The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  Grieving

  Meenakshi Gigi Durham

  FROM Harvard Review

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who love their jobs. I am not one of them, and so I am both awed and envious when I meet people who tell me about their passion for their work. My friend Heather, who performs daedal and dicey heart transplants on children, is one of them; my colleague’s wife, Maria, who brews hausfrau-friendly concoctions in a test kitchen, is another; and the librarian at my kids’ school, shuffling through stacks of Magic Schoolbus and Maisie books, seems to be that way too. I have learned, over the years, that it is not the work itself that inspires passion, but something much more elusive, some kind of cosmic alignment between a personality and an occupation. Those who find it emanate a potent, mystical energy; to me, they seem enlightened and serene, while I hover in a state of constant self-doubt and questing, like a lovelorn adolescent, wondering what I should do with my life and how to find lasting fulfillment.

  My husband, Dallas, on the other hand, has been in an ardent relationship with his job from the moment he set foot in graduate school, and in truth, this has always been a source of tension between us. That is why it came as such a blow when he lost it. When he showed me the letter that said he had been denied tenure at the university where we both teach, and where I had been tenured six years earlier, we were both silent. I could see how white his lips were, how his hands were shaking; it was as though he had been hit by a car, or a blunt object. The cosmos had come undone.

  They—the experts, the gurus—talk about job loss in terms of trauma, separation, death. On the Internet, I learned that there are stages of grief after a job loss, just like after any other bereavement: denial, anger, frustration, acceptance. “Losing your job can trigger a range of emotions—some of which may be uncomfortable or upsetting,” pontificated one website. Looking at the deep bruises under Dallas’s eyes and hearing the pain in his voice in the days after he got the letter, I found those feeble words—uncomfortable, upsetting—to be vapid, even delusory. In the aftermath of that letter, we lay awake at night, silent and rigid in our bed, thinking the fevered thoughts that brew up at 4 A.m. At first, of course, came questions of money and the well-being of our two young daughters; but as the days passed, those issues seemed trivial. We could always get other jobs, or move to a smaller house and live on my salary, or something. The real crisis was the blunt negation of Dallas’s identity, an identity that had been slowly, delicately building since he had been a star doctoral student in a star graduate program—building in pulsating fragments, like a coral reef. This identity had evolved into a complex organism, an intricate structure composed of symbiotic elements—the natural and gifted teacher who garnered glowing evaluations, the brilliant scholar, the articulate and tactful faculty member whom everyone knew would be a dean or provost one day. The academic.

  “If Professor D— were single and I were a woman, I would marry him,” wrote a student on one of Dallas’s evaluation forms. “I love his lectures, I love his ideas,” wrote another. “I even love his exams.” Dallas has told me often that he is happiest in the undergraduate classroom, that he relaxes when he is sharing ideas with students, even though they most often comment on his vitality and enthusiasm. I cannot relate to this: teaching is a challenge for me, an anxiety-producing event, even after more than a decade of doing it. I still quiver with nerves before classes, collapse limply with relief afterward. Dallas has never quite understood my teaching jitters, nor my need to prep for hours before each class. He can walk into a room without notes or preparation and earn a standing ovation. I have heard that strangers attend his lectures, people who are not enrolled in his classes or even at the university, just to experience his teaching. I am prepared to be skeptical about this rumor, but it has been repeated to me by several students, so I suppose it is true. I have never heard this about any other teacher, ever.

  He enrolled in a PhD program deliberately; I, by accident. (How does one “accidentally” do a doctorate? There’s another story there.) More to the point, Dallas knew what he was doing. I have had graduate students who came to doctoral programs to hide from “the real world,” or to recover after a divorce, or because they had borderline personality disorders that rendered them unsuitable for everyday life. But Dallas applied to graduate school because he wanted to be a college professor and a scholar. He researched the best programs in our field and applied to them; on the day I turned in my completed dissertation, feeling depleted and numb, he was admitted to an elite doctoral program—several cuts above the one I had stumbled into. I was ready to flee academe, to return to the penurious but provocative world of journal-ism I had reluctantly abandoned for higher learning. He was ready to leap joyously into it, looking ahead to the hooding ceremony and a job at a research university and beyond—to the PhD’s holy grail. Tenure.

  The U.S. Department of Education reports that only 45 percent of faculty members nationwide have tenure. Of these, more than two-thirds are men. The numbers at our university are comparable. There is concern, nationally and here, about the low numbers of women and minorities who are tenured, and about the retention of women and minority faculty.

  Dallas is a white male. Statistically, he should have succeeded.

  In fact, race and gender aside, he should have succeeded. Every indicator, until the letter arrived, had been positive. We learned, as we set about (as academics will) analyzing and dissecting the denial, that the carefully laid-out steps on the path to tenure meant precisely nothing. There are markers on the tenure track that are treated with the reverence of religious rituals and given the symbolic weight of law. In fact, they have neither, as we came to find out. These markers include annual reviews, especially the third-year review that anticipates the contract renewal; the report of the departmental faculty when the tenure dossier is ready for submission (which was laudatory and contained a unanimous vote in favor of Dallas’s tenure and promotion); and the letters from external reviewers (which in Dallas’s case were from schools as reputable as Stanford and Cornell, and all of which were positive). These portents had lulled us into a false sense of security.

  “It means I failed,” Dallas said as we reviewed the facts, like forensic detectives on CSI. “It means I can’t do this. I’m not good enough to do this.” That was what mattered: not the job per se, but the opportunity to keep doing the work he loved. An end to the cosmic alignment that had put him in such perfect harmony with the universe. He had done everything right, it seemed, but . . . But. Robert Burns wrote about that, about the best-laid plans “gang aft agley,” leaving “nought but grief and pain.”

  When you appeal a tenure denial, it is called a grievance, and the process is formally known as grieving.

  The proper period of time in which to grieve a death was, in Victorian England, as much as four years; anything less indicated a lack of respect for the decedent. In India, at least for women, grieving has no time limit: a widow is traditionally in mourning for the rest of her life. I was not sure how long Dallas would grieve his loss, the loss of Associate Professor D—. “All my classmates are deans now,” he said once. “What happened?”

  There were times when he wondered aloud what he had done to tempt fate, whether he was marked in some way with the number of the beast, or whether this was a matter of bad karma. “I wake up wanting it to be a dream,” he told me on many bleak mornings. “And then I realize it is happening, and I keep wanting to scream and come out of it and I can’t.”

  In chilling contrast to the piles of effusive plaudits that preceded it, the denial was contained in two terse lines: “Insufficient record of publication. Lack of participation in the graduate program.” We were stunned by these formulae. They were not even sentences, they were sentence fragments. And there was a deadly poetry in them, the fragments that rendered us fragmented; ashes to ashes; quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. For dust you are and to dust you will return, as the liturgy has it. We read and reread the fragments, as though they were runes whose
meaning we could unlock with sufficient slavish study. “What do they mean?” Dallas would ask, bewildered, running his hands through his hair, readjusting his spectacles. I did not know. He had published in the requisite prestigious peer-reviewed journals; he had signed off on—we counted—fourteen dissertations. Those facts seemed to negate the reasons for the denial.

  So there had to be some deeper, more mystical significance to the fragments. We meditated on them, hoping they would reveal their inner meaning. Were there seven Demotic signs contained in them? Were they based on a system of code that we needed to crack? Perhaps it would come to us in a blinding flash. Legend has it that Champollion fainted dead away after translating the Rosetta Stone in 1824. I could see that; could imagine the rush of blood to the head, the buckling of the knees, the dizzying relief that comprehension would bring.

  The denial became the constant topic of our conversation; we could not speak of anything else. We worried at it in the car, on the phone with our families and friends, in our workplace, at the hairdresser’s, at the local farmers’ market, and with our yard man, Roberto. But we had decided, virtuously, not to say anything to our young daughters, who were nine and six. No need to scare them. As good parents, we had an obligation to keep them secure, not to destabilize their happy little worlds with job issues they didn’t need to know about. The weeks went by, and we were on the phone with lawyers and the AAUP and our financial adviser, and I realized eventually that the girls had been hearing every word, and that Dallas and I were both stupid and derelict to avoid talking to them about it. So in the kitchen one evening I asked my older daughter if she knew what was going on. She looked directly at me.

  “Daddy didn’t get tenure,” she said, and burst into tears. She clung to me, sobbing, for a long time. “It doesn’t mean anything yet,” I murmured into her soft, sweet-smelling hair. “It doesn’t mean we have to move, or leave, or anything, yet. Don’t be scared.”

  In his often-assigned and overanalyzed essay “Experience,” Emerson reflects on grief as an illusion, a passion of the moment, in its way as meaningless as every other sentiment or perception, all the while acknowledging its power to rack us with pain. “I grieve,” he writes, “that grief can teach me nothing.”

  “The Investigating Officer is empowered to request and to receive the cooperation of . . . the grieving faculty member . . .” Section III 2g.6d of the university’s faculty dispute procedures.

  The grievance procedure involves memos, lots of memos. The memos, crafted by Dallas and vetted by both our lawyer and me, generated responses from institutional authorities that seemed completely irrational, even insane, to us. Everything had to be done in writing. “Can’t I talk to anyone?” Dallas asked, plaintively. “Why won’t anyone meet with me and hear me out?” We pointed out, hotly, to each other that even common criminals get to face their accusers and defend themselves in person. Not that Dallas had done anything wrong. That Dallas himself was only known to his superiors (his inquisitors, we told each other) through a growing pile of byzantine paperwork and procedural documents seemed bizarre, and it represented a new kind of effacement, another loss of self. “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” notes Emerson. And, “I distrust the facts and the inferences.”

  My husband, who is constitutionally thin and pale, grew thinner and paler. He slept badly, as did I, even though I knew there was no point in worrying. This was not a cancer diagnosis, I reminded him, in my jolliest tones. It’s not like anything terrible has happened to the kids or anything. It’s just a job. You can apply for other jobs in the fall, or you could do something else. Maybe you could go to law school. Maybe you could work in PR.

  These were not the right things to say. For me, these ideas represented options, opportunities, a chance for a new direction. For Dallas, they were like sucker punches. I could see his body recoil slightly with each word, and when I looked at him, I understood a little more about grieving.

  I am a stranger to grief. I have lost no one close to me: neither parents nor friends nor children. I empathize with such losses, of course; I can imagine how it might feel to suffer such an event. I had not imagined, before it happened, the profound and searing sorrow that would attend Dallas’s job loss. I was frightened by the depth of his anguish and by its incessant presence; it ravaged him like a consumptive disease. He went to see a counselor through the university’s faculty assistance program. He said her face changed when he told her he was grieving. A grieving faculty member, one who was initiating a formal inquiry process against the university, could not be counseled in her office. “Let me wear my human resources hat now,” she told him brightly, making a switching-hats gesture with her hands. “There are legal issues here I can’t get into. You need to realize that the university makes good decisions, and that there are systems of checks and balances in place that mean what happened to you was properly done. You need to figure out how to get on with your life.”

  “It’s the politburo,” he said to me later, head in hands. “She thinks I need deprogramming.” Grief counseling, we learned, is not grievance counseling.

  Many people interceded on Dallas’s behalf. And finally Dallas found a way to face them, the inquisitors of his heretical depravity, the ones who had ordered his excommunication. They granted him an audience, after repeated appeals from champions who had appealed to them from across the university, from Europe, from Asia, from all parts of the continental United States. They were bombarded with letters and e-mails. Did these missives cause them to cave? I don’t know. But anyway, they granted him face time. He was given a half-hour appointment with the provost.

  He went in to the august administrator’s office without hope, but filled with righteous anger. He said (and I know this only from his reports, which grew more thrilling with each telling), I hope you are happy. I hope you believe you did the right thing. I want you to know I was willing to give this institution my very best. I ask you to reconsider; please review my file. He held his head up; he looked them in the eyes. You can burn me at the stake. You can torment me on the rack. But I am of noble heart. He did not say that last part, but it should be part of this adventure. In your mind’s eye, Dallas should wear a hair shirt and a halo. His green eyes blaze with light. Angel song swells around him.

  In fact, we won. On a Thursday afternoon in May, as tornado sirens wailed and we huddled in our dining room watching silvery cords of rain strike the windows of our prairie house, the phone rang. The provost had reversed the tenure denial.

  Pandemonium. We are jumping around and yelling with joy, all four of us; we are louder than the storm; the kids look dazed and delirious. Our six-year-old gets out her markers and writes “I ❤ tenure! I ❤ Daddy!” in uneven, sprawling, rainbow-colored letters. We put her sign up on our front door. The next day, we buy balloons and champagne and get Thai take-out, the kids’ favorite.

  Letters and phone calls come in from all over the world in the next few weeks. At the farmers’ market, people walk up and hug Dallas. Our mail carrier congratulates him, and so does Roberto. This is a small town, and word gets around.

  Dallas writes to thank the provost, and I am moved by his reply. “Glad to help, Dallas. It was the right thing to do. So very sorry you had to go through hell in the meantime.”

  We do not know, with any clarity, how it happened, how the core of Dallas’s being was excised, then restored, almost daemonically. It all smacks of witchcraft, or thaumaturgy, or something. Once, long ago, I worked with a woman who was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. She had six months to live, people said. I did not know her well, but I watched her at work: young, vivacious, doomed. In her eyes lurked a new knowledge, a searing awareness that was almost tangible in its intensity. And then, suddenly, the tumor disappeared without a trace. Her death sentence had been erroneous.

  Perhaps she thinks about that diagnosis still; perh
aps she is haunted by memories of the days and nights when she thought she was dying. I can imagine that the light looked different during that time, that her senses were sharpened and quickened by the knowledge of death. I can imagine how every moment might cause panic; I can feel the bitterness of her sorrow. The careless indifference to life you enjoy when you are not haunted by death’s specter—you can probably never feel that again once you have contemplated death.

  Or perhaps you can just leave it behind, gleefully, once the threat is gone: not dead yet. It seems to me that the latter response would be preferable—easier, lighter. I wouldn’t know, though. I have not had to confront these issues.

  But Dallas has. His grieving has abated, yet grieving has deepened his passion for the work that was his lifeblood. Glimpsing how profoundly this episode affected him has humbled and silenced me. How can I reject, or mock, or decry, the very source of his psyche, his atman? There must be something there that makes this work that we do, this process of teaching and connecting and writing and coming-to-consciousness, more than just work. I have to come to grips with that: to see beyond the mundane to the numinous.

  I had not known, before, that a job could rend and then restore a person’s soul. “Grief too,” writes Emerson, “will make us idealists.”

  A-LOC

  Bernadette Esposito

  FROM The North American Review

  I AWOKE IN A FIELD, on my back. My left eye was sealed shut. Out of the corner of my right eye I spotted a girl. She sat with her legs crossed. Her torn clothes hung off her shoulders. At the elbow she cradled her arm and shook her head. Down my right cheek I felt something wet. When I caught myself trying to wipe it away, I readjusted my head. The girl looked over at me and held up her arm. From wrist to elbow it shone black and slick, with a single suppurated crease folding in on itself. “My skin will never be the same,” she lamented.