The Familiar Falling Away (Devon running down a road in Ringwood, NJ. M.A. Reilly)
I.
I know more now. Knowledge comes with personal cost.
After watching Rob die, I know that death is more labor than not; more late acceptance than hope. What I am learning nearly two years later is the nature of being alone. No matter how constant I held Rob’s hand between both of mine, he went to his death alone. We all die alone and this frightens me even though I realize it is both requirement and fate to leave alone. I watched Rob do that the last 36 hours of his life. I watched from beside his bed. I watched with my eyes trained on his. He resurfaced for a moment twelve hours before his death choking on flem. Only our friend, Robyn was present and though panic swelled having another person there in the middle of the night was more of a gift than I could name at the moment. I learned how to clear the airway, how to administer greater amounts of morphine that the doctor ordered, how to best insure that my husband's leaving would be without panic.
This knowledge has changed me: I'm more watchful now. I scare easily and let go of panic quickly too. I'm less interested in gains of any sort. The trappings of this life are that: trappings. They feel like weight. Giving is an elixir. I sidestep drama. I measure possible concerns against the lost of a love and ask how important is this? I find I anger easily at foolish things and forget grudges easily too. I know bad things happen and new things emerge.
II.
The passing of time has acted to unwind Rob from my memory, as if remembering was like adjusting a TV antenna in the hope of clearing static. A new image emerges of the last eight weeks of his life and this time I see me with him. When I close my eyes and try to see him, it’s like I am glimpsing a man I almost know, but not quite. Then I could only see Rob. His voice remained the same even though his features had changed. When he looked in a mirror and then at me and said he didn’t recognize himself I felt his pain.
“You were given huge amounts of steroids Rob. That’s what’s causing the distortion.”
“I don’t recognize my own face. Shit, even my hair is grey now.”
“You’re just distinguished.”
“I want to write a letter to Devon before it’s too late.”
“You will.”
When my husband grew too ill to be himself, I began to lose my very best friend and learned how to let this void fill with even greater space. Every loss opens me to what I could not imagine before. Rob would love knowing that.
The most devout person I have known was my mom, Catherine Reilly. Her faith revealed itself in her day-to-day living, in the kind acts she did quietly, in the way her study of St. Paul's letters informed her decisions, in her generosity. She was a woman filled with wonder and more. It wasn't until I was listening to an interview between Krista Tippett and Mary Catherine Bateson that I better understood the relationship between wonder and faith. Bateson was discussing the intersection among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and said this:
"And what struck me is that what — actually, all three of the religions that come from Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — that what we all have in common is the sense of wonder that leads to praise" (from here).
A sense of wonder that leads to praise.
It was not wonder alone, but rather wonder that led to praise that better fit my memory of my mom. So certain of God's love, she showed my brothers and me the many ways to hear one's conscience. Years later, these daily lesson lived, more than taught, remain with me the most.
II.
I woke up thinking about this sense of conscience-listening this morning. I wondered how the many people today who will cast a vote for Roy Moore will do so. What role does one's conscience play in how decisions are made and broken? How is deep religious faith balanced with the desire for expedient outcomes? The president has told the voters of Alabama that he needs a senate seat to make America great again. He told them, “The people of Alabama will do the right thing...Roy Moore will always vote with us. VOTE ROY MOORE!” His sole argument for Moor is that he will vote for "us" and us is a narrow group.
A devil's bargain that.
I was raised Roman Catholic and surely at the liberal end of that continuum and so it may not be so surprising that the white Evangelical movement as displayed these last few decades has confounded me. White evangelicals gave us Trump and perhaps by the end of the day they will give us another predator, Roy Moore. It seems antithetical to all things holy to support men who fail to engender a sense of wonder that leads to praise, unless the praise is about themselves. Where is God in such displays? How do these self-defined religious people square their choice with their faith? How do you look a pedophile, like Moore, in the eye and vote yes?
I don't buy the argument that because Moore has not undergone a trial voters ought not to consider the vile crimes that the women who have spoken out against him have claimed. That many were minors should concern all. That argument is weak and frankly, if the man in question was someone else--say a Democrat--would they be so hesitant to believe the accusers? Just look at pizzagate when many of the same people believed that Hillary Clinton was running a child pornography ring out of the basement of pizzerias. Such idiocy is still believed.
I'm curious how you reconcile yourself to all of this. What's your understanding?
Cover art for Nubes a Mi Alrededor: Oral Histories from Horizon Academy, Rikers Island (M.A. Reilly, 2008)
In the finest classrooms I have observed/researched across the last twenty years, uncertainty was more the norm than not. That's right: uncertainty. This may seem unusual given the normalcy of educational standards and their accompanying high stakes assessments that have constrained learning these last thirty years. We have been told that named lists of things to know advantages learning. But does it?
I can’t help but wonder if the standards movement so intimately tied to tests aren’t complicit in limiting learning by replacing wonder with codification. The tacit is hardly ever acknowledged in the rooms where standards are unfolded like predetermined paths that must be followed. The world beyond that path does not exist. Rather than following learners’ interests, we slavishly attend to narrow sets of standards and the lists of codified bits of knowledge as if these bits existed outside time, intention, ethics, and morals. In doing this we create classrooms where determined futures are the end point. And this is tragic.
Marching scores and scores of learners to already determined futures is less about living and more about following. In such schema ethics and creativity as Gary Saul Moroson (1994) has theorized is always lessened. The repeated practice dulls the mind. It is as if learning was more foreshadow and less lived practice.
In "Restoring Points of Potentiality: Sideshadowing in Elementary Classrooms," I wrote that a determined future is a knowable point in time that excludes other possibilities. Michael André Bernstein (1994) explained that foreshadowing relies on logic that “must always value the present, not for itself, but as the harbinger of an already determined future” (p. 2). Getting kids to know point A is all that matters; the present moment where they stand has already been scripted, contained and limited. Standards and high stakes testing rest on the logic of an already determined future. One we have been told to believe must be privileged. The actual lived experience is reduced and in some cases deadened. Codification on such grand scales limits learning as it fails to allow for the present moment to emerge in favor of determined end points. Such logic reduces possibility and replaces it with certainty.
In the classrooms and schools where uncertainty was privileged, learners (students and teachers) demonstrated curiosity, wonder, error, persistence, accuracy, and an intellectualism that was generous and gregarious. There, paths were made, not followed. Middles emerged as natural. The present moment was very much alive.
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