#SOL16: Reading Walter Benjamin

Rob in Intensive Care in January 2016, reading Walter Benjamin

Across from me, on a bookshelf is the last book Rob was reading and writing about before he became too sick to do either--6 weeks before he died. He had spent most of the fall and early winter reading a number of texts by Walter Benjamin and making copious notes about these texts and his thinking. My husband, the scholar. In January Benjamin's One Way Street and Other Writings was what he was mostly reading and thinking about and it is this book that I find on a book shelf in our home. And though we never discussed this outright, I knew he was reading and writing such dense text in order to save his mind.

Save his mind.

100 days in hospitals can kill more than just your spirit. It is a mind killer.  In addition, all of the narcotics used to curb the increasing pain from the spinal lesions and then the rapid spread of the cancer from his right lung to his left lung, his sternum, ribs, spleen and liver also undermined his capacity to think.  Reading Benjamin helped him to hold his world a bit more steady, to remind of him of the future he thought waited for him just beyond the cancer.

Reading and writing showed Rob's determination to live connected to the world and to not let the illness diminish his life. I think about this in light of the national interest, if not global interest in best ensuring literate learners. Today, I retweeted Noel Drew's (@Drewedu) tweet based on Neil Gaiman's insights about reading.

And then commented:

When I think about Rob's reading and writing life, I know it was these behaviors that helped him to keep positive and negotiate the difficulties that arose after his diagnosis. His intense love of reading and writing developed alongside the agency he felt in choosing when, what, and how to read and/or write. 

#SOL15: (Un)steady

Black Limbs (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

I.

Twenty-five years ago this past Monday, Rob and I were married in the front room of Dave's West Rutland, Vermont home. Dave's wife, whose name I have long forgot, served as the only witness. Twenty-five years have past and today finds me thinking about all I could not know that morning in Vermont. We stood there in that modest room with the wood stove burning, snow falling beyond the front windows and made promises to remain true "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." A series of phrases we repeated not knowing then the many things that these words would mean.

On that same trip to Vermont we found a deserted tree-lined road full of deep snow, untouched. We put the jeep that had been stolen two weeks before and recovered 24-hours later in Newark, NJ in 4-wheel drive and drove on only to stop a bit later and test the snow that was knee deep. We had to push hard on the doors to open them and we did and then walked about, laughing and I was sure we were the only two people on the planet.

We were so young. So unable to know the future could be anything but bright white snow and us in it.

II.

Memory is a Klein bottle, non-orientable, for what appears at first to be inside and outside breaks down when a trace is followed and lost.

We are more tangle than line; more hypotenuse than leg.

III.

Yesterday, I called 911 as my husband could no longer walk, even with assistance. He is unable to use his right leg to do what it has done for six decades. Stand up. Rob was supposed to go for chemo, but he could not get from the house to the car.  Nothing we tried, and my son and I tried everything we could, helped. Rob simply could no longer stand up--not a for a quarter of a minute.  When I called the oncologist's office to say we would not be there, the nurse practitioner told me to get Rob to the emergency room immediately as she feared spinal cord compression. 12 hours and an MRI later, spinal cord compression was confirmed and Rob was transferred from the emergency room to the intensive care unit where he remains as I write this.

Inside this story there is an abundance of sadness and fear and so much uncertainty that nothing looks orientable and really nothing ever is beyond the moment.  Inside this story there is hope and the large generosity of others.

Today, Rob's leg is stronger.  The doctors, and again I have lost track of the number, have begun treating him with large doses of steroids and radiation and the outcome is a bit brighter than yesterday.

IV.

Nothing holds steady. Not the turn of years,  not the lives we are making and forgetting.