Consumed in January 2024

The One Who Digs Stealing History

We have made it halfway through winter. Are we still hunkering down? The sun is shining here in KY, extending an invitation to come out of our caves. Punxsutawney Phil came out. He says spring is coming early.

Here are a few things I consumed in January and what is sticking with me as we head into my birth month and my obsession with aging/midlife (ok, and mothering) continues…

Gerald Stern’s essay collection Stealing History (2012), which I got my hands on after Ross Gay referenced it quietly somewhere, maybe in his book, maybe in a reading, as a model he borrowed from to write his books of delights. I can see the kinship in form—as the shortish pieces are sort of diary entries, sort of essayets, as Ross calls his—and in content: the personal mixed in with the universal, the everyday and the big subjects like religion, politics, grief, and death.

Essayet 83, “The Stages of Life,” jumps right into the last stage:

For me, at eighty-six, lying on my back on my art deco sofa, it is a little like drowning, as it’s imagined—and described—your whole life passing before you in a few seconds […]

I have to admit that I like this drowning, although I’m very different from that little bird, the Piaf who said (who sang) that she “regretted nothing,” for I regret a lot of things, though I’m somehow less bitter about it than I was a while ago.

I actually adore the drowning—it’s a joyous time for me.

The metaphor of reflecting on your life as a pleasant drowning has stuck with me, and this end-of-life musing phenomenon also came up in an episode of the Object of Sound podcast I listened to in January, a conversation between Hanif Abdurraqib and Björk discussing her 2022 album Fossora, which would have been released just weeks before Gerald Stern’s passing at the age of 97.

Björk shares how experiencing her grandfather’s death made her aware of this stage and prepared her for her mother’s passing:

I thought it was really interesting when my grandfather passed away. At the hospital, they give you this pamphlet. Of like when people are in their last days, what they are talking about. And how you should react to it. And it was like, okay, they are going to... Go repeatedly over making sure that they paid their dry cleaning bills and, you know, you know, they're going to go through like a to-do list asking you to finish stuff like that. And then they are going to ask you repeatedly if they did well. And I was like, wow, that's such a weird thing. Just reading it in like a badly sort of photocopied pamphlet in the downtown hospital. And then that's literally what happened.

He would ask repeatedly, like, you know, did I do well? And then you would tell him and then he would fall asleep and you wake up and you would start over again. Like, did I do well? And... And I would just say, you know, everybody would be there. Yes, you were a good father. You were a good grandfather. And so it just became like a mantra. And I think by the time my mother got ill, I felt like this was something that I had learned, you know. It's like, even though she's the sort of person that would never ever ask questions like that. I just decided, okay, I'm just going to give that to her as a present.

The dam broke for me when I heard Björk speak those words. As a mom, I can appreciate that gift. I am always wanting to know if I am doing ok as a Mom. As a daughter, I can identify with the gesture. And as a granddaughter, the memory of holding space for my grandmother’s death was so vivid as Björk described her experience at her grandfather’s deathbed. The advice from the medical staff to reassure the dying loved one. A lot of feelings came up during that part of the conversation.

Compounded by the music in the songs they are discussing, “Ancestress” and “Sorrowful Soil.”

I had come across this video a while ago and been deeply moved by the imagery, the color palette, and the death rituals it portrays, but I hadn’t given the full album a listen. So I decided to check out Fossora by Björk the theme of which she explains is burrowing into the life you have created; the title is an invented feminized version of a word with latin roots meaning “one who digs.” The album contains both elegy & epitaph for mother, as well as a nod to our attempts at being graceful as we release our children from the nest.

Hanif and Björk walk through the wind instruments, strings, and lyrics on the album, and Björk says something we should all borrow, I think, as a template for reflecting on aging:

“The older I get, I actually become a better string arranger.”

Say it with me, The older I get, I actually become a better _________________.

Fill in the blank.