No sooner had I read the Letter from the Editor and flipped through the first 30 pages of ads when my careless eyes engaged with- wait for it- something really, truly meaningful. I mean DEEP, people. Two paragraphs later, the emotional shit hit the fan and I found myself sobbing. Seriously, I've been reading Vogue on and off since I was 18, and never (all personal insecurity over waif models aside) has this magazine brought me to tears.
Enter Emily Rapp, an amazing writer with a connection to Austin and a recently deceased son who suffered from the neuro-degenerative disease Tay Sachs. The excerpt from her memoir The Still Point of the Turning World still has me thinking months later. I am both hopelessly drawn to this book and Emily's stark, brutal, and jaw-droppingly gorgeous prose, and totally afraid to fall down that rabbit hole. Of course, deep down I know my respect for this woman's experience and her courage and fortitude to write about it will win out, so I'm putting it on my list for this fall (more on said-list soon) and hope you will too.
 |
| Emily Rapp and her gorgeous son Ronan |
Our experiences over the past three years with our daughter have brought us in contact with the most wonderful, most real, and most incredible of people and families. Childhood illness is a reality, and though few people have the courage to face it, those who walk that path truly live in the holiest and most grace-filled of places, even in the midst of pain most can not and should not have to bear. I loved this take on the book and all that it entails from Katie Roiphe in Slate. It seemed very appropriate and spot on in terms of how isolating grief can be in general, and I've seen this again and again with those closest to me who have grieved the loss of children and siblings this past year:
As Freud put it, “Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death—accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray our effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event.” The more detail we can consume about a death, the easier it is to reduce it to a chance event; the deeper we go into its specificity, the less we face our own abject vulnerability.
Our fear, then, is entwined with our fascination, our denial wrapped up with our voyeurism. In one of the best passages of the book, Rapp blows through our denial with a description of “dragon parents” who have terminally ill babies and children—this is in contrast to “tiger moms” who are fiercely exhorting their children to succeed:
Dragons are scary. Our grief is primal and unwieldy and it embarrasses people. Talking about end-of-life care decisions for our babies to a bunch of parents with typically developing kids is tantamount to breathing fire at a dinner party or on the playground. Nobody wants to see what we see so clearly. Nobody wants to know the truth about their children, about themselves: that none of it is forever.
Rapp writes toward the end of her memoir about a visiting a Zen center. During the first meal she tells one of the officiants about Ronan. The officiant nods calmly and does not react with “histrionics.” Rapp is relieved, aware suddenly of the burden of other people’s reactions, the drain of managing other people’s emotions, because this Zen woman does not have a reaction. Rapp writes, “Here I had tossed death across the table at a stranger who looked straight at it without blinking.” In some sense that is what The Still Point of the Turning World allows us to do: look at death without blinking. It offers us the precise combination of vividness and distance necessary to think through the unthinkable.
Thank you, Katie Roiphe, and thank you, Emily Rapp, for the deep thoughts and inspiration. And thank you, Vogue, for printing something with such emotional resonance and gravitas. So refreshing!
P.S.- Here's a brief but powerful interview with Emily Rapp conducted by Terri Gross:
No comments:
Post a Comment