence and into a strange universe of rare books, medieval mysticism, and aristocratic intrigue. 

Codex is Edward’s story. It’s also the story of a missing manuscript—a strange and beguiling text that may or may not have been written by a 14th-century historian—and of a particularly hypnotic computer game. Lev Grossman weaves these imaginative artifacts into an utterly absorbing mystery.

What part of this novel came to you first—the manuscript, the game, or the main character?

Lev Grossman: Oddly enough, the title came to me first. I can vividly remember walking down a hill near where I was living at the time—in some crappy grad-student apartment—and thinking, “Codex: That’s a snappy title. I think I’ll write a book about it.” But the book really came out of the summer of ’95… You know, I’ve spent a really long time writing this book. Anyway, that summer I was working in the rare books library at Yale—it’s called the Beinecke. I was immersed in an incredibly weird and seductive world of extremely rare and valuable of books. It’s a real Willy Wonka moment, when you get to go behind the circulation desk, where they keep all the <i>really</i> good stuff that nobody else gets to see. Suddenly you’re fondling letters written by Joyce and Tennyson. I felt like this was something I had to know more about, and something I wanted to write about.

I’m guessing from your use of the word "fondling" that you had an affection for books before you worked in the rare-books library?

LG: I was already a book lover, definitely. But I don’t think I lapsed into full-on bibliophilia until I worked at the Beinecke. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in contact with something that felt so much like a sacred object as some of the texts I encountered at that library. My first day, when I was going through these letters written by William Beckford—who I happened to be reading for a course at the time—and my tiny mind was just simply blown by it.

There are other novels about the search for a text—The Name of the Rose and Possession come to mind immediately. In both those stories the protagonists are obsessed with books from the start. The labyrinthine, sometimes dangerous, situations in which they find themselves are the result of a pre-existing condition. But your hero, Edward, isn’t particularly interested in books before he embarks on his adventure. His experiences in bibliomania are a weird, secret, otherworldly interlude in an otherwise very normal life.

LG: I wanted Edward to begin the book as a philistine, but also a sort of latent bibliophile. He’s a very crass, not unintelligent, but very ordinary bloke. I wanted him to feel the dreamlike rush of being plunged into a strange new world, and to discover in himself these desires and obsessions that he had never known before. I didn’t want him to be an insufferable pedant—because I’m an insufferable pedant and I know how unpleasant that is. I wanted to see him go all the way from being an ordinary fellow to being something that he’d never thought he would become.

Continue reading "Chaucer Playing Tetris: Archival Interview with Lev Grossman"

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.

Recent Acquisitions

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren

Ladies of Fantasy: Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by the Gentle Sex, selected by Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis

Pendragon: Arthur and His Britain by Joseph P. Clancy

The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World, edited by Albert B. Friedman

Happy Father’s Day

  Frances and I worked on this project together. Instructions for origami shirt-and-tie card here.

Interview with Virginia Kantra

If she didn't have sex with something soon, she would burst out of her skin.

So begins Sea Witch, the first novel in Virginia Kantra’s Children of the Sea trilogy. While most paranormal romance authors deploy incredibly complicated plot devices to make it acceptable for their heroines to go all the way with sultry strangers within the first thirty pages or so, Kantra refuses to offer any sort of narrative apologia. Instead, she presents readers with a protagonist who is driven purely by her own physical need. Of course, it makes a difference that Kantra’s heroine is a selkie—a seal who assumes a woman’s shape on land.

The authors of paranormal romance regularly borrow from folklore in their search for resonant tropes and characters, but Kantra makes particularly deft use of her source material. In Sea Witch, for example, she exploits her heroine’s non-human status to teasingly challenge readers’ expectations.  She is working within the genre while pushing against its boundaries. Her subtlety is exceptional. One of the big surprises in the interview below is the revelation that Sea Witch was, in part, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid.” Magred’s slow transformation from selkie to human shows no traces of Andersen’s heavy-handed moralizing. Kantra is able to give her heroine a soul while preserving the ambiguity and ambivalence of the folkloric selkie.

On your Website, you say that you’ve always enjoyed fairy tales. Have you had a lifelong interest in folklore, as well, or is that something that you’ve only recently begun to study? What folklore are you interested in at the moment?

Virginia Kantra: As soon as I had a library card, I read my way through Andrew Lang's collections of fairy tales—all twelve volumes!—which were originally published around the turn of the century.  A lot of those are based on folk tales from all over the world.

Growing up, I didn't make a distinction between fairy tales and folklore.  My father was an English professor.  The bookshelves in our living room were jammed with Aristophanes, Ovid, Pope, and Milton on one side of the fireplace and Chesterton, Belloc, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough on the other.  I categorized everything as either "stuff I could read" or "boring stuff."

I'm developing more Children of the Sea stories, which as you know use the legend of the selkie, but I'm expanding the role of the finfolk, based on another bit of Orkney folklore.  I'm also intrigued by the legend of the njugl, the Shetland water horse, and trying to think how to fit that in with my current project. 

The Children of the Sea novels are not, of course, your first works. What inspired you to embark on this series?

VK: At the same time I was writing my first two romantic suspense novels for Berkley, I also did a couple of novellas based on legends about the fair folk.  I had what I thought was the idea for another contemporary romantic suspense: police chief on a remote island in Maine finds a naked woman who’s been attacked on the beach.  

And then I thought . . . What if she wasn’t human?

The “naked” bit set me off, I think.  There are folk tales up and down the British coast about the selkie, shape-shifters who take the form of seals in the ocean and cast off their pelts—get naked—to come ashore as beautiful men and women who have sex with humans.  Which is a fabulous fantasy if you are a lonely sailor and a pretty unarguable explanation if you are an unmarried village maiden who can’t possibly name, say, the married butcher as the father of your baby. 

It was that juxtaposition, that tension between land and sea, between the contemporary, pragmatic, police procedural world of my hero and the timeless, sensual, magical world of my heroine, that totally hooked me into the first story and into the series.

One of the things that I found most striking when I read Sea Witch was the beginning: Magred is a female character looking for sex—not love—when she goes ashore. It struck me that an author can do things with a non-human character that might be difficult to do with a human character; that is, behavior that's acceptable for a selkie might not be acceptable in a human. Do you find it liberating to work with supernatural beings?

VK: I did reverse gender expectations a little there, didn't I?  Genre expectations, too, perhaps.  At least one reviewer criticized Margred for not falling in love sooner, for not being "human enough." 

For me, non-human characters are a way to explore what makes us truly human: the capacity to choose, to love, to commit.  I wanted to take Margred's "otherness" seriously, both as a non-human character with a unique point of view and as a way of exploring human relationships.   I had to consider how Margred’s experience and emotions within her element—her environment, the sea—would affect her thoughts and decisions on land.  There’s a recurring line in the books that I use to capture the children of the sea:  “We flow as the sea flows.”  I adored writing Margred because she’s so amazingly sensual and sexually confident, but has so much to learn about faith, love, and tenderness.   

Romance novels are often compared to fairy tales, and they do share many structural similarities. And paranormal romance novels, in particular, borrow from folklore. But paranormal romances also tend to have a sense of cosmic danger—the heroine is often caught up in a battle between vast forces, a battle with far-reaching consequences—that is generally absent from folktales. How does this tension between your folkloric source materials and the demands of the genre affect your work?

VK: What you're saying is probably true about the majority of paranormal romance, but frankly, I don't think about the "demands of the genre" when I'm writing.  For me, high personal stakes trump cosmic consequences every time. 

But even in fairy tales, you'll notice, the characters' choices often have implications for their larger worlds.  We miss that sometimes as modern readers because we don't think of princes and princesses as part of a recognized social order.  "Cinderella," for example, hinges on dynastic realities—the prince must marry because the kingdom needs an heir.  When the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" offends the witch, his entire kingdom suffers for his sin.  Even the superstitions surrounding the practice of the corn maiden have implications for the harvest.  So once I have the characters and their personal conflicts in place, I do look for those kinds of larger consequences as a way of upping the stakes.

Have you been inspired by any particular folktales—rather than just the idea of selkies—in shaping the plots or characters of your Children of the Sea novels or "Sea Crossing"?

VK: Absolutely. I got the idea of linking the first three books from an old shanty, "The Keeper of the Eddystone Light": "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light, and he married a mermaid one fine night.  Of that union, there came three..." 

Sea Witch borrows pretty freely from Hans Christian Andersen's original "The Little Mermaid," especially in terms of Margred's search for a soul:

“So I shall die,” said the little mermaid, “and as the foam of the sea I shall be driven about never again to hear the music of the waves, or to see the pretty flowers nor the red sun. Is there anything I can do to win an immortal soul?”

The whole mythology I created for the elementals and the "First Creation" is of course patterned on the Creation story in Genesis.

Sea Fever doesn't draw on any particular source, but the upcoming Sea Lord was definitely inspired by Hades' abduction of Persephone, including the rape in the garden and the setting of the story in fall and winter.  Perhaps because I was already using all that harvest imagery, I also used the tradition of the corn maiden. 

Since you can't get a look at that book before May, I'm pasting in the relevant bit below. 

    He slid his knife from the sheath at his knee.

    Corn stood around them in patches, skeletons of summer among the stakes and twine.  Conn gathered a sheaf in one arm and, bending, sliced it through in a single stroke close to the ground.  He bound the dried stalks together with twine, tying them to form a waist, a neck, legs.  The shock at the top he left loose like long, stiff hair. 

    He laid the corn maiden on the ground beside Lucy, measuring its length with his eyes.  They were almost the same size.  He dressed the sheaf in the girl's clothing, forcing the jeans over the stalks of its legs, bundling its body into the shirt.  He was sweating when he finished.  Bits of dust and broken chaff clung to his skin.

    Kneeling beside Lucy, he gathered her hair in one hand the way he'd gathered the corn, counting the strands across his palm, one, two, three...seven.  Her face was still, her skin cold and pale. 
    An unexpected twinge caught him beneath the ribs.  He used sex as a tool, a weapon.  He did not expect it to turn like a knife in his hand.  But his feelings, her feelings, could not be allowed to matter.  He did what he must do.

    Fisting his hand around the strands of her hair, he yanked them out by the roots.
    Her breath escaped her lips in a silent cry.  A drop of blood beaded at her scalp, but his magic compelled her to sleep.
    He set his teeth, touching his finger to the blood and then to the center of the bundled corn, the claidheag, where the corn maiden's heart would beat.  If such a creature had a heart.  His fingertip burned.  He felt the heat flow upward through his arm, power building and pulsing like a headache.  He tied the seven strands of hair over the twine at the top.
    "Know," he commanded.  The pressure hammered at his temples.    He blew into the featureless face.  "Breathe."
    He pressed the heel of his palm between Lucy's legs, still wet with her essence and his seed.  The magic gripped his neck like claws, sinking fangs into his skull, squeezing his brain.  He smeared his wet hand over the dry husks of the claidheag, anointing it with life.  "Be."
    He felt the surge, the shock of focused power, leap from him to the sheaf on the ground.
    Done.
    The power ebbed away, leaving him drained, his head throbbing with the aftermath of magic, and the claidheag stiff and still.
    Conn inhaled, holding his breath to fill the sudden emptiness of his chest.
    Lucy slept, unknowing.
    He lifted her body in his arms and carried her away, leaving his handiwork lying behind them in the field.

    The dried stalks rattled together.  Know.
    The wind whispered.  Breathe.
    The earth radiated warmth.  Be.
    The breeze teased the bundle on the ground.  The claidheag's hair, the pale gold of corn husks or straw, fluttered, smoothing, softening.  Beneath the swaddling clothes, its limbs swelled and grew supple, taking on substance, taking on flesh. 
    From the branches of a spruce, a crow launched, squawking in protest or warning. 
    The corn maiden opened its eyes, the green yellow of pumpkin vines.  Lucy's eyes, in Lucy's face.
    It lay in the field, watching the clouds chase across the sky, absorbing the last rays of the sun, listening to the chatter of the wind.  
    A catbird landed on a nearby stake, cocked a fierce, bright eye and flew away again.  An ant, wandering the furrows, traced a trail over the claidheag's motionless hand.  Slowly, thought formed, a pale shoot from a kernel of consciousness. 
    It did not belong here, cut down, cut off from the earth. 
    Not anymore. 
    Sighing, the claidheag raised on one elbow and then to its knees.  To its feet.  It should go...The word was buried deep, a fat, round word, moldy with disappointment.  Home.  It should go home.
    Following the tug of blood, the stir of memory, it shambled toward the road.

Archival Interview with Jessica Berger Gross, Editor of About What Was Lost

NOTE: This interview was conducted in 2007. I’m retrieving it from the archives because the book was just reviewed in USA Weekend.

Almost 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I didn’t know this until I had a miscarriage of my own. I was surprised to learn that it’s so common, since women almost never talk about it. I wasn’t able to find anything much written on the subject, either. I can’t say that the cultural silence surrounding miscarriage made the experience worse—I don’t know if anything could have made it worse—but it certainly didn’t make it any easier. 

The anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, is a much-needed addition to the literature of mourning. I contributed an essay, and I recently interviewed the collection’s editor, Jessica Berger Gross, for Literary Mama. We talked about loss, the publishing process, and what it’s like to edit a famous author.