The Art of Losing

One of the blessings of my job as a professor of English literature is that whatever I happen to be teaching in a given week worms its way into my most personal struggles and helps me through them.  Last week I had to fly to Albany, New York and drive up to Lake George where I grew up to help facilitate my mother’s transfer (temporary I hope) from an Assisted Living facility to a Nursing Home rehabilitation wing.  She’d had a bout with pneumonia two weeks ago and lost a significant amount of mobility.  The staff at The Home of the Good Shepherd had also noted a lot of weeping and confusion.  Headed home to help, I took with me a bag of books, more books than clothes, because I knew I’d have to study in my off moments.  I was lucky enough to be reading the poems of Elizabeth Bishop again.  

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979

Bishop is one of a handful of female modernist poets, and what stuns me about her work is its deceptive simplicity.  Her poems are not pretentious:  they are about common homely experiences:  losing things, looking for home, sitting in a waiting room, riding a bus and sharing with other passengers the wonder of a moose-sighting.  Bishop worked on her poem, “The Moose,” for over twenty years before she published it.  She lived with her poems until she felt that they captured experiences truthfully in just the right words.  I’m going to share with you a poem (not one of my favorites) from her famous book Geography III because it helped me put together both a mother’s and a daughter’s struggles with loss.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster

Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master,

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

Places, and names, and where it was you meant

To travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch.  And look!  My last, or

Next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

The art of losing’s not too hard to master

Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The poem reads like a “how-to” manual—how to get good at losing things, and it suggests that practice makes perfect.  But this is tongue-in-cheek advice because we all know that losing things just happens.  Socks, like door keys, and the free hours in a day just somehow disappear.  Most of us, without any training at all, are Olympians at losing things.  Even on a quick read, I’m sure you noticed that the items lost become more and more precious as the poem goes along.  Trivial losses are followed by the loss of a “mother’s watch,” and then houses, cities, “realms,” and even a “continent.”  By reviewing her losses, the speaker steels herself to face up to the hardest loss of all—a beloved person.  Losing things is easy (all of us do it every day).  It is part of the attrition that comes with time and life in the world. But having to live without the unique beings that we’ve grown to love deeply—those people who have “tamed” us, so to speak—is the disaster that no amount of practice can master.  The flippant face of this poem nearly cracks and breaks as the speaker forces herself to complete the final rhyme required by the villanelle form: 

“the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”  

When I walked into The Home of the Good Shepherd, I saw my mother immediately, slumped down in her wheelchair which was parked next to the “medicine room” or nurses’ station.  All the nurses yelled, “Here she is!”  My mother had been waiting since early morning even though I’d told her I’d arrive at 2:00.  She lifted her head and opened her lashless blue eyes that seemed hazy, giving me the feeling that intelligent life was far away.  “Are you Mary Jo?”  “Yes, I am.”  “Well, for cryin’ out loud.”  Just a while later, after I’d wheeled her outside for a cigarette, she kept wondering, “Now how am I going to meet Mary Jo?”  I had to say again and again, “Mom, I am Mary Jo.” 

I think of all my mother has lost since breaking her hip last November.  She lost her independence, her ability to drive, her house and her All-Nighter stove.  She lost the routines like golf and church and breakfast with friends that gave her life variety.  She lost her dozens of perfectly laundered white blouses, her cashmere sweaters.  It shames me to admit that she is now wearing junk:  Walmart sweat pants and tops bought at Goodwill.  She lost her husband 38 years ago, her beloved Newfoundland Nala, two old maples, her younger sister Ruthellen, and even her children to the necessary demands of adult life.  I had been thinking about volunteering to give a talk to the residents of the Good Shepherd, imagining I’d call it “What does Shakespeare know about aging?  I figured I’d talk about King Lear, the obvious choice, but, my colleagues discouraged me, saying it would be too depressing.  I still don’t think so.  The play is just painfully honest about the way the elderly lose control over their lives and how some (like the eponymous king) resist that loss of control.  I planned the talk out, thinking that I’d emphasize the need for the very old to keep struggling, to fight for the right to have a story.  The reason I never gave the talk is that I didn’t feel I could do it in front of my mother.  She has never liked my bookish life and analytical bent.  But, in truth, I couldn’t imagine myself standing in front of a room of more or less withdrawn elders, sharing insights about aging, gleaned from books, when they are coping with the daily indignities and fears that accompany the process.  Wiry, angry little Nancy, a woman who was recently moved to Mom’s table is living King Lear’s story.  My mother, herself, resented being moved to that table in the back of the room, which is marked as the table for hopeless cases, for people who won’t eat, who are at death’s door.  Nancy IS refusing food but, like teenage anorexics, it’s her only way to exercise control.  “Nancy,” would you like me to butter your bread?” asks a young tattooed aide.  “No, but can I move back to my old table?”  “Oh, I can’t make that decision.  You’ll have to talk to Angela.”  Nancy’s grievance was efficiently brushed aside like cracker crumbs, and she muttered, “It isn’t right, but we’ll get back at them, won’t we?” 

On my recent visit, my mother seemed positively obsessed with travel: “I have to catch a bus,”  “I’m afraid I am going to miss my train,”  “All of those women took a plane.”  I knew Mom was anticipating the move from Good Shepherd Assisted Living to Fort Hudson Nursing Home, and I figured that her own mini-trip (a fifteen-minute drive) had become magnified in her mind.  She also knew that my sister Jennifer had to fly to Dallas (or was it D.C.?) for work, and that I was taking a different plane from Flint, Michigan to Albany.  All of these flight patterns criss-crossed the circuitry in her brain, and they all became trips that she, too, was taking.  “I’m confused all the time, Mary Jo.  I really cannot keep anything straight,” she said as she and I sat in her room, trying bites of cinnamon roll from her favorite local bakery and staring out at the sunshine and the leaves turning along the edge of the woods.  I’m sure I didn’t help her confusion when I pulled out my book of poems and commented that it felt like we were in a college dorm room.  I wonder, though, if this journey obsession is just the innate human need for a narrative arc into a future in which change and transformation are once more possible.  Movement, any movement, is better than just sitting “waiting to die.” 

Elizabeth Bishop has another poem about an experience in a waiting room in which a young child (nearly seven years old) reads the pictures in a National Geographic, hears her aunt’s voice cry out in pain and has the epiphany that people are all connected, all “just one.”  To me there is something wonderful and true about my mother’s loss of a clearly defined “I” so that if a daughter is traveling, she travels, too.  When my own daughter Katya was a toddler, I’d sit beside her in dental appointments, holding her hand.  When the dentist said, “open up,” my mouth would open automatically.  This is more than empathy.  It is almost a synesthesia of experiences, a blurring of the boundaries that separate us as individuals.  I was reassured by Mom's feeling that she was traveling.  I took it as an indication that she was still our mother, still wanted to go with us.  But it felt terrifying the night I saw her 88-year-old body as mine, too:  the bruised and fragile skin (purple shins), the hairless pudenda, the flaccid and wrinkled flesh of her back, and the giant sores—open and white—on her rear end from sitting for days on end.  Without thinking at all I knew that that body would be mine in a few short years. 

The child in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room,” is taken “completely by surprise” to realize that her aunt’s voice, crying out in pain, is hers, too.

                                                What took me

Completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice in my mouth.

Without thinking at all

I was my foolish aunt,

I—we—were falling, falling,

our eyes glued to the cover

of the National Geographic,

February, 1918.

Later in the poem, the obviously older speaker attempts to make sense of this early experience:

Why should I be my aunt,

or me, or anyone?

What similarities—

boots, hands, the family voice

I felt in my throat, or even

the National Geographic

and those awful hanging breasts—

held us all together

or made us all just one?

How—I didn’t know any

word for it—how “unlikely” …

After a two-day wait, it was finally time for my mother to “catch her bus.”  From the time she woke up and saw me, she was a ball of anxiety.  “Now what do I have to do?”  “Nothing, Mom.  The van will drive you over at 1:00, after lunch.”  I tried to distract her with cigarette breaks and a game of Bingo.  Nothing worked.  She asked over and over again, “what am I supposed to do?”  Finally, the van arrived.  I thought of the carriage ride with the civil suitor, who is a figure for “Death” in Emily Dickinson’s poem, but this driver, a far cry from “Death,” was a magenta-haired girl named Tammy.  “Give yourself a big hug,” she instructed Mom so that she could raise the mechanical lift with her in the wheelchair.  “Are you following me, sweetie?,” she asked me.  “I go the back way but I don’t speed or nothin’.”

I got into my rental car and followed her.  After a rainy and overcast morning, the sun had come out.  Tammy wasn’t kidding about going a back way.  She turned right at a beat-up old schoolhouse and drove along the Hudson.  Sunshine lit up the wet yellow leaves, and through them, I could see the blue river and the footings of old bridges that looked like stumps of legs or teeth.  This is the old industrial part of the river.  Plants like General Electric and the paper mills, Finch Pruyn, and Scott Paper, polluted it until in the 1970s the United States government, through something called the “Super Fund,” paid to dredge out all the pollutants.  But Warren County still has the highest cancer rate in the state.  We cross the river at a bridge I’d never seen before, and then we are in Hudson Falls, moving slowly through back streets lined with decaying houses, wrapped in fake cobwebs with carved pumpkins already blackening along the cut lines with mold and rot.  We passed a defunct NY pizza business as we make it up the hill to the main street and, before I knew it, Tammy turned the van into the driveway of the Fort Hudson nursing home.  Mom is wheeled past birds behind glass and a few fish hiding in a salt water tank.to a “cage” of her own.  The trip was much too short.  So was the list of animals Mom could remember when asked by a therapist:  bear, dog, cat, bird, bluebird, and (after a long pause) chicken.  I gently prompt her:  what about all those Jersey animals (she was a farm girl)?  Nothing.  I guess the cows she milked, the horses she rode are long gone.  The art of losing’s not too hard to master—for my mother anyway, but for her daughter it looks like (Write it!) like disaster.

I tried to photograph the caged parakeets, and this resident enjoyed having her picture taken.