musings

I read a chapter of Raising Cain last night that is about Susie’s death. Susie was my mother’s best friend, and a second mother of sorts to me. My sister and I grew up very close with three other families, of whom Susie’s family was one. Her sons Tyler and, in particular, Ethan are as close to brothers to me. I knew from Mum that Michael Thompson had worked with Susie and the boys, but I did not realize he had been a part of their lives when she was dying.

The chapter stunned me, bringing me instantly back to those intense days in 1997. Susie died in the fall of 1997 and I will never forget the months leading up to that. For one thing, my grandmother died of the same kind of cancer in June. Pancreatic cancer suffused those months. My mother, even more surrounded by illness and death than I was, was intimately involved in Susie’s caretaking. There were a group of women who circled around her, supporting both her and her sons, in a way that I think of often now.

“Women do not leave situations like this; we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, “What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.” I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.” – Elizabeth Berg

This quotation, which I invoked recently to friends involved in similar caretaking, really captures what those months were like. I was nowhere near as intensely involved as my mother was, but I was still a part of the experience. Ethan, Susie, Mum and I had countless dinners on Susie’s sun porch. We sewed square for quilts. We attended caretakers meetings.

Experiencing Susie’s death was an exquisite, once-in a lifetime privilege. I learned more about death and, perhaps paradoxically (but maybe not), about life from her in those months than I think I have since. Susie faced death with extraordinary grace. Somehow she was able to say to those of us near to her: Yes, I am dying. But see, I am not afraid. And so we were not afraid. And though the crushing sadness remained, without fear, it was more manageable.

Susie was able to rise above her own emotions to provide solace and strength to those around her. She spoke honestly about her fears, her experience, her pain. But she also honored the great good fortune of her life and was able, somehow, to put her own need away so that she could reassure those close to her, take care of her boys, until the end. I can neither imagine nor fathom the strength it took for her to do that, to put her own need for reassurance behind her desire to comfort those around her. We were supposed to be taking care of her, but in fact it was the other way around. Hers was an amazing act of generosity; to this day I am humbled when I remember it.

Hilary shared with me a prayer that was said at one caretaker meeting that I did not attend. The closing line was: I believe all of our paths are perfect. I think of this often. If a woman who died before 50, leaving two young sons with everything in front of them, can find a way to feel at peace with that, I owe it to her memory to recognize the perfection – or at least the beauty in the imperfection – of my own path.

Susie, you will never be forgotten. And Ethan, I love you.

… embracing a view of the world that welcomes people who dare and refuses to punish those who are willing to be confused and disoriented in pursuit of something tender, something honest, something true.

I love that passage, and in fact Jen Lemen’s whole post about faith.

I think about this a lot, aching with how much I want to trust, how much I want to have faith. In my deepest heart I do believe there is some order, some design so vast, I really do. But how abstract that seems, in the moments when all seems dark and confusing.

I wonder if my affection for patterns is part of this deep longing for faith: by seeing reassuring, repetitive order in the world I can trust that it is also there beneath the surface. That underneath what may look like chaos there is some scaffolding that makes sense. This likely underlies my affinity for symmetry, for the way the New York skyscrapers look reaching into the sky. Also, my teeth-clicking counting off of things by 8s: cars in a parking lot, bottles of nail polish at the manicurist, window panes across a waiting room. All of these things can be categorized and understood, and I am comforted by what that implies about the greater world.

But at the same time, my favorite images are those of the sky and of clouds. And these have, almost by definition, no symmetry. There, the design is truly so vast as to be not at all obvious to the naked eye. Somehow, the beauty of the sky is in its very randomness and it is this utter lack of pattern that summons my weak faith. Looking at the blue sky streaked irregularly with clouds, I feel as though I can believe.

I suppose it is obvious, then, that it is when the pattern is inscrutable that we must call on faith. When things look messy and confusing, our only option is to trust. In fact, if I could let go of my desperate desire to wrestle the world into an understandable and predictable set of equations and probabilities, I would likely be a lot happier. Of course the reason I cannot let go easily is precisely because my faith is so weak. It is in that space, that free fall between order and disorder that faith catches us. And I’ve never liked the feeling of falling.

Of course, the disorder in the wide world is nothing compared to the disarray inside us. There is no counting off in groups of 8 my feelings, no way to categorize and subdue the instincts and fears that roar in my head. It is here that I need faith most of all: belief that the determined pursuit of emotional truth will take me where I need to go, conviction that getting lost is the only way to be found, trust that I am still safe even when hopelessly lost and buffeted by reactions so powerful they scare me. The sad realization that sometimes even my very best effort is far from good enough lurks around the corners of my consciousness, but I see no option but to continue to try to both understand and manage my reactions.

So I will hope that my flickering faith will strengthen and not go out. I will renew my efforts to let go and believe. I will try to not be afraid of my feelings, to parse the difference between where I can manage my reactions better and where I must just experience them in order to understand. I will welcome the swell of comfort and well-being that sometimes crashes over me like a wave, whether it’s looking at a glorious sky, speaking in unison with other people in church or yoga class, or running my hand through my sleeping son’s hair. I will be grateful for the faith that I do have.

I know for sure today (or five or six)

Most human beings are really and truly doing their best

There is almost always room in a parking lot even when there is a “level full” sign

Sometimes you just have to brush your teeth

Knowing someone in and out and knowing their flaws can make you love them more

If you only swim underwater, there’s a limit to how far you can go

How you spend your hours is how you spend your life

Cold sores really, really suck

Little known fact about me: I have a day job. A “real” job. And wow are those quotation marks merited. A lot about it is not real at all. It’s not where my heart lives.

Today I spent the day interviewing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation around Judith Warner’s post, between Ivy League Insecurities and the Elmo Wallpaper and me. Obviously there are a lot of different threads woven into that particular discussion. But one of the key ones, at least for me, is the paucity of information that most of us need to jump to massive conclusions about other people. Judith Warner’s specific point was about educated women and the ways that they are resented and muffled.

And today was, of course, a day where I worked through a list of people who had been pre-screened rigorously on these very dimensions. Not told to shut up, not told to stop whining, but selected and deemed worthy according to a very similar set of criteria than the ones that the rest of us are talking about. And yes, I do believe that things like education and former employer are good, albeit imperfect, screens with which to assess someone’s potential suitability as an employee. I also believe that there are many, many qualified – actually, exceptional – people out there who do not have these kinds of schools and companies on their resumes. The challenge, of course, is finding them. Ultimately these basic filters of education and employer are sufficiently efficacious that we are willing to live with the trade-off that we will miss some very strong candidates.

One of Aidan’s sentences in her comment on my post has really stuck with me – I think this is as resonant and wise as anything I’ve heard in a long time: Perhaps all we can do is own the fact that this is what we are doing – judging – and that each and every judgment says more about the judge than the judged.

I thought of this today as I met candidates, looked at resumes, and gathered feedback from my colleagues. How we react to other people ultimately says a lot more about who we are than about the other person. Taken to the extreme, I suppose, you could say that others are just a blank screen onto which we project our own issues, insecurities, fears, and assumptions. We know, for example, that it is true that the things that drive us insane in those close to us are almost always things we dislike in ourselves.

Anyway, back to work. I found myself today trying to be thoughtful about my own assumptions and to question those of my interviewers. An old recruiting adage is that people have a “like me” bias and I have seen this in action over and over again. It occurs to me that my tremendous enthusiasm for engineers probably reveals my own lack of pride in my very soft-and-fuzzy English degree. How insecure does one have to be to have a “not like me” preference? Conversation for another time, that one. (We’ll take a moment for a fun fact. When I lived in England, I was all signed up to take 4 A Level courses for 11th and 12th grade: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and Math. It only took me a few years at American boarding school and college to roll all the way downhill to that “softest” of subjects, English.).

My personal preferences when it comes to evaluating resumes and candidates? As I said, I very much like engineers and hard scientists. I am very interested in GPA and not much in SAT and GMAT scores. I always read the “personal” line, am generally more impressed by someone who is #1 at a big state school than middle of the pack at Princeton, and deeply turned off by even the smallest typo (Worst I have ever seen? Goldman Sach’s. The person received a polite TBNT – thanks but no thanks – from me). My root system was definitely formed at BCG, where I grew up as a professional and learned to prize intellectual horsepower above all else. The preference to hire the smartest person you can find and train them in the specifics of the job is deeply ingrained in me.

Anyway. I tried extra hard today to unpack the feedback I received, to hear it in light of the teller, and to think hard about each of my instinctive reactions to candidates. I tried to be careful about the assumptions I drew. I realize we have to live with some bucketing of people; on some level, simple filters help us order an enormous universe of options. This is true, frankly, whether we are talking about candidates or jobs or potential life partners. But I think being aware of the screens we use, either consciously or unconsciously, and trying to be very deliberate about the ways our own life experiences and preferences shape the way we evaluate others (in a professional context or otherwise) are both worth the effort.