An exercise in writing memoir
My book MD2B was published last year. It is a compilation of letters I wrote from Medical School and Residency, with a few journal entries added in. It ends with my getting the Board Certification, and getting married, and moving home to California. I went to medical school in Guardalajara Mexico, after being in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay, in South America.
I have been contemplating trying to write a memoir, and what would be the “axis” of it, the reason for writing it.
In the background is the concept “object permanence” which I think occurs in infants at about a year old. Mom is there, then not there, then she is back again. It is spatially a game of peekaboo, where mom goes to work, or to the store, or to some other task, and the child feels existential anxiety and loss, until (s)he realizes that mom will again appear.
But sometimes there are limits in the mom’s ability to be present, and the child feels abandoned, and that the return is shaky. Sometimes real abandonment happens.
Sometimes it is ok, this existential anxiety, because we have been socialized to be able to find comfort from others around us, and that is sufficient. But for some really sensitive souls, anxiety facing this potential loss is the main emotional context in the rest of their lives, and shapes how they grow up and what they think.
My mom was a courageous person. She also had a lot of energy, and she didn’t sit around mulling over things, or worrying about whether a particular action would be successful at helping her reach her goals. She just jumped on a horse and started out full-speed-ahead, with enthusiasm and pennants flying.
I got sent away to high school boarding school, in 9th grade, Monday to Friday. I came home most weekends, from a town about an hour away. There were nuns who watched over the girls in the dorm, and made sure we were not falling apart. I did fine in this school, enjoying the discipline, academic challenge, gift of time in solitude and prayer, and other girls to befriend me and give me more insight into the challenges all of us were facing.
Then I went away to college, about 6 hours away. I came home probably quarterly. I did not feel deprived or abandoned, rather, given a tremendous gift. I had a wonderful time, socially and academically, in a school which fit me like a glove. I had Jesuits teaching me, and I loved their balance so much that I decided to major in philosophy. My favorite in Freshman year was Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, who went from the trenches of WW1 to work in China, and wrote this fabulous new cosmology about God as the heart of the Universe which is growing and changing, evolution which is a constant creative flow, a process which will ultimately draw all of itself back to the Creator. The nuns I was taught by in high school were excited about the changes being discussed at the Vatican Council in the mid to late 1960s, and we were on the cusp of a whole new understanding of how we all fit together into this evolving universe. For me, science and theology fit together, hand in glove.
Between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I was given the additional gift of a summer tour to the Far East, with a group of 18 students and 2 Jesuit priests, to see Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong in a 12 week tour. I was on Mt. Fuji, and in Siem Reap, and at Angkor Watt before my 18th birthday in the fall. In Singapore we stayed at the Raffles hotel. I took my guitar, and sang songs, did a little hootenanny every night with the other students. We drank singapore slings in Singapore. We went to Buddhist temples, we learned Chinese brush painting. We were in a gorgeous ryokan inn near Mt. Fuji, and had Japanese kimonos and steaming hot bath/soakings. I had a great camera (I got in Tokyo, the first day there, a new single-lens reflex Pentax), and took many photos. I bought yards of silk for my mother and sisters in Cheng Mai, Thailand. We saw kids riding elephants in downtown Phnom Penh. We went to elegant parties in the Philippines given by the parents of Santa Clara students who were glad to entertain Fr. Coz, our supervising Jesuit, who had taught their sons.
A year after I returned for Sophomore year at Santa Clara, I was in a group of students headed to Vienna, Austria, for Junior-year- abroad. We started at Oxford, with lectures there, staying in Magalen college “rooms”. A taste of Oxford! Then across Europe in buses, with professors teaching as we went. Arriving in Vienna in “Indian summer” weather which quickly turned icy, we got assigned to hausfraus’ for housing. A year of being in a granite and marble city, mostly grey and white, and snowy and cold. I had not thought about weather, and what it would do. In Southeast Asia, I had to stay inside my mosquito net at sundown, because I was immediately attacked by mosquitos and made to look like a full-on leper. I reluctantly came out, when it was later and cooler, but was always glad to get back inside my safety net.
In Vienna, I was freezing, needed gloves, woolen underwear, a thick coat I got at a second hand store. There was no central heating in our hausfrau’s flat, and she was addicted to Fresh Air, opening the windows in the frosty mornings as we blew smoke rings of frozen breath, while trying to quickly dress and start walking to school to try to warm up. We saved money by eating bread with wine and cheese, and occasionally got a sausage from the sausage vendor’s cart. I stood at the Opera, which was very inexpensive, and fabulous. I took a course in Opera, by a musician who brought in opera singers, played two-piano pieces for us, sang to us the leitmotivs of the operas, explained the drama of key-changes and structures of the music. I was reading Kant and Hegel, and thinking about ethics, and metaphysics. I took a poetry seminar from a visiting professor, from UOP, about voices in poetry, and the way different poets used language and structure. We travelled, to Greece on Spring break — April in Delphi, with the wild crocuses. I wrote a paper for Art History on Fra Angelico. I got to sit in a library at the Albertina museum, looking at medieval manuscripts in German, Italian and French, and Latin. The clerk would turn the pages, with a gloved hand.
At Christmas we were in small villages in the Tirol, about 20 of us in each place, going to midnight mass with zither music and walking in the snow holding candles, to little chapels with hand carved pews, madonnas, angels. A newborn baby Jesus in the creche, and singing Silent Night in German.
All of this before I was 21.
By the time I graduated from college, I knew I would be in the Peace Corps, 2 weeks after I graduated. I was a health educator in Paraguay for 2 years.
I taught in the native language, Guarani, how to avoid dysentery by boiling water, how to protect against germs causing infections by washing hands, and covering our mouths when we cough. I got interested in Childbirth and Obstetrics, and started thinking about going to medical school when I got home, just before my 23rd birthday. I would have to go back to college to do pre-medical science classes for the requirements to get into medical school. It was a challenge, but I started getting passionate about it as the next goal.
All of this early travel and cross-cultural exposure led to a wide interest in and absorption of the many different languages, customs, geographies, and weather in different places. It made me want to hold on to the friends who understood this plunge into the rest of the world. It probably helped me to be more resilient, although maybe most deeply because underlying all the adventure was safety and coherence, the structure of education and goals of cross-cultural service. My parents wrote me airmail letters, I wrote long ones back, often more than once a week. I kept a journal. We maintained a deep fondness and genuine enjoyment of each other, rather than the frictions some friends had with their parents. I only called home about 3 times that year in Vienna, and never called home from Paraguay, although my parents came to visit, and let me know their plans by telegram. It meant so much that they met my family in Paraguay, and knew my village, first from my letters, and then from actually coming to visit us there. My dad took the photo of the first graduating class of lay midwives our Doctor Orihuela put on at our Health Center, with my help translating into Guarani and encouraging the women to come. For awhile it was hard to remember I was American, not Paraguayan, and that this life felt like my whole life, my real family. I had trouble going back into speaking English. I introduced my parents to everyone around me. They took this in. My dad looked at my mother in wonder, and said “Is she going to speak to us soon?” I sang in Guarani, the love songs of the country. My dad didn’t know that language. They did not have a piano, so dad couldn’t play and let me sing the songs from home, from our music books, the songs of my grandmother, the musicals we loved as I was growing up, his songs from the 40s. We also went to Machu Picchu, then flew to Buenos Aires and to Rio de Janeiro together, before they went home. By the time they went home, I was deeply comfortable with them, and in connection with my past life again. When I returned to Paraguay to finish my tour of duty, I was just a little absent from who I was before their visit. Still, it was so hard leaving, when I left, in the fall of ’74. I was 23. I sometimes thought back to being in Vienna, or being in Southeast Asia. It was all amazing and dream-like, and hard to contain.
So what I was missing was going deeper into one single relationship, trying to fit into a home culture. But being able to move in many cultures, understand several languages, really helped me to not lose my footing, even as I was studying medicine, and trying to see how people dealt with illness, what tools we could use to enhance health and well-being. As time went by, I focused on the body, on women’s fertility and medical conditions, and the demands of pregnancy. This stood me in good stead in my work. It still absorbs me, to think about how to do things more gracefully, and to see the shadow side of different cultural ideals and values. I feel so grateful for all the experiences which helped shape me!
Write as if you are dying, Annie Dillard once said.
And what if you are racing against death?
So now I am 72. I am thinking about death and dying a lot more. I paid for the funeral and have it all written down, what my children need to do. I worry about their having to deal with all the midden of the archaeology of my life, and that they will throw away meaningful things. I have tried to keep what matters and what lasts. I thought I would be sitting and reading old journals, and writing poems, but I am mostly walking on the beach in the early morning, then praying with my zoom prayer circle, and then doing housewifely tasks; cooking, cleaning up, trying to put order in the house, working on the garden. Luckily, I finally have good gardening help both in Soquel and Camarillo, so the garden looks good in both places. This is a little piece of the aesthetics I hold from my dad. Being in the garden and looking at flowers are something which always has been a joy and refreshment to me.
And it is true that I like solitude now, and am glad for peace and quiet, and open-ended time. And I am trying to close loopholes on responsibility and accountability, get the groceries we need when most convenient, since we live out of town, and once I am sitting down, I hate to have to go and drive somewhere on errands again. Yesterday I did get the oil changed in the car, after I went to swim. I love swimming laps in the beautiful pool, with sunlight on the water, in the middle of the day. It is the ultimate luxury.
I am trying to get a loan from the credit union, to buy a new second-hand car with less mileage, since mine is now over 150k miles. Driving to Camarillo takes 5 and a half hours, and I am afraid of a car break-down on the road. Once I get there, I resume my life there; work on the garden, and do the housekeeping chores, but it is easier there, smaller and less cluttered, so not as exhausting. I am still sleeping well, falling asleep saying my prayers, being grateful for quiet and dark, and peace; no flashing lights or sirens, no cityscape noise. The arthritis and back and hip pain make me turn frequently, and need positioning care, but I sleep 9-10 hours in relative comfort and ease.
Dealing with my husband and his needs, and my sons and their needs and interests, and how to maintain deep familiarity and comfort with each other’s company is a big part of my day. Our elder son Andy is home, and we are becoming more connected, and he is becoming more respectful and more courteous. He has helped Greg a lot, with his infusion of energy, and pushing and pulling to get Greg to think more, talk more, stretch to use vocabulary and use his long-term memory and knowledge, and to do more. I appreciate the ease and sweetness of time with Sebastian; he is generous, kind, and a loving son, and he helps me all the time with tasks we need done.
I am glad they are going on this trip to Croatia, the boys and Greg, and that I am not going. It will not be the way I would want it to be, and what I used to think it would be like. It is good that they are doing this together. I will have some quiet time while they are gone. I am not as anxious as I was when Greg first got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease; because he has improved, and is cognitively more coherent, and Andy has been an enormous help with this. But I do see the future coming fast, and realize I am letting go, even as I am trying to hold on.
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One of my favorite quotes, all my life has been this one: I minored in German because I wanted to be able to read Rilke in German. I never got fluent enough to be a poet or read his poetry without help, but I did write some in Spanish, during my medical school years.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
martina2b 