It also makes me envious. Even though there were significant differences in our circumstances, I could relate to so many of the things Strayed said about losing her mom in her twenties. But I just don't have the capacity to do what she did. Our culture loves these grand narratives-- I loved my mother so much that I smashed up my life once I lost her, and then I took on a grand quest I was ill equipped to conquer and mastered it anyway! Of course this is a best-selling memoir. Of course its film rights were optioned by Reese Witherspoon before it was even published and it was selected to reprise Oprah's Book Club. If Witherspoon is not nominated for an Oscar for the film that comes out in December, I'll be shocked. It will make a boatload of money. Apparently it's not just our culture that loves this type of story, either-- the book has been translated into some unbelievable number of languages. To respond to the loss of your parent so profoundly that it takes months of intense hiking to get back on track, and to then spend the next fifteen years of your life honing your craft as a writer so you are up to the challenge of documenting your feelings in an artful memoir-- that is the type of memorial to a beloved parent that everyone except Cheryl Strayed can only dream of creating.
It's not accurate to say I have no "self-destructive tendencies." I believe I do have them, and they are always looming in wings the herculean tasks I am prone to taking on. They're there in the big and little things-- when I refused to miss a single mile of training for a marathon, when I obsessively pumped milk before bed every night so Nora would never have to have a drop of formula, when I decided I needed to make an insanely ambitious quilt for my one year old with nothing more than a pattern, and when I left a well compensated job I liked to commit myself to a Master's degree and then doubled down to take on a PhD. These are admirable ambitions, of course, but I know myself well enough to know that some element of my attraction to them comes from needing to push myself to the ultimate limit of my capabilities, whether or not that is a healthy or sound thing to do at that moment. It's never "necessary" for me to sacrifice quite as much of myself as I do in these tasks. At the end of my first semester of grad school, when one of my professors asked, "Liz, do you realize you're the only student who even attempted to read everything I assigned?" the honest answer was no. It had not occurred to me that there was any other way.
But my self-destructive tendencies are judicious, not reckless. I am the type of person who will burn herself out but will never burn herself up. To imagine myself in a circumstance where my estranged husband has to physically remove me from the home of a lover who has gotten me hooked on heroin? This is just something I would never, ever do. I could not do this, and I would not want to do this. But you have to be the type of person who would do this, I think, to be the type of person who would then turn around and conquer thousands of miles of trail hiking to "get your life back together." Strayed says this herself, more or less, when she acknowledges that without the "self destructive" behaviors, she never would have ended up on the trail, and so they were worthwhile. I find myself strangely envious of people who "get their lives back together" because I could never imagine letting my life "go" in the first place. Somehow I have been conditioned to believe that the more self-destructive Strayed's behavior was in the aftermath of her mom's death, the more it proves she loved her mother.
The book has made me look at my life and think about how people would probably have to be told my dad died when I was young, or they wouldn't even know it. I do not seem "troubled." I didn't "fall apart" in the months after he died. If Strayed's inclination was to smash everything up in the wake of loss, my inclination was to work harder at putting the pieces together. I didn't postpone my plans to get pregnant or take a semester off or ask for paper extensions. I just did exactly what I would have done if my dad was still alive. I wonder, or maybe I fear, whether this makes it look to other people like I wasn't profoundly impacted by this loss. I know loss is personal and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about it. But I'd like to be capable of some kind of grand gesture to memorialize my dad, and I'm just not. Somehow that feels like a disservice to him.
But then I think about what my dad would have said, if you'd asked him, How is Liz going to react to your death? He would have expected me to behave exactly as I did. In the letter he had us read at his memorial, the thing he said about me was:
"Lizzie would hustle around the soccer field, one of the most natural scoring machines we could find, but was always relegated to defending the opponent's best scorer, because we knew she'd keep up and do the right thing."My dad described me in this way-- as the one who could be trusted to "keep up" and "do the right thing"-- because this is the way I am. But it also works reflexively: I am this way because this is the way he spoke about me for as long as I can remember. I understand this on an intellectual level, because I know, for example, that the legal code not only punishes "undesireable" behavior, but by coding certain behaviors as "undesireable," the laws also regulate the ways we imagine behaving in the world. I can see, as a parent, that my daughter behaves the way I expect her to behave because the possibilities she imagines for herself are regulated by my expectations. Some people don't behave the way their parents expect, but as far as I know, I always have-- just as I have always abided by laws.
I hope that what Strayed's book will do for me in the long run is not to make me envious of her capacity for memorialization-- but to make me more appreciative of my own, even though it is different. While reflecting on her act of memorialization, I have tried to become more intellectually cognizant of the little ways I memorialize my dad all the time. Some part of me believes that the type of memorialization he would have wanted most is not the grandest one, but the one of which I am most capable. And what I have begun to realize is that I memorialize him in little ways he would have appreciated all the time.
Like this week, when I discovered that a lot of the archival and historical research I've done for my dissertation chapter on Josephine Herbst has already been published by someone else. This devastated me-- I was crying my way through the book chapter, watching my own insights unfold before me in someone else's language. Part of me felt like quitting, or at least taking a few days off to regroup, but the part of me that felt compelled to dig in and immediately set out to think harder-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad.
Or when I find myself hitting "checkout" on a pair of black skinny jeans I don't really need, but which I have decided should count as a birthday gift to myself because the price is good-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.
When I stop at the grocery store to buy food for dinner before picking Nora up from school, and I find myself choosing drinks and cookies to give her teachers as an afternoon "thank you" snack-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.
When people ask me "What is wrong with her eye?" and I explain why Nora wears an eye patch, but I also can't help emphasizing how remarkable she is and how enthusiastically she embraces each new challenge-- that part of me is a result of and an honor to my dad, too.
Nobody will ever offer me a book advance to write about the ways I honor my dad because they're not very exciting. No publisher is itching to sell Prime: Skinny Jeans from Amazon and Other Minor Self Indulgences. But I think that's okay. Even if my dad always did say he wanted to write a book, he ultimately decided to invest his energy and resources in other types of projects. So maybe a book is not the way he would have wanted to be memorialized anyway.
But maybe I'm wrong. I could see Reese Witherspoon starring in a movie about thank you gifts and skinny jeans.
