A Patient Journey

It's late and I have just spent a few days grading the final portfolios for my creative writing summer class. I am glad I took on this class--they were a terrific bunch of students and I will greatly miss them. Now I am at work on my 1A syllabus, though I am careful to be taking some form of vacation before I have to go back. I am using a brand-new textbook to me--I like to grow as a teacher and break out of the box every now and again, which means teaching new essays and stories (one of which is "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I had never read until this summer--it blew me away). My mind was so stunned by shock after my sister's death that I could not comprehend the stories I was teaching. I think things are coming back for me--I can read and make sense of prose again.

I am resting in the fact that I will be at the alma mater for some time to come. I have come to love my job again--it always depends on how my body is doing with pain levels and so forth--but I feel that I have gotten better at managing my time and my anxiety about grading is getting less. I know things will be frenetic again in a few weeks--the campus will go from nicely uncrowded to crowded, the weather will be very hot for awhile, and then the weather will change. And I will be there, teaching away--but my sister will still be gone. For the rest of my life, she will not be there. I am especially sad that she will not see my new little niece, who is to be born in October. I will love her for the both of us.

I realize that, unconsciously, I chose a textbook called Dreams and Inward Journeys for my 1A class which has many essays in it on the great searches for meaning: Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales and myth, an essay by Thomas Lynch, a mortician, on the end of life, four versions of the Cinderella fairy tale, an incredible essay by Rachel Naomi Remen on healing and coming to terms with painful memories. I suppose this teacher will be taking a journey, too. There have been so many goodbyes this year--I look forward to good things happening.

I keep going back to the fact that my sister's death has put a closure on every drama, every plan, every sense of the future that she had. This is what happens! Nothing stays, only the legacy we have left with people--and honestly, the last thing I want is to be a person who is remembered with a legacy of pain and grief hauling along, like an undetachable veil. So I am thinking about what I want to do with my life--do a yoga and meditation retreat, continue to keep teaching only as much as my illness will allow, and above all, to work really hard on getting well. It is very sobering to have a sibling die of the same chronic illness I have. I want to stay on this earth and have a long and healthy life.

Well, that's the news from the woods. Goodnight.