Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O I XCharles, after a note of warning, turns again to God, whom we so impiously neglect. Cunizza approaches; she describes the site of Romano whence she and the tyrant Ezzelin, her brother, sprang. She tells how her past sins no longer trouble her. She speaks of the fair fame on earth of the troubadour Folco, and laments that no such fame is now sought by her countrymen of Venetia; whose woes she predicts and whose crimes she denounces; and then seeming no longer to heed Dante drops again into her place in the cosmic dance. Folco now flashes brighter in Dante’s sight, and at his entreaty diverts his voice from its place in the universal song (which, like the universal dance, takes its note from the Seraphim) to minister to his special need. He indicates his birthplace of Marseilles. He tells of his amorous youth but shows how in heaven there is no repentance, because the sin is only seen or remembered as the occasion of the act of God by which the fallen one was uplifted again into his true element: and it is on this divine power and grace that the soul’s whole thought and love are centred. He points out to Dante the light of Rahab, speaks of this heaven as just within the range of the cone of the earth’s shadow, thereby indicating that the place of these souls in heaven is, in part, determined by the earthly sin that is now no longer in their minds; refers to Rahab’s help given to Joshua in conquering the Holy Land, and denounces the Pope for his indifference to its recovery. It is devil-planted Florence that corrupts the world, both shepherd and flock, by her florins. But vengeance shall not lag. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] WHEN THY CHARLES,1 fair Clemence, had enlightened me, he told me of the frauds his seed was destined to encounter; but added: “Hold thy peace, and let the years revolve”; so that I can say naught, save that wailing well-deserved shall track your wrongs. And already the life of that sacred light had turned to the sun that filleth it, as to the good ample for all things. Ah! souls deceived, ah! creatures impious, who from such good wry-twist your hearts, squaring your temples unto vanity! And lo, another of those splendours drew him towards me, and signified his will to pleasure me, by brightening outwardly. Beatrice’s eyes, fixed on me as before, of dear assent to my desire assured me. “Nay! make swift counterpoise unto my will,” I said, “thou blessed spirit, and give proof that I can cast reflection upon thee of what I think.”2 Whereat the light which was new to me, from out its depth, wherein it first was singing, went on as one rejoicing to do well: “In that region of the depraved Italian land which sitteth ’twixt Rialto and the springs of Brenta and Piave,

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Indeed, he disapproved of Kennedy’s affairs, especially since he sometimes had to serve as a cover. He also thought smoking made a woman look immoral, and since I thought a cigarette made me look like a writer—though I couldn’t inhale without getting sick—I smoked and felt judged by him. Far more important was his mastery of parallel construction, with sentences as elegant and inspiring as “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” If I hung out in his office for a day or two, I hoped I might learn, contribute, or both. That’s why, on a November day, I was sorting clippings while Ted hurried to finish a speech for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. He ran the final copy out onto the White House lawn, where a helicopter waited to take the president to Air Force One. I watched as Kennedy, that familiar man I’d never met, walked into the wind from the whirling blades. It was the last time Ted or I would ever see him. In New York the next day, I could tell, from the faces of people in the street, who knew about the shooting and who did not. Ted called to say the bullet had shattered the president’s skull. There was no hope. I thought, When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves. —ONCE VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON was president, Bobby Kennedy stepped down as attorney general to give LBJ the right to name his own. Then this younger Kennedy declared his candidacy for U.S. Senate from New York State. It seemed to be a painful effort to fill his brother’s shoes. Bobby Kennedy hated even public speaking. I once heard him give a brief talk, and I related to his uncomfortable voyage from one sentence to the next. Hoping to publish a freelance article, I followed Bobby Kennedy around for a day of campaigning in New York City. He was a very unusual candidate. When avoiding a reporter’s question, for instance, he didn’t just give a skillful nonanswer, as most politicians do. “As you can see,” he would say, “I’m trying to avoid that question.” He seemed interested in engaging only with people who asked questions to which they really didn’t know the answers. Jack Newfield of The Village Voice told me the secret of interviewing Bobby: Bring along someone who doesn’t know the subject—or better yet, who disagrees. Then Bobby will see a purpose in explaining, and you’ll get lots of quotes. In Manhattan, two famous writers, journalist Gay Talese and novelist Saul Bellow, joined Kennedy’s Senate campaign for the day. I knew Talese and had recently met Bellow when I interviewed him and followed him around his beloved Chicago. The three of us shared a taxi to Kennedy events.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Over the two weeks I’ve been here, this house has become like a ship at sea for me; nothing else exists. I tell her that, thanks to her, I’ve come to understand the power of community. There is silence. I fear her good hours are gone. Then she smiles and says, “You’ll never be the same.” Later, a medical attendant arrives, and I know she has decided to accept morphine. Since this is real life, not a novel, there is no sharp line, no definitive good-bye. Wilma just seems to pull away from us, like an ocean tide receding from all of us left standing on the beach. The moment after is utterly different from the moment before. Now I understand why people believe the soul departs with the last breath. Everything looks the same, yet everything is different. We stand in the room around Wilma’s bed. She is no longer there. Respectful attendants come with a stretcher on wheels, open the French doors, and move her slowly across the porch where she loved to sit, and onto her beloved land one last time. Later, her ashes will be returned to the banks of the spring where Charlie’s medicinal herbs grow. This is where she wanted to be. —IT’S THE BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY MORNING of April 10, 2010, and we are sitting outdoors at the Cherokee Cultural Grounds. Though it’s only four days after Wilma’s death, 150 tribal, state, and national leaders, including President Clinton and President Obama, have sent messages, and about fifteen hundred people have gathered to hear friends and family share personal memories. It’s the best kind of memorial because each of us will leave knowing Wilma a little better than we did when we arrived. Among her last requests was that everyone wear or carry something in her improbable favorite color: bright pink. A symbolic drink made of strawberries is served. Strawberries are called ani in Cherokee and are supposed to help her make her way through the sky to the ancestors. For me, this is the beginning of years of picking up the phone—and realizing I can’t talk to her; of thinking about our book—and knowing we can’t write it together; of hearing something that would make her laugh—yet I can’t tell her. My friend Robin Morgan, author of a lovingly researched novel about pagan times,21 has called to tell me that Wilma is being honored in many countries around the world as a Great One. Pagan and Native cultures share many beliefs, and one is that lighting signal fires at high points in the landscape will light the path of a Great One home.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Terrible as it was to Levin to put his arms round that terrible body, to take hold of that under the quilt, of which he preferred to know nothing, under his wife’s influence he made his resolute face that she knew so well, and putting his arms into the bed took hold of the body, but in spite of his own strength he was struck by the strange heaviness of those powerless limbs. While he was turning him over, conscious of the huge emaciated arm about his neck, Kitty swiftly and noiselessly turned the pillow, beat it up and settled in it the sick man’s head, smoothing back his hair, which was sticking again to his moist brow. The sick man kept his brother’s hand in his own. Levin felt that he meant to do something with his hand and was pulling it somewhere. Levin yielded with a sinking heart: yes, he drew it to his mouth and kissed it. Levin, shaking with sobs and unable to articulate a word, went out of the room. Chapter 19 “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” So Levin thought about his wife as he talked to her that evening.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I understood that LaDonna’s presence among the thirty-five International Women’s Year commissioners would send a signal to Native American women around the country who otherwise might not feel invited to state conferences. What I didn’t understand was how rare this was. At less than 1 percent of the population—at least, by the notorious undercount of the U.S. Census9 —the more than five hundred tribes and nations made up the smallest, poorest, and least formally educated group in the United States. Nations were very diverse, varying in size from the vast Navajo Nation that extended into several states to reservations of less than twenty acres. But across that diversity, they shared such common struggles as dealing with a federal government that had yet to honor one treaty in its entirety, gaining control of the schooling and treatment of their own children, protecting their land from exploitation for oil, uranium, and other resources on it—and much more. For instance, women on reservations suffered the highest rate of sexual assault in the country, yet the non-Native men who were the majority of their assaulters were not subject to tribal police or jurisdiction, and were mostly ignored by the larger legal system. From quiet, understated, and sometimes hesitant Native women who came to meetings and stayed to talk, I learned about the generations of Indian families who had been forced by law to send their children to Christian boarding schools often funded by tax dollars; never mind the separation of church and state. The nineteenth-century founder of those schools coined the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.” They deprived children of their families, names, language, culture, and even their long hair. Then they were taught a history that measured progress by their defeat. Often, these children were subjected to forced labor, malnutrition, and physical and sexual abuse. Later, after several schools were closed down, the land around them yielded graves of starved and abused children. Saddest of all, two centuries of child abuse in Indian boarding schools had sometimes normalized punitive child rearing and sexualized violence within Indian families. Childhood patterns are repeated because they are what we know. Even when the schools were humane, teaching Native languages and practicing Native religion was illegal, something that continued until the 1970s. Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: “For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer’s desire.”10 In Indian Country, there is a belief that one act of violence takes four generations to heal. Because many centuries of such acts have yet to be known or taken seriously by most Americans, much less healed, this nation may keep repeating its violent childhood—until we find the wound and heal it. I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

• From Querelle (1953)

  240 I JEAN GENET of fittingness in him against which few arguments remain. However, the friendship linking him to the victim-turning the latter into an extension of the murderer's own personality gives rise to a magical phenomenon we'll try to express in the following terms: I have just been engaged in an enterprise that involved a part of myself (my affection for the victim). Now I know how to enter into a kind of (nonverbal) pact with the Devil in which I do not give Him my soul, or an arm; but something equally precious: I give him a friend of mine. The death of this friend sanctifies my thieving. It is not a matter of formal arrangement (there are reasons stronger than the provi· sions of any law, inherent in tears, grief, death, blood, in gestures, objects, matter itself) , but an act of true magic that makes me the only true possessor of the object for which a friend has been voluntarily bartered. I say voluntarily because my victim, in being a friend, was (and my grief confirms this) a greening leaf somewhere close to the tip of one of my branches, nourished by my own sap. Querelle knew that no one on this earth, without committing a sacrilege Querelle himself would try to prevent by fighting against it to his very last breath, would ever succeed in taking certain stolen jewels away from hi m, as his accomplice (and friend) whom he had delivered into the hands of the police in order to escape more quickly hi mself, had been sentenced to five years' solitary confinement. It did not exactly cause him grief to find himself the true owner of those stolen goods, but he regarded them with a feeling we have to call more noble, and not in the least tainted by affec· tion, a kind of manly faithfulness to a wounded companion. Not that our hero had the idea that he was holding the booty for his accomplice, in order to share it with him later; the main thing, for him, was to keep the loot intact and out of reach of hu man justice. Every time he stole or robbed again, Querelle immediately felt the need to establish a mystical connection between the stolen objects and· himself. "The right of con· quest" became a phrase that meant something. Querelle meta·

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  As another example, consider chronic pain. The law treats chronic pain by and large as “emotional” because there’s no observable tissue damage. In these cases, the law usually concludes that the suffering is not real enough to merit compensation. People who suffer from chronic pain are often diagnosed as mentally ill, and even more so if they opt for an invasive operation to try and reduce their “illusory” suffering. Medical insurance companies deny treatment since chronic pain is considered psychological, not physical. The sufferer cannot work, yet no compensation is provided. But as we saw in the preceding chapter, chronic pain is likely a brain disease of prediction gone wrong. The suffering is real. The law is missing the point that prediction and simulation are the normal way that the brain works, and chronic pain is a difference of degree, not kind.61 Interestingly, the law does accept that other types of harm can be absent now but show up in the future. A prominent example is chemical harm such as Gulf War Syndrome, a chronic, multi-symptom illness allegedly caused by unknown factors during the Gulf War, whose effects did not appear until later. Gulf War Syndrome is controversial; there is no consensus on whether it’s actually a distinct medical condition. Regardless, thousands of veterans have taken their claims of Gulf War Syndrome to court. There is no analogous legal avenue for stress or other harm seen as emotional. (Awards for pain and suffering are relatively rare.) Having made this observation, I must point out that the law is deeply inconsistent and even ironic in its view of emotional harm when you consider international norms for torture. The Geneva Conventions prohibit psychological harm to prisoners of war, and the U.S. Constitution likewise forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” So it’s illegal for a government to torture a prisoner psychologically, but it’s perfectly legal to place a prisoner in solitary confinement for long periods, even though the stress of confinement may shorten the prisoner’s telomeres and therefore his life.62 It’s also perfectly legal for a high school bully to insult, torment, and humiliate your children even though this will shorten their telomeres and potentially their lifespan. When a group of middle-school girls deliberately excludes another girl, they are acting with intent and motivation to cause suffering, yet legal action is rare. In one highly publicized case, fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself in 2010 after months of verbal aggression and physical threats. Six teenagers were criminally prosecuted for harassment, stalking, assault, and assorted civil rights violations after they bullied her and then posted crude comments on her Facebook memorial page. This case prompted Massachusetts to pass anti-bullying laws. These laws are a start, but they punish only the most extreme cases. How do you regulate the playground in a legal context?63

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Some religions oppose all nonprocreative and out-of-wedlock sex. Some people are just trying to get the sex industry out of their neighborhood. But it is the polarized choice between criminalization and legalization that is the problem. In fact, no one this side of the Taliban wants to criminalize prostituted people. As usual, a binary conceals all the realities in between. The secret is the Third Way: decriminalizing prostituted people and offering them services and alternative ways of making a living, not criminalizing but penalizing the buyer by requiring some education in the realities of the global sex industry, and criminalizing the traffickers, pimps, and sellers of other people’s bodies. Known as the Swedish or Nordic model, this legislation and social program was passed in Sweden in 1999, then also in Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, and France in 2016. Because it is the only law that recognizes the difference in power between the prostituted person and the buyer, its realism has helped some prostituted people to get out if they wish, and some buyers to be informed or embarrassed out of creating demand. But inhibiting demand in any way is exactly what the global profiteers of the sex industry oppose, with all their power of media and money. It’s no secret that far more people are now trafficked for sex, labor, or both, legally and otherwise, than during what we think of as the era of slavery. In communities, a few people find their own Third Way. I remember an African American woman judge in a night court who refused to hear charges against any woman accused of prostitution until her customer was arrested, too. It was amazing how fast those charges melted away. But for most of us, it’s still a secret that the hotel or motel down the street specializes in trafficked teenagers; or that the average life expectancy of a prostituted woman may be less than that of a soldier in combat; or that young girls from Alaska are taken on ships to be sold in Minnesota; or that runaway boys are dependent on “survival sex,” a street term for trading sex for food and shelter; or that prostituted people are marked with tattoos of ownership and even price codes by their pimps; or that a random group of six hundred mental health professionals reported that three-quarters of them have treated prostituted people for post-traumatic stress disorder and other results of what is supposedly a victimless crime.4 —IN 2008, ALMOST FOUR decades after Flo Kennedy and I went to Las Vegas, I decide to go there again. Nevada is still the only state with licensed brothels, and the number has increased in four decades. By now, the term sex work has become an accepted phrase, so normalized that not to use it is seen as odd, out of it, and even disrespectful.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He could feel the churning up of something, the movement of memory. His grandmother and his grandfather had lived on that mountain, far away from everyone and everything. They kept animals, chickens and goats, sometimes a cow. Back then, Lionel had eaten meat and thought nothing of it. Back then, his grandfather had given him big bowls of venison or fish that they had trapped and killed and cleaned themselves. His grandfather had not been tall or stocky. He had been a tracing of a man, his skin deep and black. His grandfather had taught him how to kill in the most humane way—with the straightest, cleanest line, the purest shot. There had been days deep in the ashy frost of fall when Lionel had stood with his hands deep in the cavity of a deer, had felt its body cooling, its blood thickening. He could remember how grainy blood felt after a while, and, in a more imperfect way, the gradual sense one got of the whole network of vessels and veins and arteries that kept a thing alive. When he lined up everything that he had learned on that mountain in Tennessee from his grandfather, who had smelled of sweat and tobacco, who had chased him with skin of deer and rabbits, making their fur dance, and from Ben Tovelson in the green woods—when Lionel lined all that up and peered down through it, he could see, with horrible clarity, just how he’d been able to lift the blade in the narrow room a year before. They drove on. The cold, bright world whipped by the window. “Lionel?” Charles asked. Lionel could barely hear him over the howl of the wind. He dipped his head back into the window. Charles was looking at him the way people did when they glimpsed the wildness in him, that part of him which was still not yet tamed, beaten back into shape. Lionel tried to smile. His eyes were teary and wet. “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” Charles put his hand on the back of Lionel’s neck. He was driving without looking at the street. His eyes were on Lionel. His hand made reassuring shapes against his skin. “Hang in there,” he said. His eyes went back to the street, to the cars that were out in front of them. Lionel leaned into Charles’s touch. He wanted to tell Charles about the mountain but couldn’t make himself yet. “I’m hanging in,” he said. Maybe it was enough to want to tell Charles about the mountain. His life had become a series of small eruptions, minor escalations.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  All I can think of is her description of her near-death experience after the head-on car crash years earlier. She told me it felt as if she were flying through space, faster than any living thing could fly, feeling warm and loved in every pore of her being, as if she were one with the universe, then realizing: This is the purpose of life! Only the thought of her two young daughters made her turn back. I’ve always remembered that and hoped other people I love would share this last feeling. One day I hope I will, too. But I can’t think about such a moment for Wilma now. I can’t wish it for her, because then she will be gone. She shows me a statement she is making about her illness, explaining that she is “mentally and spiritually prepared for the journey.” She’s definitely more ready than I am. That night I’m bolted awake by hearing Wilma cry out in pain. I find Charlie warming blankets on a potbellied stove. As a traditional healer, he not only knows the uses of herbs but has an instinct for the untried. He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain. This terrifying sequence is repeated several times. The next day I ask the young Dr. Grim, who could not be more different from her name, what can be done about the pain. She says Wilma knows that morphine and other opiates would help, but taking enough to cut the pain would also dull her consciousness. She wants to be fully present for as long as she can. In the next few days, relatives, friends, and colleagues come from miles around to pay their respects. They sit near her, reminisce about the past, argue politics for the future, and bring pies, cakes, and casseroles for ever-increasing numbers of visitors. Children bring flowers, or sing a song from church or school, or just watch television. Some stare at Wilma and their parents in a way that says they will never forget. As some of the older visitors leave, they say, “I’ll see you on the other side of the mountain.” I’ve never seen such honesty about dying. People closest to the family do the small and continuous tasks: laundry, bringing in firewood, feeding Wilma’s indoor dog and outdoor cats. They include our mutual friends from San Francisco, Kristina Kiehl and Bob Friedman. Kristina has been there for three weeks, helping with this final challenge as she has with so many others. She invents a way of washing Wilma’s hair in bed. Bob takes over the continual task of washing dishes for the many people who gather in the big kitchen, talking softly. At night Wilma calls out in pain. Then it begins during the day, too. I can’t bear it. I go into full research mode and phone every physician I know.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As Wilma’s friends put it, she is finally going to the other side of the mountain. At the end of my own tribute to Wilma, I tell the people gathered here in rural Oklahoma that in no fewer than twenty-three countries, signal fires have been lighted for Wilma, and are now lighting her way home. Back at Wilma and Charlie’s house, Charlie carries out her last request, one she was and wasn’t laughing when she made. She asked him to take the metal leg brace that she had had to wear all the years after the car crash, place it in a field, and blast it with a shotgun. He does just that. —IT IS NOW FIVE YEARS AFTER Wilma’s death, and I’m more than ever learning from and about original cultures—on my own continent, in India, and in countries of Africa, where we all came from. Our current plight is not made inevitable by human nature. What once was could be again—in a new way. I once asked Wilma if one day my ashes could be with hers, and she said yes. In the future they will be. Even though my ancestors were forced to escape their homes and come here, I feel I’ve found my land. If I could say one thing to Wilma, it would be this: We’re still here. [image "Afterword" file=Image00023.jpg] Coming HomeA s I write this, I’m fifteen years older than my father was when he died. Only after fifty did I begin to admit that I was suffering from my own form of imbalance. Though I felt sorry for myself for not having a home, I was always rescued by defiance and a love of freedom. Like my father for instance, I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t earning enough money as a freelancer to file income tax returns, something I had to spend months with an accountant to make up for. Like him, I’d saved no money, so there was a good reason for my fantasy of ending up as a bag lady. I handled it just by saying to myself, I’ll organize the other bag ladies. Finally, I had to admit that I too was leading an out-of-balance life, even if it was different in degree from my father’s. I needed to make a home for myself; otherwise it would do me in, too. Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Mercy Me was a simple game, a stupid game, one they’d all played in the woods and in the sheds on the farm, putting their hands around each other’s throats and squeezing slowly at first: softly, then firm, digging into the soft fuzz at the nape of the neck, until the other boy beat your chest, until his face went red and he opened his mouth and gasped, Mercy, mercy me. Have mercy on me. In the bathroom, the spaces between his fingers still sticky with piss, he squeezed Francisco’s throat gently, the same way he first held Gristle, Marrow, and Bone when they were first born and he sensed that he could, very easily, destroy them. It was love to choose otherwise. In Simon’s bed, telling the story, he’d tried to be jokey—“You should have seen her face”—but there was nothing funny in it. She had flushed with anger, with fear, and she’d pushed Hartjes to the side. He’d clipped his head on the edge of the window. She pulled Francisco, coughing, wheezing, up from the floor and beat his back hard and fast. She’d said, “I love you, are you okay, I love you.” She had wrapped her arms around Francisco while Hartjes sat there holding his head. He had felt like he was full of wet sand. And Simon had rolled on top of him and kissed him and said, “Are you still waiting for her to turn to you, too? To say she loved you? You gotta let this go, man. It’s done.” Hartjes had wanted to say that if it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different and stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth’s, and it was a kind of natural law that kept them all doing as they should. But he just kissed Simon’s throat. But now she was dead. It was a different thing to speak ill of the dead. In his family, one did not speak the name of the dead after they had been buried. It was a summons. A beckoning. And who knew what the dead might take with them when they left again. When his grandfather had died, they had burned not only his possessions but almost everything he’d ever touched, all of it that could be burned. What made no sense to burn—the tools, the guns, the tractors, the car—they wiped and cleaned. They laid it all out on the benches and worktables in the back and scrubbed everything down with alcohol and bleach, with oil and polish, wiped and wiped as if that might erase history, time, possession. His family took down all his grandfather’s pictures, stored them away.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  A few are even citing the 360 million deaf people in the world—or the million in this country—and studying sign language as a language requirement. Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine? Thanks to those Gallaudet students, I can imagine it. • On campuses that offer courses in hospitality training or hotel management, visitors often stay in a hotel that is the practice lab for students. I’m having coffee in the lobby of one in the Midwest when a tall, rangy, fair-haired young man in cowboy boots asks if he can sit down. Because he seems so shy—and because he says he has long admired both me and a particular professional baseball player—I’m surprised. Never before have I been so paired. As we talk about his hopes of starting a country inn, I have the odd and overwhelming feeling that I’m talking to another woman. He is a cowboy, very taciturn and masculine, yet I can’t shake the feeling. When I finally get up the courage to say so, he says, “Of course, that’s because I was raised as a girl.” Then he tells me this story. I tell you from memory. It isn’t the kind of story that you can forget. I grew up in a family that lived outside of town, in a big old house in the desert. There were three generations of us. I knew my grandfather was also my father, and he was also my mother’s father, but I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that. What I did know and hated was that, whenever we stopped for gas and didn’t have enough money, my mother or some other relative would send me into the gas station to do a blowjob for the guy who worked there. I don’t remember when this started, I was maybe four or five, but I had learned to do this sexual service for my grandfather. He used to say that I should have been his granddaughter. Maybe he felt strange about doing this with a boy—my mother began dressing me in girl’s clothes and calling me a girl’s name. When I went to school, I wore boy clothes, but I didn’t have friends. I learned right away that ours was the family other families told their kids not to play with. As soon as I was old enough to run away, I lied about my age, and joined the Navy. I felt safer than I ever had at home. Getting out was the first thing that saved me. By the time I came back home and rented a room in town, there was a women’s center where groups talked about a lot of things, including sexual abuse in childhood. I had no idea this had happened to anyone else.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I write names down next to rhubarb and peach pies, vats of sweet iced tea, and trays of cornbread. A high school student carries in crates of bottled water, and a silent man in overalls mows the lawn just because it needs it. Wilma’s family wants to be able to thank each person, hence the list. Once again the individual honors the community, and vice versa. I finally understand why Winterhawk, Charlie’s son by an earlier marriage, turned down a scholarship to Dartmouth and stayed here instead. It was not just land that brought Wilma home; it was also community. At the long kitchen table, knowing Wilma creates a bond among us, and strangers talk. The husband of her dear friend who died in the car crash has been here for days, and explains that Wilma helped to raise their daughter. Gail Small, Wilma’s friend and one of the activists she admires and profiled in her book Every Day Is a Good Day, has come all the way from the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana. There, Gail has waged a lifetime battle to keep extractive and exploitive energy companies from destroying the land, and to keep religious schools from abusing the next generation. As she says, “Children were sexually molested by priests and nuns, then came home to spread the cancer themselves.” She started not only an environmental group called Native Action, but also a high school on the reservation. Oren Lyons has come from his home in upstate New York, the headquarters of the governing body of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee. It is the oldest continuous democracy in the world. 20 Whenever Wilma or I used to ask him something serious, he always answered, “I have to consult with my women elders first.” In fact, it was the equality of women in those nations that inspired white women neighbors to begin organizing the suffrage movement. Wilma’s own mother is there every morning, having walked from her house just down a dirt road. She tells me that Wilma took her to Ireland to see her own hereditary land for the first time. We both know that she will outlive her daughter. I’ve promised to bring Wilma conversations from her kitchen table, since she is unable to have them herself. Over the two weeks I’ve been here, this house has become like a ship at sea for me; nothing else exists. I tell her that, thanks to her, I’ve come to understand the power of community. There is silence. I fear her good hours are gone. Then she smiles and says, “You’ll never be the same.” Later, a medical attendant arrives, and I know she has decided to accept morphine. Since this is real life, not a novel, there is no sharp line, no definitive good-bye. Wilma just seems to pull away from us, like an ocean tide receding from all of us left standing on the beach.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  One is Linda Joy Traitz, who at nineteen was a waitress at Café Figaro, where Cosby dropped in occasionally because he was its part owner. He offered her a ride home, then, in his car, she says that she was confronted by a briefcase full of drugs and booze, plus his sexual assault. I wish Flo were here to learn her instincts were right. Eighteen years older than I, with a life that stretched from seeing her parents threatened by the Ku Klux Klan to becoming a civil rights and show business lawyer, she was nearly always right. Traveling with her was better than any college education. I once saw her buy a purple pantsuit for a young white salesgirl in a small-town dress shop, something the salesgirl wanted but could never have afforded. When I went back after Flo’s death, that now middle-aged woman told me Flo’s generosity had opened up a new view of life. • In 1980 I board a crowded plane for Detroit and find myself seated among a group of Hasidic Jews. The men are wearing wide-brimmed black fedoras over their yarmulkes, the women are in dark-haired wigs and long-sleeved dresses, and the children are as neat and well behaved as miniature grown-ups. I notice some hurried rearranging of seats. The goal seems to be that no woman sits next to a man not her husband—or next to me. My seatmate turns out to be the oldest man, stooped and gentle, reading his prayer book. Knowing that no Hasidic man is allowed to touch a woman outside his family, not even to shake hands, I do my best to be respectful and keep my arm off our shared armrest. Still, I’m surprised that separating me from the women seemed to be a higher priority than isolating me from the men. I hear the word feminist in English amid the Yiddish from two young men sitting in front of us, and they peer back at me between the seats. When we arrive at the Detroit airport, I go into a ladies’ room—and there are the wives and daughters. The youngest wife checks the stalls into which the older ones have disappeared, looks me straight in the eye, and smiles. “Hello, Gloria,” she says firmly. “My name is Miriam.” That smile is worth the whole trip. • It’s 1996, and I’m in Kansas, home state of U.S. senator Robert Dole, who has just run for president of the United States. I turn on the television in my motel. Dole is on camera, smiling, talking about his ED—erectile dysfunction—in a paid commercial for Viagra. As Liz Smith, the smart and funny Manhattan gossip columnist, always says, “You can’t make this stuff up.” • Just as the millennium is about to end, I’m in a car with two women students on our way to a political meeting in Arizona.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Walking toward a large flickering light rising into the sky, I gradually saw that it came from a bonfire that was even taller than the men and women moving around it. On our side were rough wooden shelters and dozens of long picnic tables, all lit with lanterns or bare bulbs hanging from the trees. They were laden with enough food to last the night. There were old-fashioned cauldrons of stew, platters of fried chicken, dozens of deep-dish fruit pies, and mounds of fry bread made with the white flour, lard, and sugar that government rations had turned into a time-honored and unhealthy treat. Alcohol was not allowed in this sacred space, but there were coolers of soft drinks and urns of coffee. Family groups were eating or talking quietly—not hushed, as in a church, but not loud or boisterous either. People were watching the dancers from lawn chairs, some far from the fire and wrapped in blankets against the chill, others closer and just resting before rejoining the dancing. On the other side of the huge bonfire, I could see a shadowy group of men chanting deep-toned call-and-response songs. Dancers spiraled around the huge bonfire, the innermost circle barely moving and the outermost one increasing in speed like a whip until only the young and strong could keep up. Charlie invited me to join with him, and it was daunting, like trying to get on a moving train. Once inside, I realized that the dancers were not so much stomping as caressing the earth with each sliding step. So many together made a deep whooshing sound. We formed a curved line, like a huge living nautilus shell, with women elders at its heart around the fire. I knew from Wilma that their heavy leggings were sewn with small tortoise shells, and each shell was filled with tiny pebbles, so as their feet and rattling shells hit the ground, there was a sound I’d never heard before, yet it was right and familiar. Women elders were keeping the rhythm of life. I knew that Wilma should be dancing with these women elders at the center near the fire. But could she? I sat with her at the outer edge of the firelight as she prepared for a ritual that has survived centuries of land loss, warfare, lethal epidemics, outlawed languages and spiritual practices, and other attempts to take away home, culture, pride, family, and life itself. I watched as Wilma wrapped thick strips of cloth from knee to ankle, covering the steel brace that she could not walk without, adding the weight of tortoise shells and stones by her own choice. She moved out of the dark, past the dancers at the speeding end of the spiral, into the inner circle of women moving around the fire. And then she danced. —IT’S A FEW YEARS LATER, and I know that Wilma still has health problems. Lately, she has had a series of tests for fatigue and back pains.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I cancel conference and birthday plans. On the phone with Charlie, I learn that Wilma has been diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It is one of the least curable and most painful forms. Two plane flights and a long drive later, I arrive at Wilma and Charlie’s house on Mankiller Flats. Her caregiving team is assembling. Besides Charlie, there are Gina and Felicia, her two daughters, who come and go from their nearby homes; Dr. Gloria Grim, a young physician who heads the Cherokee Rural Health Clinics that Wilma started; also two of Wilma’s longtime women friends, one a nurse. They have had a lifetime pact to come and stay whenever one of Wilma’s many health crises seems likely to be her last. Wilma herself is lying in a hospital bed next to the big four-poster she shares with Charlie, so they will still be in the same room. She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body. She can tell I haven’t accepted any of this yet. As if to comfort me, she says most Americans want to die at home, but many spend their last weeks in a hospital without friends and family. I ask her if she’s now organizing a campaign for the right to die at home. This makes her laugh, and I buy some time. All I can think of is her description of her near-death experience after the head-on car crash years earlier. She told me it felt as if she were flying through space, faster than any living thing could fly, feeling warm and loved in every pore of her being, as if she were one with the universe, then realizing: This is the purpose of life! Only the thought of her two young daughters made her turn back. I’ve always remembered that and hoped other people I love would share this last feeling. One day I hope I will, too. But I can’t think about such a moment for Wilma now. I can’t wish it for her, because then she will be gone. She shows me a statement she is making about her illness, explaining that she is “mentally and spiritually prepared for the journey.” She’s definitely more ready than I am. That night I’m bolted awake by hearing Wilma cry out in pain. I find Charlie warming blankets on a potbellied stove. As a traditional healer, he not only knows the uses of herbs but has an instinct for the untried. He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain. This terrifying sequence is repeated several times.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X X I I I “Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also shall he be punished” is the unalterable law which Dante sees written—not only in the ancient Hebrew records, but in every part of the Universe. The sinners whom he here finds frozen together in one hole are Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri (Roger) of Pisa, traitors both; and Ruggieri has the Shadow of Ugolino’s hunger gnawing upon him in the eternal ice, while Ugolino has the image of his own base treachery and hideous death continually before him. He lifts up his head from the horrid meal, and pauses, when Dante recalls to him his early life, in the same way as the storm paused for Francesca; and the Archbishop is silent as Paolo. After leaving Ugolino, the Poets go on to the Third Ring or Ptolomæa, which takes its name from the Ptolomæus (1 Maccab. xvi. 11) who “had abundance of silver and gold,” and “made a great banquet” for his father-in-law Simon the high priest and his two sons; and, “when Simon and his sons had drunk largely,” treacherously slew them “in the banqueting place.” Friar Alberigo and Branca d’Oria are found in it. FROM THE FELL repast that sinner raised his mouth, wiping it upon the hair of the head he had laid waste behind. Then he began: “Thou wiliest that I renew desperate grief, which wrings my heart, even at the very thought, before I tell thereof. But if my words are to be a seed, that may bear fruit of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, thou shalt see me speak and weep at the same time. I know not who thou mayest be, nor by what mode thou hast come down here; but, when I hear thee, in truth thou seemest to me a Florentine. Thou hast to know that I was Count Ugolino, and this the Archbishop Ruggieri; 1 now I will tell thee why I am such a neighbour to him. That by the effect of his ill devices I, confiding in him, was taken and thereafter put to death, it is not necessary to say. But that which thou canst not have learnt, that is, how cruel was my death, thou shalt hear and know if he has offended me. A narrow hole within the mew, which from me has the title of Famine, and in which others yet must be shut up, had through its opening already shown me several moons, when I slept the evil sleep that rent for me the curtain of the future. This man seemed to me lord and master, chasing the wolf and his whelps, upon the mountain 2 for which the Pisans cannot see Lucca. With hounds meagre, keen, and dexterous, he had put in front of him Gualandi with Sismondi, and with Lanfranchi.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And one of the wretched shadows of the icy crust cried out to us: “O souls, so cruel that the last post of all is given to you! Remove the hard veils from my face, that I may vent the grief, which stuffs my heart, a little, ere the weeping freeze again.” Wherefore I to him: “If thou wouldst have me aid thee, tell me who thou art; and if I do not extricate thee, may I have to go to the bottom of the ice.” He answered therefore: “I am Friar Alberigo, 11 I am he of the fruits from the ill garden, who here receive dates for my figs.” “Hah!” said I to him, “then art thou dead already?” And he to me: “How my body stands in the world above, I have no knowledge. Such privilege has this Ptolomæa, that oftentimes the soul falls down hither, ere Atropos 12 impels it. And that thou more willingly mayest rid the glazen tears from off my face, know that forthwith, when the soul betrays, as I did, her body is taken from her by a Demon who thereafter rules it, till its time has all revolved. She falls rushing to this cistern; and perhaps the body of this other shade, which winters here behind me, is still apparent on the earth above. Thou must know it, if thou art but now come down: it is Ser Branca d’Oria; 13 and many years have passed since he was thus shut up.” “I believe,” said I to him, “that thou deceivest me: for Branca d’Oria never died; and eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and puts on clothes.” “In the ditch above, of the Malebranche,” said he, “there where the tenacious pitch is boiling, Michel Zanche had not yet arrived, when this man left a Devil is his stead in the body of himself, and of one of his kindred who did the treachery along with him. But reach hither thy hand: open my eyes”; and I opened them not for him: and to be rude to him was courtesy. Ah, Genoese! men estranged from all morality, and full of all corruption, why are ye not scattered from the earth? For with the worst spirit of Romagna, found I one of ye, who for his deeds even now in soul bathes in Cocytus, and above on earth still seems alive in body. 1. In 1288 the Guelfs were paramount in Pisa, but they were divided into two parties, led by Ugolino della Gherardesca and by his grandson, Nino de’ Visconti (for whom see Purg. viii), respectively. The head of the Ghibellines was the Archbishop of the city, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. In order to obtain supreme authority, Ugolino intrigued with Ruggieri, and succeeded in expelling Nino. He was, however, in his turn betrayed by the Archbishop who, seeing that the Guelfs were weakened, had Ugolino and four of his sons and grandsons imprisoned.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “I brought you some apple pie,” Betty said. She had bright yellow calico in her hands. “I thought I’d make some curtains for this window, if that’s OK?” Td lived without curtains since I’d moved in more than six months ago. I nodded. Betty began to sew. From time to time she glanced up at me. I knew she had probably been sewing in my room for several houts when she stood to iton the curtains, but it seemed like seconds. The curtains were really pretty, but my face wouldn’t move, even to smile. Betty came over and sat down near me. “You should eat something,” she said. I looked up to acknowledge Id heard her. She moved toward the door to leave and then stopped. “T know,” she said. “You don’t think anyone knows. You can’t believe anyone would understand. But I do know.” I shook my head slowly—she didn’t know. Betty knelt down in front of me. As we made eye contact I felt a sudden jolt of emotional electricity. I saw everything I was feeling in Betty’s eyes, as though I were looking at my own reflection. I looked away in horror. Betty nodded and squeezed my knee. “I do know,” she said, getting up to leave. “I do understand.” I didn’t move from the couch. Darkness settled over the room. There was another knock at the door. I wished everyone would go away and leave me alone. Peaches came in, dressed to kill. “My date was a dud,” she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later she brought out two pints of vanilla ice cream 68 Leslie Feinberg with a spoon sticking out of each. She sat down next to me on the couch and offered me one. The ice cream tasted so sweet and cool going down my throat it made my eyes sting with tears. Peaches stroked my hair. I was thinking about how the world looks when it’s buried in deep snow drifts—every twig and telephone line outlined with inches of snow, sparkling in the moonlight. Silent and still. Muffled. That’s how the world seemed to me now. I wished I could tell Peaches or Betty how peaceful I felt, but I couldn’t speak. “You're afraid to sleep, aren’t you child?” Peaches’ voice was so soft. “But Miss Peaches is here with you now. You gonna sleep safe in her arms tonight. I won’t let anything hurt you.” She disappeared into the bedroom. A moment later she came out and led me to my bed. She’d changed the sheets; they were fresh and clean. She put me down like a child and lay next to me. I could taste vomit rise in my throat, but she gently pulled me to her body. My lips found the curve of her breast. “That’s hormones made them swell up like that, but they’re mine now.” She kissed my hair.