I.     When you called

It was morning, February 23, 2020. Mema had been in the hospital for a little over a week but sounded so strong and in good spirits when I last spoke to her on the phone. Even though she was in the hospital, she had been in a hurry to get me off the phone so she could eat ice cream and play along with Jeopardy. My future employment as a philosophy instructor was very uncertain and things were financially tenuous, so I selfishly used her apparent strength to rationalise not dropping everything to fly to Atlanta. She was ninety-three, but visits to the hospital were not uncommon, and she always made it back home. But then there were serious complications during corrective heart surgery, and she was in the ICU being kept in a heavily sedated state. The doctors said it didn’t look good. When I saw my phone illuminate with your number, I knew, and I sank down in sorrow and regret.

Teddy. She's gone. I've lost a part of myself, and it hurts so bad. Somehow you stitched those words together against the clamour of ventilators, heart monitors, and the overwrought voices of nurses and orderlies. Somehow those words managed to hold together just long enough to make their way to me. Then your voice quickly unravelled into uncertainty. I don’t know what to do.

I didn’t know what to say. I compulsively traced a figure eight around two pieces of dust stupidly sitting on my desk. With the trembling in your voice, I was suddenly eight years old again. You were piling us into that used, rust-trimmed Chevy hatchback – my emotionally precocious three-year-old sister, two smelly dogs, and an anxious cat – so we could begin our five-day exodus from Roswell, New Mexico, to Lake Placid, Florida, where we would live with Mema. There was still a dull ache murmuring from my back from when that man had thrown me against the wall above the couch. But there was also a measured relief in knowing that he wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. Not to me, not to you, and not to Nicole. Yet there was that same trembling and uncertainty in your voice then. You knew we had to leave, but you weren’t sure you could be whole without him. He was not my father. He was a strange man to me. Even so he had almost been more to you, and he was Nicole’s father. I could tell from your watery eyes that you hoped maybe Nicole and I could help hold you together, hold all of us together, even as fragile as we were. I didn’t know what to say. But I tried to be there as best I could as you drove day and night. First under the stubborn steel desert sky and then through the shallow water pan swamps of the Gulf Coast under the heat-lamp sun, malodorous animals panting and whimpering the whole way. You had been working as a receptionist at a hospital. There was no way you could afford to leave him and carry the burden of taking care of me and Nicole on your own. Mema had been living alone on a fixed income in a house she and your dad mortgaged just before he passed ten years prior. Highlands County consisted mostly of retirees, orange groves, and cattle pastures, but the cost of living was low. With her help we could make it, and so we made our way to the safety and security of Mema’s.

II.   Confronting the question of grief

This was not the first time someone I cared about passed away, not the first time I felt sadness after a loss. But this was the first time I lost someone I loved so much and who had been so integral to my life. This was my first substantial experience with grief. The first thing I realised about grief is how ageist our assumptions about it can be. I frequently lived with Mema growing up. She had not merely been my grandmother but instead a dominant caretaker in my childhood and adolescence. As I grew older, we remained invested in one another’s well-being, and our relationship grew into a deeper friendship. And when a friend – a best friend – leaves your life, it does not matter how old they are, the void is there all the same. In the months following her death I found myself thrown against a relentless wall of facticity every time I felt an acute desire to check on her, to let her know I was okay, or I started looking forward to my next visit when we would surely have yet another fiery debate about religion. The realisation that she was dead would stiffen my chest, leaving no breath but only a lump in my throat, and I would start crying yet again, unable to speak. And in trying to escape out of these episodes, sometimes in bad faith, I would wonder if this was what grief was – a debilitating sadness driven by a desire that was made deranged by the impossibility of its object.

Mema meditated on the existence and nature of God daily and held a deep conviction that God exists. And despite knowing that I was a sceptical person when it came to these questions, she always told me to pray – after all, what could it hurt? But Saint Anselm seemed to suggest that one cannot even think about God without acknowledging the real existence of God, since our idea of God is of an absolutely perfect being, a being greater than any other conceivable being, and by definition what is absolutely perfect cannot be a mere idea but must exist outside of the mind – otherwise, we are left only with empty entertainments and gestures.[1] The monk Gaunilo was suspicious of Anselm’s assumption that finite minds could fully harbour adequate thoughts about what exists, other than those based on what could be felt and seen, and so was suspicious finite minds could harbour any adequate notion of absolutely perfect beings. But even after setting questions about our finite minds aside, Gaunilo goes on to parody Anselm by pointing to the absurdity in thinking that we might have some reason to truly believe that a Lost Island – an ideal island more excellent than any other conceivable island – exists simply because we might be able to stir it up from the depths of our thoughts.[2]

Less worried about proving existence, and half a century after Anselm and Gaunilo, Blaise Pascal appeals to the homo economicus by asking us to consider the expected payoffs of believing in God. Pascal weighed an infinity of infinite happiness against finite losses – “But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that [God] is.”[3] But since late adolescence, the larger issue for me hasn’t really been about payoffs. Instead, I’ve often found myself feeling more ambivalent about the question itself, and it seems my incessant anxiety has been driven mostly by a plague of more insistent worries and insecurities that continually hammer away whether I believe God exists or not. Yet unlike God, Mema was rarely hidden from my life. So losing her has made me wonder if I shouldn’t still hold out hope for an ideal afterlife where we are all reunited. Perhaps we will all live together with perfect, infinite joy and unconditional love. Such a potential reward might somehow make my acute and painful desire to talk to and see her again rational, it could turn my grief into an ever-expansive desire that allows me to suspend any disbelief that I will be with her again.

But that also feels disingenuous, and I suspect that Gaunilo’s worries apply to any of Pascal’s potential payoffs just as well. Even if I could conceive of some hidden Lost Island of Paradise – an island of which no greater can be conceived and so promising unconditional love, infinite happiness, and perfect joy – and even if that possibility provided some small reason to believe that such an island exists and that I might find it, wouldn’t it still be foolish to wager on that possibility, to let go of what is in my hands right now and set sail in search of that island? More importantly, while Mema was integral to my life, the history behind our relationship was filled with complicated knots. So I do not know if our relationship in full, with all of its messy and often painful parts, could even exist on this ideal island. Our relationship did not, and could not, originate from unconditional love or infinite and perfect joy, but only from a very vulnerable love and finite joy. It seems that is the best any of us can do or expect from one another while maintaining empathy, while still holding on to one another – because what we actually hold in the palms of our hands is finite. And if an imperfect relationship that constitutes an important part of who I am cannot exist on this Lost Island of Paradise, how could I? Like all idealisations, no matter how formally well-behaved, ideals of God, of unconditional love, and of perfect joy seem much too thin to hold the significance of our particularities, our individual finiteness and imperfections. Yet those things are needed to bond us with one another and in turn give us a real sense of expansiveness and possibility.[4]

But, in my grief I was reduced and confined by the experience of such a significant loss, an experience which remained mysterious to me and left me feeling helpless.

III. The love of divinity

The exodus from New Mexico was not the first time I was going to live in Mema’s house. Three years earlier, Mema flew to Roswell and took me back to Lake Placid to attend kindergarten. The public schools in Roswell did not offer full days for earlier grades. My mother was struggling with her mental health just after Nicole was born. Nicole’s father had lost his job as a repairman for the cable company. My own father was a police officer in the military and was newly married overseas; his presence in my life was minimal. My mother faced multiple burdens of maintaining her mental health, early motherhood, underpaid labour, and unpaid labour at home, all at the age of twenty-six. Mema was lonely and felt isolated, so my living with her seemed to be a good arrangement for everyone. It was an arrangement that continued for many years throughout my childhood and adolescence and became constitutive of who we were. Mema constantly wrote to my father, keeping him up to date and demanding he be more involved in my life. I am forever grateful that he gave me those letters thirty years later. I am well aware that I cannot keep Teddy but in the meantime I can give him so much – a nice home, clean, nice clothes, a lot of attention and love, help him develop his own personality. Teddy asks 1000 questions a day, his mind is like a sponge. These are the formative years, I strongly believe now is the time to shape the future man.[5]

Over the years, it was most often just the two of us living together, along with my dog Smiley. Mema and I went to church nearly every Sunday morning. Service after service, I sat lost in awe of the vast amount of empty space contained between us and the cathedral ceiling high above. I found the inverted mountainous valleys of the ceiling rolling overhead, framed by the ridges of the monumental buttresses, both comforting and vertiginous. And there was Mema looming above with her closely contained yet wild head of black curls, her boundless blue eyes, and her long red nails guiding her voice along the faded white hymnal page. Her bright ruby red lips dancing gracefully against the many colours of the stained-glass images of angels and prophets – What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul.[6] Earlier on those mornings I would often carefully watch her reflection in the wall-to-wall mirrors of her bedroom, poised at her black veneered vanity bursting with faux gilded handles, as she assiduously applied her lipstick. And at church her mezzo-soprano voice took flight from those ruby red lips, rapturous as it ambitiously tried to fill the sweeping void of the cathedral vault above – And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on.[7] It was a voice so many would compliment her on, especially men. It was a voice that soared above the chorus of the more modest and pious. It was a voice that carried a confidence I admired but also felt self-conscious of as I stood demurely by.

Yet it was a voice that was always absent during the last hymn because we would furtively leave service from the back pew so that we could make it to the American Legion Hall for the Sunday afternoon bingo games. And as Mema impatiently waited for me to put my seatbelt on, she would remind me that the luckiest cards for the big $250 jackpot were most certainly at the tops of the sheets the vendors pulled from. The expansive American Legion Hall could easily seat at least two hundred players. When games were in session, the cardinal croupier stood high in a pulpit at the front of the hall and carefully attended to whichever white ball managed to escape from the multitude acting out their rituals of chaos inside the massive bingo ball-blowing machine. This machine composed a comforting white noise in chorus with the many exhaust fans sucking the gauzy white smoke from white cigarettes nervously burning down in the smoking sections. Most of the white-capped players were elderly wives or widows of veterans, though some were veterans themselves. And as they sat in formation, paired off in rows of long folding tables, bathed in fluorescent light, they were all focused with feral expectancy on the grand divining flashboard of seventy-five numbers sitting high above the croupier’s pulpit. And as the croupier revealed the next number, a flurry of red bingo daubers and red chips would call in response along with weary groans of frustration.

The times before and between games were times of mingling, conversing, and gossiping. Mema’s dark hair suspiciously stood out against the whitened crops of her peers, yet her French accent and lively prosody genuinely stood out against the more patient and calmer Floridian dialect. Children hardly ever came to the hall, so at nine years of age my presence also stood out every weekend. Everyone would comment on how nice and well-mannered I was, in which Mema took great satisfaction, given how much effort she put into making sure my hair was parted to her liking, that my shirt was properly tucked into my second-hand Sunday slacks, and that I always said “yes, ma’am,” “may I please,” and “thank you.” Aside from practicing manners and courtesies, I also formed many meaningful friendships at bingo. When I wasn’t sitting next to Mema reading or drawing, I would commune with the many retired, elderly women and men who missed their grandchildren, or perhaps never had any. They would compliment my drawings, and ask me questions about school and what I was reading. I would ask them about their luck, their families, and what their favourite soap opera was. And I would gladly serve them, going to the concession stand to refill their decaf coffee or grab them a bag of chips. Sometimes I was rewarded with a quarter or my own snack, which I graciously accepted since I did not receive an allowance. But those rewards were mostly irrelevant to me. In serving my friends I felt the intrinsic joy and immense pleasure that comes with being helpful for others. I learned about the gratitude one feels when one recognises they are the object of the gratitude of the person they are helping. And these loving moments and friendships lasted throughout many years of my childhood and adolescence.

But during the games, when I started to feel angst and to grow bored with keeping myself occupied at the table I shared with Mema, I would often escape to the bathroom. I enjoyed the private solitude that came between the four lacquer-finished stall partitions, the calm sounds of running water, and the minty aroma of antiseptic urinal cakes incensing the air. But those sounds and smells would change into something much more curious later in the afternoon. At the back of the bingo hall there was a smoky, dark bar for veterans that would open at two p.m. when the sale of alcohol could begin on Sundays in Highlands County. That back bar was always hidden from me, but the patrons would use the bathroom shared with the main hall. And I would nervously and covertly peer from underneath the stall partition and watch the men at the urinals. I did not understand their strange words, but I was made curious by the sight of their fleshy, reddish penises. Something within me would stir, something that felt uncertain but not unfamiliar. It brought to mind the closeness I experienced years before with my friend in Roswell as we tentatively explored the sensuality of skin against skin in her tree house. It evoked the feelings of warmth I experienced with my friend in North Port when we slept in his parents’ camper parked next to their house, and we unexpectedly spent much of the night tenderly exploring the secret places of one another’s bodies despite being told “homosexuality” was a sin. Suddenly my heart jumped – Teddy! Where are you? You better not be in that damned bathroom again. Have you seen my grandson?

IV. The wrath of divinity

Before I was ten, I had already been to five different elementary schools in three different states. I did not act out in school, at least not often. But I did not pay attention and was disengaged, which resulted in many teacher notes. I know this is one reason why I often lived with Mema, who mostly stayed at home and could maintain steady pressure on my behaviour. Yet while she desperately wanted me to learn and grow, her methods were often cruel. The atmosphere at home could quickly turn tense, even dreadful. She would sometimes make me read the Bible alone in my room for hours. I remember how hard it was to stay focused, but nobody understood. She would quiz me on the reading and was prone to impatient outbursts of verbal insults when I did not perform up to her expectations — or worse, I would be thrown into a cold shower. These outbursts were terrifying – “Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised.”[8] One morning, breakfast had been pleasant enough, and afterward I was washing the dishes. Mema stood over, scolding me: Argh, no, Teddy! How many times must I tell you? Pay attention. You are wasting water. But I’m not wasting water, Mema! Suddenly I felt the sting of her hand across my back. I turned, desperately searching for mercy in her eyes, finding only a multitude of wrathful angels with bodies crushed underfoot, mere rage and blood loosed against the narrowing blue. She began screaming. Innocence fled, leaving my insides quivering as she chased me down and into my bedroom, slamming the door closed on me. I felt confused and betrayed. Alone. Hours later she still refused to talk to me or to let me out – “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”[9]

While trying to process my grief after Mema passed away, I was talking to a close friend about the work of bell hooks and the possibility of reconciling love and abuse in the context of grief. My friend was participating in a Torah study group and recommended I look at the work of Rachel Adler.[10] The early books of the Abrahamic religions are filled with stories and metaphors that portray the relationship between God and humanity as fraught with antagonism, threats, and abusive punishments. Adler emphasises how these stories seem to be premised on toxic masculinity, on aggression and misogyny.[11] Overall, the stories and metaphors raise important theological questions about the extent to which the dynamics they convey can have any place in doctrines of salvation and liberation, both of which are radically inconsistent with abuse.

Of course, the general issue is not merely theological, since all caretakers are in some way bound with those cared for, often by some implicit or explicit covenant. Caretakers are charged with helping us grow and develop and with providing us with emotional and material support. Ideally this bond of dependence can be characterised as loving, but failures in caretaking are unfortunately common. Too often those charged with caring for us might provide some of the things we need while also expecting unquestioning obedience and loyalty and will punish us with abuse if we fail to meet those expectations. So how could any dynamic involving such abuses ever serve as a foundation for moral development, for redemption, for freedom from ignorance and suffering? How could any dynamic involving such abuses ever serve as a model for future relationships based on love and care? It seems impossible, and often “we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do.”[12]

We navigate discontinuities in our lives by extending ourselves into the future through various narratives, for example, the narrative of family member, the narrative of caretaker, the narrative of dependent, among many others. The narratives not only work to make us whole by mending the discontinuities we suffer in life but are also a source of holding one another responsible. “Narrative is our construction of integrity. Through it, we seek to assume responsibility for our fractures and our fracturing without relinquishing our hopes of being trustworthy and being trusted. For if all errors were fatal, we would be too paralysed by despair to wish to assume responsibility or to desire integrity. If discontinuous selves are to be continuously responsible, our only hope is in the possibility of teshuvah, return and reconciliation, that injuries can be healed.”[13] Fractures in our lives create a demand for reparation. However, reparation requires nurturance and love, and abuse and injury are significant forces that work against those requirements and so prevent repair. Moreover, the narratives that make integrity and responsibility possible are themselves defined through our relationships with others, especially those we live with. So the problem is easily compounded by a tragic dilemma that too often shapes domestic spaces, especially when they are relatively isolated from broader communities – the only person who might be the source of the nurturance and love needed to repair the narratives that shape us is instead the very person who is abusive and who needs to be held responsible. “When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposite of nurturance and care.”[14] There were many times I felt fractured and unloved in the shadows of Mema’s rage, when I could not see her face, and was deeply unsure if we could be made whole again.

Sometimes there are cases of abuse so severe that reparation is impossible, but even when reparation is possible – when the narratives that constitute us can be made whole so that we can be made whole again – love and nurturance are not enough unless they are grounded in forgiveness, trust, and shared power. Forgiveness involves a recognition of the injurer as finite and imperfect. In cases where reparation is a possibility, it should also be possible to recognise the injurer as someone vulnerable and susceptible to emotional injury, even when they yield power.[15] But the process of forgiving the injurer should not have to begin with the harmed. The injurer must be able to confront their own vulnerability and imperfection. Furthermore, the narratives that make us whole only provide for the possibility of forgiveness, but in order for that possibility to be realised the narratives must be premised on trust, which involves a mutual recognition of our roles in those narratives. Unless the injured person can recognise a caretaker as whole, unless the injured person can reliably feel that the caretaker is motivated by a genuine desire to nurture growth, the injured person cannot recognise the caretaker as loving or caring but only as something strange and even dangerous. This means that the injured person must be able to recognise that they are the proper object of a caretaker’s intention to love and care; the injured person must be able to see their own feelings, desires, and beliefs through the caretaker’s eyes as something whole and worth caring for. An injured person cannot fully open up to another’s attempts at love and care, no matter how ardent, if the injured person’s voice is not heard, if the injured person’s suffering is not felt through empathy, and if the injured person is not recognised as a co-creator of the narratives that define the relationship. Thus, being recognised as a genuine caretaker cannot be coerced – to be recognised as a loving and caring parent one must actually act and respond in those ways, which means the sufferings and demands of the injured must be heard and acknowledged.[16] So, when reparation is possible, there must be mutual recognition and shared power in addition to forgiveness and trust.

My interests in queer theory have partly stemmed from my overall interest in philosophy, but they mostly come from trying to make sense of the idiosyncratic gendered narratives that have shaped my values and dispositions towards others, starting at a very young age. The dispositions to forgive and to accept forgiveness, to be caring and to accept care, to be vulnerable and to accept vulnerability are often entangled with complicated gendered narratives. And there is a lot of debate about how these gendered narratives originate and operate in our lives. On the one hand, it seems that many gendered narratives are largely shaped in public spaces and through public rituals, that there are broader social-juridical forces constantly shaping both gender and sexual desire.[17] On the other, some might worry that overemphasising these external factors leaves out the possibility of agency and the possibility that there are private narratives that work with or against the public pressures. But domestic spaces are an often-overlooked space in between, from where idiosyncratic gendered narratives can originate and are shaped by performances within the domestic space, a space that is not quite fully private and not quite fully public.[18]

Mema moved into her small two-bedroom house just after my grandfather passed. She lived on a fixed income, so over time her home became a museum for a post-WWII middle-class life. It was filled with mass-produced goods: replicas of still-life paintings, porcelain figurines, catalogue rugs and furniture, and a modest collection of Time-Life and Reader’s Digest books. These artefacts once conveyed a vague degree of culture but had since lost most of their bourgeois qualities anywhere other than perhaps rural Highlands County. My room, which I was not allowed to decorate, always had the air of a quaint bed and breakfast. It was never the kind of room that could germinate masculine sensibilities typical of modern US culture. The carpet was a pastel yellow. The bed was headed with a scantily scrolled brass frame and skirted by a fine piece of laced fabric. The nightstand and dresser were littered with vases and baskets bursting with artificial fuchsias and roses.

But the artefact that always captivated my attention was a replica of an early Victorian-era painting, Young Boy with Dog, by Samuel Miller, which hung just over my bed. The painting itself is underwhelming. There is a young child holding a small picture book with one hand while resting the other on a small dog, which is gazing subserviently at the child while standing on its back legs and resting its front paws on the child’s hips. Yet the painting shows very little depth, which creates the odd effect of the young child and dog looking more like paper doll cutouts than substantive creatures. The young child’s hair is carefully parted, and they are wearing a peculiar billowing navy-blue frock with a white ruffled collar and soft yellow breeches peeking out underneath. They do not convey burgeoning masculinity but express a certain softness and deference instead. It is a young child who is wearing a frock because the child has not yet been fully breeched, i.e., classed as a man by their family, which was common in many Western European cultures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[19] So the young child seems to be in an ambiguous state between early childhood and adolescence and between femininity and masculinity.

There were numerous periods of time when men were completely absent from my childhood. Yet there were still too many times I witnessed qualities of toxic rage from the strange men who did manage to pass through. And there were too many times I witnessed the same kind of rage in Mema. From later conversations I realise that rage partly came from the unprocessed trauma of having been treated like a catalogue porcelain figurine – broken, glued back together, traded off – by imperious or philandering men for so many years of her life, like when she was swept away from her family by her first husband, an older US military chaplain, at the end of the Nazi occupation of France. The dynamics of aggression and control typical of toxic masculinity that often echoed through our life together were terrifying. And while Mema also conveyed less toxic qualities such as a sense of pride in herself and a sense of self-reliance, which she tried to instil in me as well, I know that the toxic dynamics have manifested in me at certain times in the form of deep anxieties and a tendency to close myself off to people when they have tried to get close to me.

But the domestic space that defined my relationship with Mema was also shaped by deference and vulnerability, which constantly worked against the unhealthy manifestations of toxic masculinity. Ever since I was a toddler, Mema had encouraged and shown me how to be delicate, sensitive, cooperative, forgiving, and nurturing, all of which were traits that were often disparagingly relegated to femininity and domesticity in larger social contexts. So there was a peculiar kind of gendered narrative, a domesticated kind of masculinity, that shaped my life with Mema – not typical masculinity that was performed in a domestic space, but a queer kind of masculinity moulded by certain ideals of femininity grounded in domesticity. I internalised this domestic kind of masculinity, which did not fit well with the dominant ideals of masculinity I encountered outside of the home, and this meant that I often failed to meet the gender expectations of my peers – I was too nice, I was too unassertive, I was too weak, I was too emotional – and I was labelled a sissy or cast into some worse homophobic category. These incongruencies even confounded my relationships as a young adult when I failed but was expected to perform a certain kind of aggressive and assertive masculinity. Nonetheless, I’m sure that the strange idea of masculinity that Mema impressed upon me has continued to shape who I am and has been instrumental in processing past traumas by allowing me to learn how to make myself vulnerable to others, how to accept my shortcomings, and how to have compassion for others and myself.

After the conflagration had settled, in the early afternoon, Mema called for me. She had just woken from a nap. I crawled into her bed. In the soft yellow light pouring through the delicate window curtains, lying close together, she asked me about how I was feeling, we cried, and then we talked about the beauty of the red cardinal’s afternoon song. These tender moments were so valuable because they were necessary for the possibility of forgiveness and the reparation of our bonds that would continually develop with time. These tender moments were so valuable because they helped define us as persons capable of real love, a love based not only on a desire to nurture but also on mutual recognition and shared vulnerability.

V.   The creation of ourselves through repetition

I was nearly sixteen and living with my mother and Nicole in North Port, Florida, when Mema sold her house in Lake Placid and moved four hours north to Ocala. A year later I had a new sister, Cheyenne. An abusive man who struggled with addiction had found his way into our lives, and my mother struggled to keep us afloat financially. So, when Cheyenne was just four months old, we had to move in with Mema, but five months later there was a bitter argument and we had to leave Mema’s and move yet again, this time to Georgia. By the time I was eighteen, I had been to four different high schools in two different states, and I started working full time to help out financially, though I still did not have a high-school diploma. But the stress of family dynamics eventually became too much for me, and I moved out on my own. I spent a lot of my twenties estranged from my family and without intimate relationships. I was trying to build some stability in my life, and I mistakenly believed that the only way I could grow as a person was to be on my own.

At the age of twenty-seven, after years of working in low-paying restaurant and retail jobs, I finally managed to gain enough confidence to take a risk and start college. But, at the same time, after years of turning in frantic circles to avoid fear, worry, and stress, I started collapsing mentally with panic attacks and general anxiety. In my early thirties, I finally confronted my denial of my mental health challenges and started seeing a therapist. One of the most important things I learned was that family dynamics can contribute to mental health regardless of how much contact you have. So, while it was good to create healthy boundaries for myself, there was no way that I could ever cultivate compassion for myself and others while completely ignoring my family and family history. There could be no healing of the “self,” there could be no “individual” growth as a person, because in ignoring my family and family history, I was ignoring an important part of what I was. Even more, this meant not only ignoring the painful dynamics but also the loving dynamics.

There is then now and here the loving repetition, this is then, now and here, a description of the loving of repetition and then there will be a description of all the kinds of ways there can be seen to be kinds of men and women... Mostly every one loves some one’s repeating. Mostly every one then, comes to know then the being of some one by loving the repeating in them, the repeating coming out of them.[20]

Living with anxiety, I came to appreciate both the destructive and reparative nature of repetition – through the debilitating repetition of a worry and through the restorative repetition of mindful breathing and counting. So I was naturally drawn to Gertrude Stein’s work, which so effectively embodies the power and significance of repetition. And in The Making of Americans, we see that we can learn a lot about the nature of persons when we interpret seemingly particular characteristics and experiences in terms of repetition at multiple scales – across generations, across lifetimes, and even across the hours in a day. What emerges is a realisation that the self is not hiding in some rational black box of reflexive determination moving towards what satisfies its desires and away from what does not. Instead, the self is woven together with a multitude of connective tissues that bring our idiosyncratic first-person point of view together with our histories, our families, and many other people and living things. These tissues are built up over time with repeated performances and shared expectations, many of which are passed down through generations. Throughout many years of my life, Mema and I had an ongoing practice of performing narratives that involved one another, narratives defined by common and shared expectations and realised in the repetition of our daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly routines. Through those performances, as well as improvisations on those performances, connective tissues formed that held our personal identities, who and what we were, in place.[21] Without those connective tissues we would have begun to unravel, reduced to mere organisms tumbling through a turbulent stream of sensations and instincts with no guiding narratives, no means of navigating our way.

Loving repeating is always in children. Loving repeating is in a way earth feeling. Some children have loving repeating for little things and story-telling, some have it as a more bottom being. Slowly this comes out in them in all their children being, in their eating, playing, crying, and laughing.[22]

We are finite and vulnerable, which creates a need for constant care and new growth. Some of the tissues that held Mema and I together were knotted and unhealthy because they were predicated on abusive dynamics. But through our mutual concern for one another, through our striving for mutual recognition, there were many other tissues that grew and compensated for what was unhealthy. Nearly every afternoon during my formative years in Lake Placid, I cautiously walked home from the school bus. Down a long, white isolated dirt road gravelled with old, crushed Florida shells and sediment simmering under the sun. Through the strange densely packed Florida scrub tangled with palmettos, sand pines, prickly pears, silvery armadillos, and scrub jays. Then there was Mema’s house foregrounded with four small beige arches like a castle atop the Rock of Gibraltar. And every day, she waited for me knowing that I knew that she knew that I desperately wanted her to be home. And every day, I hiked home knowing that she knew that I knew that she desperately wanted me to make it home. And every day, those mutually enforced expectations were realised and over time wove together beautiful bonds that made me really me, made Mema really Mema, made us really us. With each repeated performance, we became something loving and something loved, and she and I became more real. It would have been impossible to know who and what we really were without knowing these daily performances.

And each day we repeated so many other loving performances. We held one another on the couch and watched Jeopardy. She encouraged me to draw from the musty, worn Time-Life books on French impressionism. I asked endless questions about her soap operas, about her childhood in France, about her. Every Sunday we left church early, Mema impatiently waiting for me to fasten my seatbelt, and we spent the afternoon at bingo in communion with friends. To a lesser degree, my friendships with people at bingo also formed connective tissues. For years I would repeat the same loving rituals with Mary, Abagail, Bill, and many others, and those performances also made us who we were, me who I was. Though unlike my relationship with Mema, those tissues deteriorated more quickly and were eventually replaced as I grew older.[23]

But Mema and I remained close until she passed away. In fact, our bonds continued to grow and grow stronger. She eventually moved to rural Georgia, and though I lived far away, I would visit when I could afford the trip. Every time, I would prepare her favourite curry dish. Since she could not drive and no longer liked to leave the house, I would make extra servings to freeze, which she could enjoy after I left. And we would laugh about how she would surely eat them all within a week anyway. We had a reliable routine of phone calls, and sometimes we would talk for hours. We would often talk about the past, trying to make sense of our choices. We would sometimes cry over the pain, the conflicts, and the alienation that needlessly divided our family. We would sometimes mourn the loss of those times we were all joyously connected to one another. We would often talk about our interests – she would share her fascination with Chagall, and she would tell me about her own paintings in progress. Of course, we would talk about God. And once she told me about a moment in which she felt like she was sitting within a great expansive space and how, even though her individual sense of self felt so very small, in that moment she felt large with great peace. Throughout the years we were often there for one another during many other important life realisations. When I started college in my late twenties, she was very much emotionally invested in that project and always encouraged me, even when I was overcome with self-doubt. Mema’s active recognition of and investment in my life was significant in stabilising my deepest goals and values.

But on February 23, 2020, the connective tissues that held us together ruptured and grief began to seep in, leaving me reduced, confined, and without direction. Eventually, I attempted to overcome those feelings by trying to accept the impossibility of reunion and by trying to rationalise my experience. And I tried to validate this strategy by looking into what various philosophers had already said about the nature of grief. I quickly found my initial rationalist intuitions were shared. Donald Gustafason argues that grief is an emotion that essentially involves a belief that a living person or thing has died and a desire that it not be so.[24]He further argues that since such a desire cannot be satisfied, grief is irrational. Carolyn Price responds that only feelings of anguish based on a continued search for the deceased are irrational but not the feelings of desolation and isolation that come with the acceptance of the loss.[25] Both focus on rationality, but neither addresses the rationality of grief in the context of a possible metaphysical reunification with the deceased. I’ve already expressed scepticism about relying on promises of future celestial rewards as a means of confronting grief. But more importantly I no longer think that rationality is a meaningful focal point when thinking about grief. Care ethicists like Nel Noddings[26] and Virginia Held[27] argue extensively that caring and empathy are better guides to what morality requires than rational calculation. I think this is even more clear when it comes to understanding and living through the experience of losing our loved ones. Focusing on rationality might encourage us to look past the emotional significance of grief, and it might encourage us to think of grief in individualistic terms rather than in terms of our relationships. This is not only misguided in terms of how things are but also confused in thinking about how we should live together with grief.

VI. You very clearly understood what matters most to grief

I've lost a part of myself, and it hurts so bad.[28] When the connective tissues that hold our personal identities in place are ruptured, we experience a very real and significant metaphysical injury, an injury that is as real and significant as breaking a bone but is rooted in our histories and relationships with others. It is an injury that causes deep pain, it causes feelings of sadness and anger, and creates a desire for repair. When we grieve, we are responding to the loss of a literal part of who and what we are. This need not only be a matter of losing a close loved one. If grief is an awareness of this kind of metaphysical injury, it also begins to show us the nature of the grief someone experiences when they lose an entire community, history, or culture that previously helped constitute who and what that person is. Importantly, when grief is a response to a metaphysical injury, it is no longer clear that rationality is what really matters. When someone is in physical pain, what matters most is that we care for them, not respond with explanations and rationalisations. Likewise, we need to care for the bereaved, not rationally evaluate them. We should care for them by helping them to repair and build those relationships that can continue to hold together who they are after their loss. One way we can do this is by helping the bereaved hold what has been lost in a continued memorial narrative.[29] But we can also help the bereaved rehabilitate by building on the strength of the connective tissues that remain, that are still holding them together, such as their relationships with others, especially those relationships that were partly linked by what has been lost.

When Mema passed, I was no longer an object of her expectations – I could no longer know that she knows that I was looking forward to our next visit. When Mema passed, I lost a significant part of my self, which caused anguish and created a need for healing. I lost the narratives that Mema and I practiced and created together. Those narratives played a role in holding my identity, my values, and my goals in place. Suddenly I had to again confront questions about my sexuality, my career goals, and my religious beliefs on a level more fundamental than merely passing doubts. Importantly, I also had to confront questions about my relationships with Nicole and Cheyenne and with you.

The fact that I had lived with Mema so much growing up, the fact that she shaped so much of who I became, the fact that Mema and I had been very close even through adulthood, was always a source of tension between the three of us. When I was a child, I could feel your vulnerability and pain, and even wanted to make it go away, but I was still too young to fully understand it. And even though I had been so close to Mema, I also loved you and wanted you to drop everything to be with me. But the harsh realities of being a wage-working mother, the harsh realities of always being burdened with double duty, whether single or not, made that materially impossible. Because I could not fully understand that as a child, there were moments I felt resentment, even later as a young adult reflecting on my childhood.

But when we fail to see our peculiar first-person point of view as something bounded and distinct from those who care for us, we expect too much from them and we are apt to see our particular wants and needs as something universal. Kaja Silverman suggests that when the child realises their endless expectations cannot be satisfied by their caretaker, usually the mother, because their caretaker is finite and imperfect, the child turns to a figure that is less limited and more powerful, usually a fantasy of the father, and eventually to God, whose love is supposed to be limitless.[30] And there is a real injustice in turning away from those who sacrifice so much to care for us. Yet there is an additional tragedy involved when our lives are shaped by individualistic assumptions. Who and what we are is not exhausted by an idiosyncratic first-person point of view – a calculating black box of desire satisfaction. The person is held together by their histories and their relationships, which is far more expansive than a meagre first-person perspective. So when we fail to see our peculiar first-person point of view as something bounded, when we fail to also feel and look from the perspectives of others we are related to, from the perspectives of the different histories that have converged on our seeming particularity, we also fail to see who and what we are; we fail to understand what really holds us together.

As a child, it was difficult for me to believe or imagine that God was perfect or contained limitless love. It was simply not the picture of God I took away from reading religious texts such as the Bible. Instead, I saw God, even in the New Testament, as something to be feared, something capable of wrath, something whose love was far from unlimited. And still today I worry that even though we want a picture of God that is infinitely powerful and contains limitless love, we haven’t really managed to get that picture clear other than in some vague philosophical sense—a philosophical fantasy that I’ve often struggled to find existentially compelling. Mema, however, was really there, could be touched, and I could be immediately arrested in both her rage and love. There were many times I saw Mema as someone to be feared, as someone loving but whose love had limits. Still, when I was a child, she was someone powerful I turned to in the moments when I felt resentment towards the absence of my father, who primarily existed in the form of letters, and the moments I felt resentment towards you, when you would leave me with her, yet I could still smell you on my clothes.

I no longer feel that resentment, and I think that I have come to a fuller understanding of the challenges and unfair burdens you faced. Over the years we have made progress in repairing our relationship with one another and have been speaking more since Mema passed, and I hope we continue this process. Finally, I hope that this very act of writing does more than describe a life or a personal and philosophical perspective. Instead, I hope that this very act of writing about Mema is an act of caring, a movement towards healing. I want this act of writing through our shared life with Mema to keep her with us and help hold us – grandmother, mother, son, and sisters – together in a continued narrative and to help us process our grief by rediscovering and repairing these parts of ourselves, our relationships to one another.