Transforming Trauma Through Reflection and Praxis

Abstract

What happens when the issues of the human condition one has been teaching and theorizing about become issues in one’s life-world, even become a totalizing force that seeps through the boundaries around and between the “personal” and the “professional?” What happens when one is not only teaching about the challenges of grown-up-hood, balancing adult relationships, family caregiving, work responsibilities, and personal development but is suddenly faced with an event which forces one to confront competing responsibilities and make meaning of an existential emergency? In this hybrid essay—a combination of mini-memoir, testimony, and scholarly discourse—my central preoccupation is an unexpected crisis and how I engaged the possibilities and limitations of my professional knowledge as an educational gerontologist with a commitment to Critical Theory and came to more fully embrace the principles of Critical Gerontology, intentionally dissolving the boundaries between “work” and “life.”

Prelude: Exploding Brains

There is a silly thing I sometimes say when I’m teaching. Probably I’ve been saying it for far too long but I still get laughs, which I enjoy, so I keep making the joke. I don’t make the joke just because I get laughs. Students don’t laugh because the joke is especially humorous. They laugh, I suspect, because what I say is apt; it accurately describes our shared embodied experience of confusion and overwhelm when faced with complex ideas and experiences. And because laughing at the joke gives us an unexpected chance to release built-up tension, it clears space so we can share a small moment of relaxation before we dive back into the complexity.

The setup for the joke happens something like this: A student (and I should state explicitly that the majority of my students are “adult learners” and predominately women; they’ve returned to formal education in their full-on adulthood, even their “mature years,” to complete an undergraduate degree or begin a graduate degree) will be lamenting a particularly difficult reading assignment (usually something theoretically substantial) or discussion topic (usually something theoretically substantial!), complaining about the impenetrability of the ideas and how they’ll never be able to get their minds around “this stuff,” describing vividly the excruciating pain involved in stretching their minds and thinking deeply. I listen closely to their plaintive cries and while quite sympathetic, at some point I can’t resist asking, “Does your brain feel like it is going to explode?” And my students always respond with “Yes!” and then they laugh, to which I reply with something along the lines of, “Good! That’s exactly the experience I was hoping you’d have. If your brain doesn’t feel like it is going to explode once in the while then we aren’t doing our jobs!”

Sometime, the joke has been known to turn into a strange compliment. It might happen this way: A student stays something particularly insightful or innovative for him or her, and in response I exclaim, “Everybody out of the way! What you said is so amazing my brain is about to explode!”

I never once imagined that my mother’s brain—or mine, for that matter—could explode for real.

Preamble: Commitments and Contexts

My central preoccupation in this essay is a significant, unexpected event from my “non-academic” life: An aneurysm ruptured in my mother’s brain. I explore my experience of this event from the standpoint of being her adult daughter and primary family caregiver as well as a mother to my own daughter and an educational gerontologist with a commitment to the use of Critical Theory. I celebrate the primacy and legitimacy of individual and shared experience and the transformative potential of solitary and communal critical reflection on experience. I offer an episodic narrative of my mother’s and my experience as an example of age autobiographical work (Gullette, 2003), a kind of critical Gerontological “case study” of the ongoing, messy process of working through and transforming trauma into deeper albeit partial and provisional understanding.

For more than two decades (longer than half my lifetime), my intellectual commitments have been informed by the Critical Gerontology framework, an alternative approach to Gerontological education, theory-work, research, and practice.

Resisting neat categorizations and extending provocative notions from Deleuze and Guattari, Katz (2003) referred to Critical Gerontology as “a pragmatic and nomadic thought-space across which ideas flow and become exchanged . . . a magnetic field where thought collects, converges, and traverses disciplines and traditions” (p. 16). According to Ray (2008), within this critical Gerontological thought-space, two “parallel lines” have developed over the past 30 years: the political economy approach which foregrounds the social structures that construct and affect aging, old age, and later life; and an approach informed by the humanities which foregrounds individual experiences and processes of meaning-making in adult aging. Although my cross-disciplinary education and work as a gerontologist has been primarily in the context of the human sciences disciplines, I have spent a large portion of my life involved in the arts, specifically music, dance, and theater. In this essay, I am self-consciously situated in this disciplinary mash-up and while sensitive to social constructions of and structural constraints on experience, I am walking the critical Gerontological line that privileges exploration of and reflection on individual experiences as a source of knowledge about our travels through the life course.

What holds critical gerontologists together as a community of scholars, teachers, and practitioners, whichever “line” one is enacting, is a shared commitment to several strong principles: (a) the importance of acknowledging and bridging the biographical and the historical, the personal and political, and social structures and individual agency; (b) the commitment to critically reflecting upon and thinking about self, society, and the field of gerontology itself; (c) the privileging of collaborative theorizing, not only with other scholars and educators but also with students and especially with older persons, the very subjects of—and potential partners in—inquiry; (d) the commitment to grappling intentionally with—rather than attempting to simplify or reduce—the complexities of what it means to be a human being; and (e) the imperative that the ultimate outcome of our striving must be a deeper understanding of lifelong human development and aging in the service of personal, social, and cultural transformation (Katz, 2003; Moody, 1988, 1993; Ray, 2008; Zeilig, 2011).

What I consider to be especially powerful about Critical Gerontology is that it serves as a meta-framework, a comprehensive sensibility within which to ask and pursue answers to questions about the most complex features of our travels through the life course as human beings because it recognizes that who we are and the work we do in the world are intertwined inexorably (Glendenning, 2000). And, most crucially, it provides a lucid counter-argument to the narrow and over-determining normative discourses and practices that still dominate a great deal of the research and theory regarding adult development and aging, later life and old age (Biggs, 2003; Katz, 2003; Moody, 1993, 2008).

As I mature into my professional (and personal) life, I have been moved deeply by provocative contributions from Biggs (1999, 2005), Ray (2003), Gilleard and Higgs (2000, 2005), Hendricks (2003), and Katz (1996, 2003). Their work has inspired me to turn the lens of Critical Gerontology back upon myself, to ask probing questions, such as

What have I been doing all these years and why? What motivates—even compels—my research and theorizing? How has my personal life shaped and been shaped by my work in gerontology (or age studies, as Margaret Gullette would have it)? How has my sense of the field, and myself in it, changed over time? What do I celebrate—and regret—about my scholarly life and the progress of critical gerontology overall? What do I see as the central issues for critical gerontologist in the future? (Ray, 2008, p. 97)

I have been supported in my movement toward deeper critical reflection and praxis especially by Biggs (2005) who, in his discussion of research training for a critical sensibility toward aging experiences, asserted quite boldly that “we need, then, techniques by which to know ourselves and the contexts in which we work” (p. S125). He continued, advocating that

identifying multiple sources of empathic understanding such as similar life events and attending to biography, oral history, and testimonia may be used to enhance a will to understand. The problems of . . . amnesia of depth, indicative of seduction by simple states of mind, plus their undertow, the avoidance of personal anxieties with age, point to a need for enhanced self-reflection of this type. (p. S126)

I remain convinced of the relevance and power of the Critical Gerontology ethos for my work-in-the-world, but something even more elemental has happened: I have decided to take the principles of Critical Gerontology so seriously as to try to live my daily life informed by them (not only employ these principles in the context of my work as an educational gerontologist). As well, I have decided to take my lived experiences from the “rest of my life” so seriously as to attempt to live my life as an educational gerontologist by them. And so as a point of departure for exploring the connections between the ways I think, the work I do, and how I’ve responded to—recovered from, learned from, and integrated—the particular kinds of grown-up-hood complexities I’ve experienced over the past many years, I chose to dwell for a time in the intense center of my experiences with my mother. As well, consistent with the practices described in the works of Gullette (1997, 2003), Ray (2000), and Richardson (1997, 2004), I aspired to write from within and (hopefully) out of the “muddle” (G. Bateson, 1972) created by this crisis to (hopefully) a place of deeper understanding. But my resolve was not enough, I needed the help of others, their insights, mentoring, and compassion, to do so. Thus, I also recommitted myself to a collaborative mode of work whereby I invited anyone—colleagues, friends, family, students, elders, even strangers—who was interested and willing to think with me about the larger meanings and implications of these and other life experiences and to offer their own experiences for collaborative mulling-over as well.

This is a hybrid essay, a combination of mini-memoir and scholarly discourse; perhaps it even qualifies as a “testimony,” because through the process of putting to words my and my mother’s experiences, I am “bearing witness to a crisis or trauma” (Felman, 1995), so as to deeply question how I might theoretically and pedagogically and personally make use of these experiences, not only on behalf of my own and other’s deep development and intentional aging but also as fecund material to enrich my teaching and praxis (Biggs, 2005; McFadden, 2008; Ray, 1999, 2003).

Testimonia: Trauma (and Glimmers of Transformation)

Two weeks after she celebrated her 60th birthday and one week after returning from a cruise to Mexico with her younger sister, an undiagnosed aneurysm ruptured in my mother’s brain. She was driving from the library at the university where I work to my house to meet me and my daughter for dinner when her brain exploded. It was February 19, 2006, and I had recently celebrated my 39th birthday, my daughter had celebrated her 10th birthday, and only recently, months before my mother’s aneurysm, we’d felt as though we were emerging from a period in our lives that had been extraordinarily challenging, even traumatic, for all three of us.

In my own life throughout the previous decade, I had experienced many unanticipated events that demanded of me what felt like an almost constant process of adjustment and adaptation, periods of recovery and reflection followed by rebuilding of self and life-world. In the most recent months, there had been my maternal grandmother’s rapid decline and near-death, followed by her equally rapid and unexpected improvement. This grand woman, my only surviving grandparent, had been my “best person” throughout my growing-up years, my unlimited source of unconditional positive regard, and my model for the reality-bending possibilities of curiosity, intent, will, and hopefulness. Driving 12 hours through the middle of a frozen winter night, my mother and I rushed to her so that we might be there in time to care for her during what we thought were her final days on earth. When I arrived at her bedside, I had no doubt that she was dying. I climbed into bed and slept with her all night. In the morning, my grandmother woke up, toileted, and dressed herself, whereas I woke up vomiting and continued to do so for 2 days. This was a singular, beautiful experience, an unexplainable yet verifiable event. I was deeply shaken.

Also during the half-year prior to my mother’s ruptured cerebral aneurysm, there had been the unexpected and violent end of her second marriage and her first sustained experience of living alone. She and her first husband, my father, married when they were both 18 years old, right before he headed off to the Vietnam War; I was born 9 months later. Three years later, my brother was born with severe and irreversible auditory and visual impairments caused by a congenital syndrome, the existence of which had been unknown to my family prior to my brother’s birth. Growing up, I had played the steady, strong eldest child and helpmate to my mother, as she was completely dedicated to my brother who had so many needs, while at the same time dominated by my father who also had so many needs. My mother struggled with her own depression and fear and great self-doubt; it was all she could do to cope with even the smallest of life’s hassles. Until my brother left home in his early twenties, my mother’s daily reality—her identity, in fact—was organized around the considerable responsibility of parenting a child with significant impairments.

She’d been married to my father for 25 years and had cared for my brother for 21 of those 25 years when, for the first time in her life, she chose herself; the day after my brother’s 21st birthday my mother ran away from home. Quite courageously, she walked away from life as she had (and we had) known it, as she felt her responsibility to keep our family together for my brother’s sake was unnecessary now that he was living on his own out in the world.

At the time, I was a 24-year-old married gerontology graduate student. Like my mother, I’d married quite young, enthralled with the idea of “true love,” but also (I only realized much later) because early marriage offered me an escape from my intolerable native family situation. My mother and I had been meeting for lunch a couple of times a month to commiserate over our separate and shared woes. I’d known for quite a while that something of significance was going on with her as each time I saw her, she’d hand over to me another small box of objects that were important to her, that she expected me to protect for her. I even suggested to her on the occasion of one of these deposits with me of her sentimental objects that it seemed that she was “preparing for flight.” And so, when she phoned me and asked that I pick her up and help her “run away from home” I wasn’t too surprised—I’d always wondered why she hadn’t fled sooner—though I was in shock because of what I could foresee as the consequences of her actions. Indeed, the consequences were numerous, significant, and lasting. My father felt betrayed by my collusion with my mother and responded in extreme ways; I felt caught in between my parents and unfairly relied upon by my mother; my brother felt that his and our family’s entire life had been a lie.

After a few months, in between staying temporarily with me or friends and for a very short while on her own, my mother met and married her second husband, to whom she was married for 13 years until the day after Mother’s Day 2005 when she found herself truly on her own for the first time in her entire life.

In the months that preceded the explosion in her brain, my mother had gone a long way toward establishing a life as a single, late “middle-aged” woman who’d already traveled through the life course for several decades, to fully embracing her “third age” or “adulthood 2” with vitality and purpose (M. C. Bateson, 2010; Gullette, 1997; Weiss & Bass, 2002). I’d helped her to acquire an apartment in the neighborhood where my daughter and I are established; a friend and I had moved her into the new place and had kept her clear of her second husband. No longer focused on keeping a struggling relationship together, she found that she had the energy to think new thoughts and embrace new challenges.

With the approach of her 60th birthday, my mother had decided it was the ideal time to pursue as many of her dreams as she could: going back to school, training for a walking marathon, building economic security, and developing current and new friendships. Her decision to return to college—in fact, to the university where I am on the faculty— to complete her undergraduate degree was to fulfill a lifelong dream that had been disrupted so many years previously, a dream that she shared with many of my students who are also women returning to college in their mid-lives. Even without a college degree, my mother had worked hard for over two decades as a medical assistant in a managed care setting, providing a steady source of income in both of her marriages to men who were chronically unemployed. Newly independent, she described to me feeling an unfamiliar vitality, clarity, and purposefulness; she said that she’d never felt “better or younger” in her life, that for once her “insides and outsides” matched, she felt her life had a coherence that she could get used to and wanted to make last as long as possible.

From my vantage point as her adult daughter, she seemed to me to be experiencing a fundamental shift in the substrates of her identity, her very way of being in the world was transforming. For what felt to me to be the first time in the almost 40 years I had been her daughter, she was expressing her thoughts and feelings in a way that impressed me as representing some deeper truth that she’d carried around within her for decades but never felt up to narrating. And she not only expressed herself in an increasingly open and innovative way, she also began—at least discursively—to assume responsibility for her life choices in a way I was completely unaccustomed to and wanted to put my faith in with a desperation that surprised and somewhat concerned me. I discovered in myself a ferocious hope that her new habits of thinking and being in the world would “stick.” (And I must admit here that I wanted this as much for my own sake and the sake of my daughter as I did for my mother’s sake.)

My mother was asking the kinds of questions that she’d never allowed herself to ask before without being paralyzed by fear, as if to ask such existential questions about the universe and her place in it would unleash uncontrollable and destructive forces. I noticed that she was inventing wholly new language to describe her current self, whom she aspired to become, not only whom she’d been in her “past life.” Before my eyes, my mother, who for so many years had seemed resistant to engaging in self-reflexivity and assuming her own agency, was evidencing the possibility of the “reversibility of discourses” about her life and self (Powell & Biggs, 2003). For the first time in my life as her daughter, I experienced her as a growing-up person, by which I mean to say, she was exhibiting the sensibilities and characteristics I had come to associate—theoretically and in my own struggles with personhood—with grown-up-hood, an intentional commitment to our own deep development and a purposeful and responsible life, no matter how complex and “messy” that life might be (Gullette, 1997). My mother seemed better able to dwell with and negotiate the contradictions inherent in her identity as an aging woman despite having few models for doing so (Biggs, 2003).

All of this was jarring because of my unfamiliarity with such maternal agency from the standpoint of being my mother’s daughter and it instigated for me yet another spiraling phase in my own developmental journey. The innovations my mother seemed to be making in her self and her life-world were a source of new hope for me about potentialities for her life and our life together as growing-up mother and daughter as well as for the role she might play in my daughter’s life as a grandmother. It felt strange to me witnessing my mother’s increasing independence as a woman, not only as my mother. She was becoming . . . how to say it? Not so much a new person but a larger and more solid person in the world, an expanded mother who took up more space, a fuller being.

Intensive Caring

It had been an arduous process convincing the attending emergency room physician at the hospital where the ambulance initially took my mother that in fact she was experiencing a cerebral emergency. I arrived at her bedside to discover him accusing her of “drug seeking behavior” for what was probably “just a bad migraine.” The minute I looked at my mother’s face and heard her voice, I knew that she was experiencing something more significant than a migraine headache. I insisted that the neurologist on call be brought in for consultation immediately. In response to my plea, the ER physician said, “And you are?” To which I responded, “Her daughter, Dr. Sasser_.” He asked, “What kind of doctor”? I said, “A gerontologist.” To which he replied, “So you aren’t an MD. Well, I think we have this under control. We’ll keep an eye on your mother.” To which I responded with mostly incoherent wailing that fortunately resulted in the specialist being paged and appropriate diagnostic imagining ordered. The neurologist told me later that had he not been called to the scene when he had, my mother most likely would have died or been impaired severely and irreversibly.

Perhaps it is important to this story for you to know that this hospital was part of the medical complex where my mother had been working as a medical assistant for two decades and where she received her routine medical care; she knew almost everyone on staff in the ER, including the attending physician. As if our experience in the emergency room wasn’t upsetting and shocking enough, my mother was discharged too soon after her post-operation hospitalization, resulting in a major set-back in her healing. As well, the managed care system of which the hospital was a part attempted to renege on their commitment to her as an employee and client, threatening to deny her medical claims and discontinue her relationship with the neurology specialist to whom they had referred her for surgery. This stubborn institution gave us nothing but problems every step of the way as I attempted to navigate it as her caregiver, with varying degrees of success and a great deal of exasperation. I wonder, what fate might my mother have faced without me there to advocate for her?

Once she was stabilized medically and waiting in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) prior to receiving the emergency procedure to remove the blood that had pooled in her cranial cavities and seal off the aneurysm with a coil made of titanium, my mother’s two preoccupations were, first, why this terrible thing had happened to her especially now that she had, as she put it, “gotten her act together,” and second, whether it would be possible for me to smuggle into the ICU a hamburger and fries. During her stay in the hospital—first in the ICU, then in the regular medical ward, and then when she was recuperating under my care—her personality seemed characterized by extremes. Elements of her best and worst self co-existed: She was funny one moment, even uncharacteristically ironic, and the next moment, she was perseverating about something she couldn’t remember or locate, such as a pair of red and black socks that she feared had been left at the hospital or the fact that her car was still parked at my house rather than at her apartment and that it needed its battery recharged. Elements of my best and worst self battled: At one moment, I was patient, empathetic, not easily ruffled, completely fierce in my devotion to her; in the next moment, I was barely able to suppress impatience, annoyance, fear that my mother’s current state would become her permanent way of being in the world, that I would become her long-term guardian. All I could think about was the absurdity of worrying about lost socks when she was almost lost to the world or changing the oil in her car when she had actually crashed her car as she’d been driving when her brain exploded.

I felt a strange kind of disappointment mixed with grief because, as I have described, only months before the crisis our relationship as growing-up daughter and mother began to transform. We were reliant upon one another in new and better ways; we occupied clearer and more “appropriate” roles than ever before. I think we both thrived (as did my daughter) because of these hard-won innovations in our relationship. And so I was jarred deeply by the incontrovertible fact that this newfound stability, these new modes of being in the world for my mother and for us, was being disrupted by an event of such magnitude and consequence as a ruptured brain aneurysm.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I was in crisis. There was a collection of thoughts that I perseverated on day and night. These thoughts were surprisingly logical in form while being emotionally intense in content: My mother almost died but didn’t; my mother didn’t die but she might be left with severe and lasting impairments; my mother seemed to have some rather severe impairments and some of them might or might not go away with time as her brain healed; my mother was alive and here with me still, for which I was thankful because I wasn’t ready for her to leave the earth (I wonder, are we ever really ready? What does it mean to be ready?). Would I be able to sustain my energy and serve as her caregiver for an unknown length of time? I had been a caregiver for family members and others many times in my life, so I had real and direct and cumulative experience. My beginning in the field of gerontology, and one of the ways I supported myself right after high school and during my undergraduate years, was as a certified nursing assistant working in nursing homes. I’d also had early training in my family. So serving as my mother’s caregiver in the aftermath of her aneurysm wasn’t a departure from my normative family reality nor my early work roles; rather, it seemed consistent with my past experiences, though of course also distinct because of the magnitude and emergent nature of my mother’s health crisis, because it was going to be for an indefinite length of time a totalizing force in both of our lives, and because it happened with no warning in the middle of what we were both experiencing as a gentler, calmer phase of our life. Was I up to it, could I make it through another round of taking care of my mother? And would my years of experience as an educational gerontologist with a commitment to Critical Theory help me to navigate and manage this overwhelmingly complicated situation? Could I call upon my “expertise” for dealing with complexity now when my mother and I most needed it?

These and other thoughts looped through my mind as reality narrowed and many of the central features of my life got knocked into the background, especially the features pertaining to my professional life. It was the middle of a term in which I had a larger-than-usual collection of responsibilities: teaching three advanced seminars, departmental administrative duties including advising students and supervising faculty, university committee work, and outside professional commitments and speaking engagements. In between tending to my mother and tending to my daughter, I made phone calls and sent email messages, canceling and postponing, deferring and apologizing. I asked human resources at the university about the process should I need to take an indefinite family leave of absence; in asking, I worried that I was increasing my vulnerability as an associate professor and department chair working without a contract nor tenure (the university where I work does not have a tenure system and is an “at-will” employer). I don’t know how I did it but somehow I managed to fulfill baseline professional obligations that felt crucial or time-sensitive: reading student papers in the hospital waiting room, answering email messages in the middle of the night, calling in favors from my colleagues and students, and asking them to extend to me their understanding and benefit of the doubt during this time in which I was disoriented and overwhelmed.

Perhaps as a way to manage the intense un-synthesizable mixture of emotions I was flailing in, I started keeping a new journal specifically devoted to recording everything that was happening related to my mother’s crisis. From the mundane to the philosophical, I documented it in the little brown book given to me by a concerned friend. On the inside cover, I wrote the medical nomenclature for what had happened to my mother—“sub-arachnoid hemorrhage”—and accompanied the words with a drawing of an upside-down spider, imagining that there was a huge red arachnid lodged supine at the bottom of my mother’s skull. I listed the many medications she would have to take every 2-4-6 hours ’round-the-clock for an indefinite length of time, dispensed by me until she might be able to monitor the elaborate system for herself. I did a lot of free-writing about anything I could remember from the weeks preceding the massive rupture, searching for signs of the impending explosion (perhaps I was imagining that I might have prevented it if had I been paying more attention?) and I noted things my mother said and my observations of her condition. I kept lists of contact information for all of the people who would need to know about what had happen to my mother, bills that I’d need to pay for her, and reminders to myself of my other responsibilities: my daughter’s schedule or tasks at work that had to be completed by me or by a proxy. I studied medical journal articles and took notes about what had happened to her: the etiology of the aneurysm, the symptoms and treatment and long-term prognosis. I learned that such aneurysms are hereditary and strike women more often than men and are often fatal or result in permanent impairment. My initial impression was confirmed that my mother had somehow beaten the odds of this unexpected and devastating thing that had happened to her.

I still don’t quite understand how it was possible, but even in the middle of my mother’s crisis, and my own crisis that was triggered by her crisis, I felt strongly that while this was no doubt a traumatic and stressful experience, it was also a potentially liminal event in our intertwined lives. I began to see connections, the ways in which what I was thinking and feeling about this experience seemed to relate to, even be facets of, my long-standing preoccupations: the primacy of personal experience as a legitimate basis for understanding; the challenges and potentialities of deep adult development and intentional aging; practices for transformative, emancipatory teaching and learning in adulthood; the complexities of embodied consciousness and meaning-making in the farthest reaches of the human life course. I jotted notes to remind myself of possible future inquiry and writing projects, about how I might use these emerging insights in my teaching and work with my adult students. I felt questions pouring out of me; I could barely keep up with them! As for answers, if I had any, they were at best emergent, partial, and provisional. I was experiencing my own metaphoric exploding brain. My sense of what was important to me in my work—no, not just in my work, but in every facet of my messy life—was shifting. Key features of my identity were being dismantled and reassembled in ways that I experienced as deeply frightening and exciting. But just as I was uncertain about whether I could fulfill my responsibility to my mother as her caregiver as well as mother to my daughter, I was uncertain as to whether I’d have the energy, courage, and life-world support to enact my aspirations for my own personal and professional development.

I also wondered if my body was sound enough to carry me through what I hoped would be a long journey through the life course. One of my journal entries written during the initial days after my mother’s emergency reflects my sudden realization that my daughter and I might be walking around with hidden cerebral aneurysms. I wrote, “Time bomb: Does it exist? What will set it off? Is there one within me?” (At the urging of my mother’s surgeon, I had a magnetic resonance imaging procedure [MRI] soon after her rupture; it indicated the absence of any visible potential aneurysm in my brain; my daughter asked to meet with her pediatrician to find out whether she, too, should have an MRI). Faced with such comprehensive uncertainty, I felt I had no choice but to write through my experiences, from the coldly pragmatic lists to what I now experience as heart-breaking passages about my thoughts and feelings as I struggled through this experience with my mother (and also with my daughter), one of the Big Events of Life, a point of confluence where all the existential features of life as a human being collide: frailty, impermanence, terror, suffering, love, hope. Writing became a crucial, critical praxis through which I honored my confusion, legitimized my own and my mother’s (and my daughter’s) embodied experiences, and reclaimed a sense of agency over my life when so many aspects of it were out of my control (Ray, 2000; Richardson, 1997).

Magic Charm

After her brain exploded, while she was recovering in the hospital and in a state of confusion punctuated by her emerging realizations of what had happened to her, especially about how her life had been altered irrevocably, my mother was frightened and in pain, unable to sleep. I felt as though I was slammed right up against the limits of my ability to encourage and comfort her. The pep talks I had given her many times throughout our life together whenever her confidence faltered or she was anxious now seemed quite banal. My assurances that I loved her and that she was safe and that I’d take care of her didn’t seem to do much to reduce the utter terror she felt. I couldn’t be with her constantly while she was in the ICU, though that is what she wanted, and while I called her often when I wasn’t by her side, phone conversations were very challenging for us because of the constant pain in her head and auditory impairments as an aftereffect of the aneurysm. I realized that what she needed was a strong image or notion that she could hold onto, something she could call up in her confused mind in the middle of the night like a touchstone or a magic charm.

I remembered an “enticingly beautiful idea” from a transcript of a National Public Radio interview that one of my colleagues had given me the week before my mother’s aneurysm. A pediatric researcher had demonstrated that “babies’ cells stay in their moms, not for days or weeks, but for decades” and that these cells “protect, defend, and repair her for the rest of her life whenever she gets seriously ill” ( Krulwich, 2006). I had my strong image around which to create for my mother a simple, positive visualization: My fetal cells, but in the form of little homunculi that looked just like me, were coalescing around the site of my mother’s aneurysm, working day and night to make sure that her brain was healing and there would be no further explosions.

A few days after my mother underwent the special procedure to repair the aneurysm with a titanium coil, I read the transcribed interview to her and then offered her the visualization I had constructed, urging her to focus on the image of tiny little me inside her brain whenever she felt anxious or frightened. For a couple of days it worked like the magic charm it was intended to be. Then, one night when she was suffering from an intense migraine headache that was a secondary outcome of the trauma to her brain, she called me weeping, repeating over and over again, “I’ve been looking for you in my mind like I’ve been doing but now I can’t find you. You’ve disappeared.”

Her sudden and qualitatively different dependency—the immediacy of her existential vulnerability—devastated me and called forth my deepest, fiercest protective impulses. I became quite metaphysical. I assured her that I was in fact there inside and beside her. Even if sometimes she was not able to find me, I wasn’t hiding, nor would I ever flee from her. When she couldn’t “see me,” she only needed to breathe deeply and know I was there like the air.

Living Theory

In my post-crisis recovery as I endeavor to transform trauma, in my ongoing project to connect my “personal experiences” with “critical Gerontological praxis” (Ray, 2003), I have come to realize that it wasn’t the event of my mother’s health crisis per se that was the point, and this hasn’t been a story about a bad thing that happened that caused me to decide to do some things in my life differently because I realized (once again) how precious and transient this life is. In an instant, a brain explodes, a car crashes, a relationship comes to an abrupt end or changes dramatically, something violent alters reality in inconceivable and irreversible ways. For many of us, time unfolds unpunctuated by such violent episodes of crisis. We have the sheer good fortune of living in Western advanced capitalistic countries during this historical epoch. Most of our travels through the life course are paved with good health and opportunities, at least when compared with, say, those living in extremely marginal economies or in war zones. Typically, our lives are not strewn with daily reminders of our true nature as embodied humans, the profound frailty we share regardless of how we are positioned in terms of age, health, or ableness. As Gadow (1983) reminds us, we are each of us as flesh vulnerable and dependent upon each other. The inescapable fact is that each of us has one foot on the earth and one foot in the stars.

It almost goes without saying that the work we do is informed by the lives we live—and the lives we live are hopefully informed by our work, as well—especially in a field such as gerontology; but I’ve come to want something more, a deeper and larger connection between my work and the rest of my life. As I aspire to do for my students, so I have been attempting to do for myself: I construct opportunities, sometimes only momentary and sometimes sustained, for engaging purposefully in critical reflection about and contemplation of what I am experiencing and learning, and ways I might enact my emerging understanding, make connections between (and perhaps resist the boundaries around) the personal and the professional, my inside world and my life-world, my experiences as a daughter, a mother, and a Critical Educational Gerontologist living in a particular time/place and space(s). In all honestly, I didn’t come out of this experience with my mother with a sense of new personal coherence or theoretical certitude or professional mastery. Instead, I was broken wide open and in being broken and open I realized that my only way through the accumulated trauma was to embrace rather than flee from uncertainty and instability and complexity. My relationship with Gerontological Critical Theory became less abstract and more grounded in lived experience, my form of consciousness more “meta.” The “something new and good” that I hoped would emerge from my experience caring for my mother during and after her crisis began to take shape. I understood that a way to transform trauma, my own and others’, as well as dwell within the rich messiness of my life, was through critical Gerontological praxis in which I emancipated myself from the oppressive expectations “in and out of academe, which dictate how we should think, research, write about, teach, and otherwise construct knowledge regarding age, aging, and age relations” (Ray, 2003, p. 37).

New questions began to emerge and invite my sustained attention: What are the social and ideological impediments or challenges to our own and others’ capacities for resilience, adaptation, and growth as we travel through the adult life course, and how do we address these structural issues and enhance individual agency? What happens when I de-compartmentalize my life, when I resist the fracturing of my identity that can result from occupying multiple, often disparate roles? What are intellectual and spiritual practices for engaging the big questions of being human? Can we learn to apply intentionality to deep development and aging without the need for such brutal reminders of impermanence and fragility? When these brutal reminders come into our lives, and they will, how can we recognize them as opportunities for personal growth, enhanced relationships with others, even new modes of being-in-the-world?

In reflecting upon the extent to which my “expertise” as a Critical Educational Gerontologist helped me cope with this crisis, my commitment to Critical Gerontology deepened and transformed. I came to realize that at heart, I am a Gerontological-anarchist: I’m committed to freedom and creativity as we travel through the life course more than I am committed to the codification, standardization, and institutionalization of ideas and practices around the human aging journey. I simultaneously appreciate and see through the desire to make the messiness of this human experience tidy. The human journey is a complex, multifaceted process that unfolds over a long period of time—if we are fortunate—and, thus, invites and even demands a multifaceted, nuanced, and critical approach. How could my work as a Critical Educational Gerontologist devoted to this wild, emergent, and complex phenomenon be anything less than wild, emergent, and complex?

Interlude: Space and Time (September 2006)

I have written and re-written various sections of this essay at different times over the span of several years. The day upon which I wrote this interlude was almost 7 months to the day since I heard the voicemail message from my mother. She was calling from the roadside where she had crashed her car to tell me she thought she was having a stroke or aneurysm. I hadn’t answered the call and so she left a message on my cell phone. At the time of her call, I was in the bathroom grooming myself in preparation for her expected arrival for dinner. When I listened to the message, I was so shocked by her slurred speech that I accidentally dropped the cell phone into the toilet.

The site of the crash is on the route I drive from the neighborhood where we live to the university where I work. Each time I make the drive, I am reminded of the trauma we are still living through. My mother returned to full-time work out of necessity a few months after her ruptured aneurysm . I’d have given just about anything if she could have taken more time on medical leave not only to recover from the rupture but also to engage in emotional healing and self-reflection, so that she might start the difficult work of integrating this event into her sense of self. Instead, she’s back to “normal” life but she feels anything but “normal.” I received an email message from her in which she wrote,

Yesterday was a particularly difficult day. Three huge errors were brought to my attention at work. Last week I noticed that I was more confused than usual . . . not sure why. My boss was very kind about my errors but it threw me for a loop. I hope that I can heal from this aneurysm before I cause harm to someone and/or lose my job because I can’t do it anymore. I am so frustrated and sad. I am going to do as you suggested and be very kind to myself and not stress too much.

Frustration, sadness, intermittent confusion, even some anger, and resentment are emotion states that my mother struggles with on a daily basis. But all of these feelings are counter-balanced—I think, I hope—by a renewed sense of gladness to be alive.

In addition to returning to full-time work, my mother resumed many of the other activities of her “normal” life: daily fitness walking, small trips to visit family and friends, and active (though circumscribed) planning for her future. The one activity she has decided not to resume is formal education; she will not fulfill her dream of completing her undergraduate degree. And there are new activities in my mother’s life. Every 6 months for the next several years, she will have a diagnostic angiogram or an MRI to determine if the site of the ruptured aneurysm is still stable.

The first round of these tests, 6-months-out from the crisis, revealed that the site of the aneurysm was exposed, that the titanium coil had compressed and my mother was at risk for another rupture. This news was hard for us to take. The odds were so small that something like this would happen (close to as small as the odds that she’d experience and survive a ruptured aneurysm in the first place) and the consequences of not fixing the rupture site could be serious, even fatal. She scheduled the procedure immediately, wasting no time and without consulting me. The date of her hospitalization was the first day of Fall term at my university; in fact, it was the first day I was scheduled to teach a new course. I realized then in a way I hadn’t fully realized during the initial crisis that this was the “new normal” for us; my professional and personal responsibilities have some kind of significance and importance but they have to be balanced indefinitely with the reality of my mother’s delicate embodiment. Our shared reality has been altered; we mark the passage of time based on how long it has been since the moment her brain exploded.

Post-Script: Collaborative Moments

I had been working on this essay for some time before I offered to read it to my mother, though before I got too far underway with the writing of it, I asked her for her permission to put at its center our still-raw experiences. I’ve read sections of this essay to students and friends and colleagues. I’ve discussed its theoretical foundations with generous and insightful colleagues in the United States and United Kingdom. But when I was asked the year after the crisis to offer a presentation at the continuing care retirement community (“CCRC”) that is adjacent to the campus where I work, I realized that this could be an opportunity to put into praxis my Gerontological Critical Theory commitments, especially my commitment to cross-generational collaborative inquiry. More pragmatically, I hoped whoever attended my presentation might offer me some much-needed help, as at that time, this was an essay looking for an ending! (Actually, I suspect I was looking for some resolution to the tumultuous period my mother and I had experienced.)

I decided to do a “performance” of an earlier iteration of this essay with an audience composed of elders living in the CCRC and the surrounding community, administrators and caregivers working at the CCRC, and faculty and students from my university. I began the performance, which included a reading of the essay followed by open discussion, by sharing with the audience that the essay was a work-in-progress that I’d been writing over several month (now over several years!) and that it had come to a rather definite (though hopefully temporary) standstill. I told the audience that I simply couldn’t figure out how this essay wanted to end, though I was definitely ready for it to end, and that I invited them to collaborate with me in thinking through the possible forms the ending might take. I also let them know that the process of writing early versions of the essay had been a profound experience for me because it is a testimony to a significant life-crisis and an intentional effort to integrate this experience into my sense of self (as well as support my mother in her efforts to do so as well). I hoped my mother’s experience and my experience with her would count for something, would instigate something new and good.

The reading of the essay took about 45 minutes. It took place in a dark dining room without a functioning microphone system; there had been a bad storm with high winds and, as a consequence, a power outage. As I read the essay, as I projected my voice so all could hear, including those audience members with hearing impairments, my throat became dry and strained. I was quite shaken by the emotional and physical effort it took to make it through reading the essay under such conditions. I had tears in my eyes. I was covered with nervous sweat and exhausted. I felt vulnerable as I’d never before revealed so much of myself and my life in such a public venue, nor had I ever delivered this style of presentation.

At the conclusion of reading the essay, I left the protection of the podium and ventured out into the large audience. I asked, “So, what do you think? How does this essay wish to end?” One of my close colleagues laughed as she suggested,

“Maybe you should end the essay by telling about how after you heard the message from your mother where she told you she thought she was having a stroke you were so shocked you dropped your cell phone in the toilet!”

A new student at my university whom I’d yet to meet said, with tears in her eyes,

“I’m very surprised and moved by what you’ve just read. I can’t believe what you and your family have lived through. It is very brave of you to share all of that with us. I hope you and your mom will be okay.”

A woman who lives at the CCRC asked me if I was doing okay, if I was eating well and taking care of myself, if I had a faith tradition to bolster me in times of trouble, and if I was still scared and sad. Other audience members related stories about their own losses and existential concerns: spouses who had died suddenly or tragically, adult children who were suffering with mental illness, other unexpected life crises that they had survived. We exchanged poignant stories for some time and then I asked the audience yet again for advice as to how this essay might wish to end. Another woman who lives at the CCRC said something that has stayed with me and has been borne out in subsequent months and years in my experiences as my mother’s daughter. She said, in a very quiet voice, that only I and a few others could hear, “I don’t think there can be an ending for such a thing. I think you need to accept that there is no ending, that it is an unfolding story.”