Last week, one of my former students and lifelong friends, Mary Fisher Diaz, whom
we at the university knew as "Mary Beth," died. And as I mourned, the last lines of Roethke's "Elegy for Jane,
My Student Thrown by a Horse" echoed in my mind: "I with no rights in this matter." I kept hearing the
final lines without ever looking up the poem. So then I did want to look up the
whole poem, something about a pickerel smile and wrens. The poem is an elegy on
the death of a very young woman who was Roethke's student, and I was struck how
much of his first stanza reminded me of Mary:
…her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for
her
And she balanced in delight of her thought.
Googling around, I
tripped over, and made the mistake of reading, what some readers thought of the
poem. One stated that since Roethke had known Jane "for only one
quarter," he didn't know her very well, so he couldn't really be talking
about her death, he couldn't really have felt it that intensely. Her biographer
says that Roethke must have conflated that death with the death of a friend of
his who had been killed earlier while horseriding because he couldn’t have felt
that way over a student, that he was infusing the poem with his grief over the other death.
Well maybe. Does anyone
say that Dylan Thomas doesn't really mean that poem about the six year old
killed in a fire because he didn't really know the child? Certainly each poet's
poem launches an attack on the general fact of death, but each is definitely
grounded in the very specific death that "set the poet off." Thomas
is clearly angry; Rotheke is....moved to a much more mixed emotion. His poem
does not begin, "Oh weep for Jane, for she is dead, oh weep, oh weep"
the way Shelly begins his elegy for Keats. But then he is a Modernist, not a Romantic. He begins with an affectionate,
almost bemused description of her curly hair, of her pickerel smile and her
syllables. Bemused, affectionate, but yes, the rest of the poem is a bit distanced.
*****
Mary emailed me about
three months ago to say that she had just finished a huge project for her job
as librarian at The University of Illinois-Chicago: she had curated the
archives of the former Mayor Daley. The opening was featured in the Chicago
newspapers and on websites that I linked and sent to other former students and
faculty who knew her. It was a big deal. She mentioned that she had rather run
her health into the ground with the work and had lost a lot of weight, but she
was seeing a doctor who would help her regain her strength.
None of this alarmed me.
She has always been thin as a shoelace and utterly disinterested in eating
while at the same time being a very hard worker. In the circa 1989-90 photo I
have of her, moments before we began layout for the college creative writing
magazine (before Page Maker), in the days of rubber cement and wax paper, which
she clutches in the picture, she looks intensely serious. But in the following
photo, taken a month later, she smiles broadly as she holds the completed issue
which she edited, its cover the heavy heather pink stock covered in a flower
design, which she chose from art students’ submissions.
Our lives had gotten
seriously entwined her junior year when she had creative writing classes with
me and linguistics with my husband. Then, too, it was a small college and a small
department, and all of our lives were entwined-- not in the sexy exciting world
of affairs and intrigue depicted in academic novels but in the quotidian of
sharing books and meals and troubles. Mary's trouble was the need to pay her
own tuition at the private college, and the only job available to her working
in a diet business, making cold calls and being a receptionist. She hated it,
and one day when she and I sat down to brainstorm other work, we came up with
the idea of her setting up her own business doing odd jobs, housecleaning,
housesitting, and running errands, and she soon was making twice as much money
in half the time for her last two years of college. Her senior year, there was
a lot of drama on her grad school application, which ended up in the wrong
program, but the chair and her advisor made calls, her record spoke for itself,
and she got a full ride to grad school two states away.
Before leaving, she
married the fellow student she had dated through college in a beautiful wedding
which she invited us to in a former President's house in her hometown. She and
her husband visited us when they returned to the area, and she called us right
away when she ended the marriage. After her master's in English, she began grad
work in library studies and came back to the college to speak to my "Jobs
for English Majors" class. She loved being a librarian. She decided not to
get a PhD in library studies so she could spend more time working with students
and less with writing a dissertation. While working in the library, she met the
love of her life, Carlos Diaz, and they bought a house in Chicago and had a
daughter. About that time, Paul and I left that college and the state, and we
only saw Mary and Carlos once in the ensuing years, a time when we were at a
conference in Chicago.
But we've stayed in
touch by email and Facebook. Many many of my Facebook friends are former
students, and as Paul taught English the same place as I did for 18 years, many
of them are his Facebook friends too. I have often said, our morning coffee chat sounds
like the parents of 50 children,"Oh, and did you see that Troy got sick on
that trip he's on in China?" "Did you see Bryan's fiance?"
"Did you answer Steph's question about how Faculty Development works at
your college?" (Just days before Steph invited us to her wedding reception
after she elopes.) Photos of Julie’s sons, Laura’s son, rants from Lisa and
Kim. Links from Ted and Theresa.
And yet we aren't their
parents, are we? Speaking of Facebook, there is a lovely little ditty everyone
is posting this week titled, "People who don't have children think they
know. They don't know." Speaking only for myself, I know. I was my one and
a half year old niece's caregiver much of my sabbatical year. I was the first
one to take her to Santa Claus. And do battle over boots and hats. And then for
much of the two years when my sister Daun, a single mother, was dying of
cancer, I was my niece's caregiver, along with my other sister and my parents.
I drove infinitely many trips to Montessori, playing over and over the song,
"What do you do with a dinosaur, who eats your lunch and asks for
more?" And did battle over carrots and picking up toys and getting there
(everywhere) on time. And yet, my sister’s friends all laughed that my other
sister and I were just inept because we had never been parents. At one memorial
service, someone pointed out that the last week of my sister’s life, I got my
niece’s hair caught in her coat zipper. I guess real parents never do that.
And then my sister died,
and my other sister became the parent, and though she never had children,
suddenly she was deemed parental. And in her parenthood, she decided that I
would not get to spend summers with my niece, that I would get to see her only once a year, sometimes only
every year and a half for three to five hours, and that went for my parents, her grandparents also. My niece was not permitted to
stay over at my house, as Daun said she would but never thought to put into writing. My niece is not permitted to Skype with me (or her grandfather). Everyone
told me to stay the course, write to her, send gifts, and she would remember me
the same. But she is 18, and though she is sweet to me in the three hours a year we
have a year, there is a distance that is much much more distant than I
experience with students I haven’t seen for years. So I am very grateful for
students and three goddaughters who have kept in touch.
When Paul and I returned
from England and Wales in the summer, I sent Mary Beth a huge postcard on Jane
Austen which I had bought for her in Bath. Austen was her favorite author and
subject of her master’s thesis, long before Austen was so very hot. I said I
didn’t know if she was still a fan. She was, she wrote back, and hoped so to
one day go to England and visit Bath. I planned to send her the book I had
bought, Jane Austen’s Bath, for
Christmas this year.
When Daun was dying, a
long two year death by cancer, her dissertation director sent a card once a
week, and, toward the end, nearly every day. This in addition to emails. Funny
cards mostly. Hysterically funny sometimes. The day after Daun died, one of
Joanna's cards arrived and made me laugh for the first time in two days.
*****
About two months after
emailing me about her archives exhibit, Mary called to say she had bad news: she
had esophogeal cancer, and she had very little time to live. I had lived this
conversation once before. It produces an other-worldly feeling. A Dystopia. I
asked her if she wanted Paul and I to visit. She said yes, as soon as she got
home, and she added, “Whatever would I have done without you two during
college?” And she gave me Carlos’ number, which she said was the best to use
for awhile.
I got busy contacting
Mary's undergrad advisor (and my long distance dear friend) and former college
classmates. And I bought cards. Not funny ones. Pretty ones. Not sappy. Not
sentimental. Not rhyming. Pretty, about friendship and thinking of you. She was
the kind of a person who liked those kinds of cards. After two weeks, I called
Carlos, who drove from the store he was in to the hospital to put Mary on the
line. She told me she was still hospitalized but they thought she might be
able to go home as she had just for the first time in weeks managed not to
vomit but to keep down the fluids they were now pouring into her (as opposed to
dripping into her IV tube) after removing her stomach. "This is not a
cure," she said. "This is just so I can get nutrition more comfortably
in the time I have."
Paul and I discussed
making a quick 2-day trip, flying in to Chicago after our Thanksgiving guests left. I
alerted a few other former students in Chicago that maybe we could do coffee while we were there.
Then, last week, mailing Thanksgiving cards, I went to Mary's Facebook page to
get her daughter's middle name...to find that she had died five days earlier.
The funeral and burial, held not in Chicago but in her hometown here in Ohio,
was over.
I broke down sobbing,
and I am still crying ten days later, during which time I have been mourning a
97 year old aunt whose funeral I spoke at. This not the same as losing a
relative. It’s losing a friend, but not just that either. It is a loss all unto its own. Roethke knew
that too. We do love our students in a different way than family and other
friends, even when they are our friends, too. If nothing else, as Adrienne Rich reminds us, our minds must love the
minds of our students. But it’s not just their minds. It’s their neck curls and
pickerel smiles. It’s that twining of lives that I mentioned earlier. Maybe
moreso in small colleges, maybe moreso when they are majors in our departments.
Maybe moreso in English, when they have written stories in creative writing
about dying parents or when they have aced linguistics and tutored students who
are floundering, or when they are the students floundering in linguistics and
being very funny about it, or hating creative writing but having to take it for
their major and being funny about it.
If Roethke seems
curiously distanced emotionally, as people have noted about the poem, it is
because where we fit in after the classes, after the graduation, is not all
that clear. There is so much time together and then there may be none except
what we scrape together in our travels, on Facebook. You can feel so very much
but in the end, as Roethke says, you have "no rights in this matter,
neither father [nor, I'd add, mother] nor lover." And yet, Roethke also
says, “Over this damp grave, I speak the words of my love.”
