Anne Giles Clelland

And the Congregation Averted Its Eyes

“...and the congregation averted its eyes.”
- J. K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

The woman in the photo could be a resident of Pagford, the fictional village in J. K. Rowling’s new novel The Casual Vacancy. The woman vibrates with ambivalence.  She hopes the bright pearls and bright smile will distract the photographer from her tear-reddened eyes, the loose, lined skin on her face, the way she clutches and offers mementos from her childhood as if they are precious and matter.

When the woman saw the photo online, she felt the horror of a realization had too late, fists clenched, arms shaking with the desperate wish for just one more moment to do something, anything to unback the car from the parking meter, to unpour the boiling water from the shattered glass pitcher, to unclose the car door on the child’s hand.

She wanted to save the elderly woman in the photo from the inevitable:  people will increasingly perceive her as inconsequential because she won’t have time to finish what she starts, or, more immediately, the strength, wits or wherewithal to do much of anything well.  The rah-rah about aging is darling but changes nothing of the truth that one is increasingly less than one was and dies in the end.

***

Only in the past few years have I heard the adage about fiction, “It may not be factual, but it’s true.”  I felt at home in Rowling’s Pagford, not because of its familiarity, but because of Rowling’s relentless candor. 

I was raised in Blacksburg, Virginia, home of silence.  Of the two suicides of my classmates, two deaths by car wrecks, and deaths of three of their parents that occurred in the years I attended Margaret Beeks Elementary School and Blacksburg High School, not a word was spoken by my parents, by my teachers, or by my classmates.  The odd behavior of the swim club manager was not mentioned.  Faces of the “poor kids” in the class photos from my elementary school years were missing from my high school yearbook.  About loss and absence and its accompanying confusion and pain one did not speak in Blacksburg.

In Blacksburg, at Virginia Tech, I fell in love and married and moved away.  I expected to have a baby, stay home and raise the baby, have another baby, and live happily ever after as a family.  Only when I was unable to conceive a child and looked in anguish and bafflement at a future for which I had no ability did I see how silence had disabled me.  The pain was greater than I was.  I cannot remember the moment I first spoke, but only then did a slip of a self come forward.  Only then did I feel a chance to not be broken by pain.

Rowling’s characters break each other’s hearts.  They long to undo the undone.  Then they do again, blindly and knowingly.  They are alternately hurtful and calculating, brave and foolish, merciless and merciful.  They and I are one.  And they must, as I must - or choose not to - live with what what’s happened to us and with what we’ve done.

I find it excruciating at times to not be a member of the congregation, especially now that I'm back in Blacksburg, to not avert my eyes from the truth of who I am, from what I am feeling and thinking and remembering, from what I see when I look at what others feel, think and do or have done to them or have happen to them.  I can feel upset, weak, vulnerable, even traumatized at the time of the looking.  But I know, paradoxically, that I strengthen myself for what is and what will come from every truth I muscularly embrace.  I live as fully as I can, not partially.  On my deathbed, where it all must end, I will not regret not having tried to wholly live my life.  I will not regret my silence.

I am the ambivalent woman in the photo.

Photo credit:  Travis Williams for The Roanoke Times

Photo embedded from The Roanoke Times's The Burgs flickr stream, part of the photo slide show accompanying Memories mark Blacksburg school's milestone, The Roanoke Times.

Timeline 4

• Meet with health care organization physicians for first time who might do a clinical trial with our behavioral health software, Wednesday, June 27, 2012
• Take up sport of table tennis again after 32-year absence, June 27, 2012
• Begin designing research and writing application for Office of Sponsored Projects (OSP) and Institutional Review Board (IRB), June 28, 2012
• Cat missing for 25 hours, July 9-10, 2012
• First table tennis tournament since 1980, last place, July 21, 2012
• Freak at 35th high school reunion, July 21, 2012
• Start new start-up, July 31, 2012
• Think I never, ever will but finally complete task of about 40 hours: passed online Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Human Subjects Research Training, August 1, 2012
• Sell a corporate asset, first big deal, feel like Donald Trump, August 8, 2012
• Recover physically from my mother's death, August 11, 2012
• Necessary, difficult, strategic planning session with my father and consultant Paula Wilder, August 16, 2012
• Speak at Grand Rounds, August 23, 2012
• Start, again, to keep a food journal with my trainer because I am eating and drinking too much, August 25, 2012
• One-year anniversary of mother's death, August 27, 2012
• Learn of acceptance of presentation of behavioral health software during tracked session "What Goes Into Making an Extraordinary mHealth App?" at mHealth Summit on Wednesday, December 5, the National Institute of Health (NIH) an organizing sponsor, expected attendance of 5000 from 50 countries, August 27, 2012
• Won a match and made it to second round in Virginia Tech Welcome Table Tennis Tournament, September 1, 2012
• Last Presidents' Council meeting, September 4, 2012
• Host a baby shower, as always, as a childless woman, September 6, 2012
• Host a farewell party to a national team table tennis player from China, September 9, 2012
• Write a column for the November issue on the dark side of entrepreneurship for Dan Smith at Valley Business FRONT, September 10, 2012
• Try to be of value to fellow entrepreneurs, September 14, 2012
• Serve as a mentor at Startup Weekend Blacksburg, September 14-16, 2012
• Post a job opening on an online job board for the first time, September 14, 2012
• Struggle with operating a 4-year old company, starting a new start-up company, running both with people, not machines, contractors, not full-time employees, being a good wife, taking care of cats, doing dishes and laundry, maintaining relationships with friends and family members, staying fit, handling the urgency of entrepreneurship which regresses one from secure urbanite to desperate hunter-gatherer (i.e. if we don't finish hunting and gathering, we don't eat, i.e. if we don't finish the tasks in Basecamp right now, the company goes down), negotiating consensus among salaried people with the leisure to contemplate the stars, eating Greek yogurt at 3 PM so I don't binge at 5 PM, not lamenting the 3:00 AM awakenings, but making a pot of tea and starting to work again on that application with its 100+ questions, not being able to talk with my mother, June 27, 2012 - September 26, 2012
• 12 weeks to the day after our first meeting, and 100s of hours of work later, team completes application to submit to the OSP and IRB for the clinical trial, September 27, 2012
• Laugh joyously with someone a fraction of my age with whom I do not share the same sex, language or culture about the craziness of using impossibly small paddles to smack an impossibly light ball back and forth across a table, September 27, 2012 

Timeline 3

• One-year anniversary of mother's death, August 27, 2012

One Year

My mother died one year ago today on August 27, 2011.

I know an anniversary is a concept, not a tangible reality.  My mother will be just as gone yesterday as she will be tomorrow.  I am experiencing the one-year anniversary of her death as a time of reckoning, however.  Her death marked a before-and-after in my life that I had no idea then would have existed now. 

In the immediate after, I felt like my father and sister and I became one, that we needed three minds to handle the aftermath of her death, from what felt like an explosion of our family system, to the phone calls and meetings and papers required to end a person's documented existence.  When any one of us remembered a meeting, we would call or email to remind both of the others.  One of us had always forgotten.

Many times over the past year, I have felt helpless with grief, unable to answer a question, read a map, choose something from my wallet with which to pay for groceries.  That happens less often, but today, of all days, it is likely to happen again, so I have cancelled all of my regular appointments and have added no new ones.  Except to have lunch with my father and sister.

Today is Monday.  Early Saturday morning, I could see each day of my life since my mother's death like a deck of cards, with unpleasantly taupe-colored ribbons piercing and sewing them together.  I made a list of those ribbons - unhappy conditions and states and ways operating in my life that I've been unconscious of or too driven or too tired to address - and now they are named and conscious.  Some I can't change and I will have to learn to be with.  Some will take time to change.  About the two over which I have the most direct control, I took action on one on Saturday by mid-morning and one on Sunday by mid-afternoon.

I have felt the urge to write my mother a letter, knew I would do it today, but felt overwhelmed by the enormity or what one says after fifty-two years together.  I woke up this morning realizing I would give myself a 14-line, sonnet-like limit for prose:  one page.  Done.  Important to have done.

I have one single, last, precious voice mail from my mother that I have saved for 13 months.  I will listen to it again today.

Much is touted as being "once in a lifetime" but the death of one's mother happens only once.  The first anniversary of her death happens only once.  I can imagine on the second anniversary of my mother's death that I won't cancel my appointments.  I will probably ask my father and sister, though, if they're available for lunch.

Mary Wilson Burnette Giles, May 29, 1933 - August 27, 2011

Circuit Training

This month, I began my seventh year of weekly sessions on Saturdays at 10:00 AM with trainer Don Belote at the University Mall location of The Weight Club in Blacksburg, Virginia.

For the past 3 years or so, I have done circuit training during my sessions.

Circuit training is a series of lift-run intervals using weight-lifting equipment which I term "machines."

Here's my regimen:

2-mile warm-up run, approximately 20 minutes

Timed:

• 8 machines - 7 mechanical pieces of weight-lifting equipment + 1 series of overhead lifts while seated on a peanut-shaped, inflated ball
• 3 sets of 12 lifts on 8 machines = 288 lifts
• One 1/9 mile run on the elevated track after each set minus 1 lap = 24 laps - 1 lap = 23 laps = 2 5/9 miles

1 mile follow-up run, sprinting the last lap. Then, some abs and hamstring work.

Total lifts: 288
Total miles: 5 5/9 miles
Total time: 2 hours

Personal record for timed session of 8 machines and 23 laps, set March 26, 2011: 56 minutes.

Around the time of that PR, my mother, who had been ill for years, began the decline that would end in her death on August 27, 2011.

Some Saturdays since then, I haven't been able to run.  I just sit at the machine, lift, talk with Don, sometimes cry. In recent months, I've gotten back slowly to finishing 7 machines.

On Saturday, July 28, I felt stronger and faster during our session and asked Don at the end, "Was that eight machines?!" "No," he said, "Seven."

The next Saturday, August 4, I said to Don, "Let's have our own personal Olympics.  Let's go for eight."  He looked at his cell phone and said, "You would need to stop talking and get going."  I went.  When I ran back up to the machine to do my second set of lifts, I said, "Can we go for eight?"  He said, "We'll see."

I so wanted - maybe needed - to do 8 machines, to assure myself of the readiness of my strength for the upcoming anniversary of my mother's death on August 27, 2012. 

I ran and lifted, ran and lifted.  I always have a think during the run and shared my insights with Don a few times, but kept lifting.  Around the 30-minute mark, though, I could feel the heaviness of fatigue starting and stopped talking.  Don's "We'll see" meant that 8 machines was contingent upon his judgment of my fitness as I progressed through the circuits.

When I descended the stairs from the elevated track for machine #7 and looked for Don, I was crushed to see him waiting by the assisted pull-up machine with which we end each session.  I started lifting and almost begged, "Will you set me up for 8?"  "Keeping going," he said.  "We'll see."

When I came down after the 3rd set of lifts on #7, I found him at another machine.  "I think I can do it," I said.  "I think you can, too," he said.

I set a personal circuit training record for 8 machines at 53 minutes.  It took 11 months and 1 week to recover and return to near the level of fitness I had before my mother died. 

During coverage of the Olympics, I watched the story of Kerri Strug and her last, leg-destroying, career-ending vault that won her the gold medal, and of her coach Bela Karolyi carrying her in front of all the crowds and cameras to the podium to receive the medal.

I think heroic coaching took place with no crowd and no cameras at a gym in Blacksburg, Virginia with Don's "We'll see." 

Under the scrutiny and oversight of my coach, I won an invisible, private medal and carried my own sweaty, tired, still-sound body out of The Weight Club with my own strength, by myself.

Photo courtesy of Justin Cook, The Roanoke Times, June 7, 2010

Timeline 2

• Get new mentor, December 15, 2011
• Write a 5-year timeline, December 16, 2011
• Turn 53, December 30, 2011
• When asked to propose a toast, am speechless, December 31, 2011
• Get seen by a photographer, January 18, 2012
• Cellar remodeled and ping pong table delivered, February 3, 2012
• Attend first political meeting since government teacher made us go in 1976. Government teacher is there. February 16, 2012
• Embarrassed to be from Virginia, Birthplace of Presidents, February 21, 2012
• Inspiring, uplifting, healing trip to New York City to visit Manisha and Vijay Singal, February 23 - February 26, 2012
• Sit in front row at Gotham Comedy Club with companions and get deliciously seen by comedian: "You look like you bake cookies all day long." Friday, February 23, 2012
• 5th Avenue walk and talk with Manisha, February 25, 2012
• Six months since mother died, February 27, 2012
• First bike ride in six months, March 3, 2012
• Make finals in VT KnowledgeWorks Entrepreneurship Challenge with Feel. Think. Choose.(TM)
• Retinal hemorrhage heals after 3 months, March 12, 2012
• Conversation initiated by my father about my mother frees me from the past, Wednesday, March 14, 2012
• Have dinner with government teacher, thirty-five years since we were together in her classroom, March 14, 2012
• Think of what my mother would say - "Corporate, schmorporate" - and create category for cats, March 18, 2012
• Get 7 machines with 1 mile warm-up, March 24, 2012
• Talk and laugh while playing one billionth game of ping pong in cellar with husband, March 24, 2012
• Write this timeline, March 25, 2012

Cats in Pink Beds

His Cat

Her Cat

My Cat

c. 1999 - November 20, 2010

I adopted my cat from the Humane Society of Tampa Bay on November 2, 2004.

Unburying Things

So many people suffer because they try to bury things or pretend they didn't happen or say it didn't affect them.
- Gail Billingsley, Comment on "I See You"

For me, too, Gail, yes and yes.

The challenge is that we often "bury things" because they cause us so much pain we think we can't bear them in the open.  For me, the "buried things" do affect me and they affect my relationship with myself and others.  In fact, counter-intuitively, they cause me more pain buried, not because I can't see them, but because I can't see - and therefore can't change - how they're operating in my life in ways that cause pain to me and those I love. 

Here are ways I have kept "things buried":

• Denying their presence: "You didn’t understand." "It wasn’t meant that way."
• Denying their importance: “It doesn’t matter." "I'm over it." "That was the past." "I'm fine." "It could have been worse."
• Giving myself orders about them: “Get over it.” “Stop being so serious.” “Move on.”
• Avoiding them: “Uh-oh, I’m having feelings and thoughts about things. Let me work more, drink more, eat more, force more, strain more, anything more not to feel these feelings or think these thoughts.”
• Speaking affirmations, making lists of things to be grateful for, personal altars with crystals and feathers, reiki. (For me, the truth breaks through the ritual: “I am grateful for this glorious day…but I still feel sad about that thing...”)
• Trying: "Try to see the humor in it." "Try not to think about it."
• Upon remembering being felled by the "thing," staying on my knees. (Contemplative introspection is a strength of mine, so strong that I can readily reach: “I have no hope” and “Life has no meaning.” Both may be true, but they’re immobilizing.)
• Dwelling or ruminating, turning the handle and grinding and grinding. (Although re-remembering can at first feel like continuing to uncover truth, it can be a way to stay with known pain and avoid the next, newly painful insight.)

Here is what helps me "unbury things" so that I not only survive the process, but thrive from it:

• Telling myself the truth about what happened, what I felt and thought then, and what I feel and think now.
• Self-acknowledgement and self-compassion: “Yes, it did happen, yes, that was hard and painful, and, yes, it makes sense that you feel and think as you do.”
• Swapping out dependence on uncertain other-regard for ever-available self-regard: “Yes, humans need the regard of others and comfort from others might feel important right now, but we can't be sure someone's available. Right here, right now, whether others see it or not, or value it or not, you are doing the best you can to live according to your principles and values. You mean well. That has merit. You can take comfort in that.”
• Swapping out absolutism for magnanimity: “Given your past, it makes sense that you would think that feeling pain now means you will feel pain forever.  Ah, it’s the human condition to think it's black or white, all-or-nothing.  Your thinking, in particular, tends toward the apocalyptic.  That's okay.  You make it through this process every time and you grow every time. Easy does it."
• Practicing self-care.  This is so individual and the proverbial warm bath with candles so doesn't work for me.  For many reasons, I am a being with high energy.  Intense exercise aligns the electricity of who I am with what I’m doing in a way that feels restorative to me.   

Buried in the dark, the "thing" has the power.  Unburied, in the light, I can take its measure and choose how much power I give it.

I have shovel in hand.

I See Me

 I see you.
- Navi people, Avatar

See me, feel me
Touch me, heal me.
- Go to the Mirror!, Tommy, The Who

My mother refused to take photographs of me.  She said she wasn’t good at taking pictures. I remember one exception when I was a child.  We were all in the yard, my father had his camera, and I urged her, as if she were the child, to try.  My father, sister and I became the audience to her show as she exaggerated awkwardness with the camera, laughed, snapped a few shots in my direction.  When the film was developed, I saw the photos before they were thrown away, one with my forehead, one of blue sky where I didn’t appear at all.

She did see me. She and I were sitting at the dining room table on a hot summer afternoon, drinking Coca-Cola from ice-filled glasses. I was about sixteen. Only as an adult did I learn that the expression that came upon her face was an alarm to change the subject determinedly, desperately. My mother assumed the look of a scholar, who, upon examination and discernment, was uttering an incisive, indisputable truth.

“You'd be pretty if you didn’t have such a big nose,” she said.

***

My mother died six months ago.

Her personal traits accompany me through genetics and choice.  Her iconoclasm?  Yes, please.

With regard to the traits of her relationship with me, I am practicing examination and discernment.  Some have left a troubling, dark, legacy.  I loved my mother passionately, devotedly, so earnestly, with my whole heart and soul, and would have given anything, perhaps my own life, to please her, to relieve her of any dissatisfaction, to make her happy, to earn a mother’s love from her.  A child, then a teenager, isn’t conscious, or dares not be, of any oddness in the nature of the behavior of the parent.  And the expanse of love a dependent child feels for a parent leaves no room for consciousness. 

As an adult, however, from the edge of the growing space between my mother's presence and her absence, I am becoming aware of beliefs from the past that leaped the gap and accompany me in the present. 

I have a face not even a mother could love.

I have been told enough times by enough mothers of other children that this is not true, that if I had been their child, they would have loved my face and me, no matter what. But a child sees a mother's actions and hears her words, waits for what a mother doesn't do and listens for what she doesn't say.

The short story:  The conflict I witnessed within myself between dark and light while being photographed for a book cover was epic. Light won, but gee. It took me three days to recover from a photo shoot. 

The long story:  Our noses continue to grow as we age, drooping at the tip so they appear even larger.  My grandmother lived to be 101, so I’ve had a glimpse of my future, mon panache.

My grandmother, who died three months ago, had a face a granddaughter could, and did, with all her heart, love.

My mother had a face a daughter could, and did, with her whole being, love.

Let me look in the mirror.