The Cause of Death

Sue Clement Cohen

September 25, 1943 - July 8, 2012

Years ago, while training to become a hospice volunteer, my mother completed a worksheet on which participants were asked to imagine their own obituaries, complete with age at death, cause of death, and information about memorial plans and survivors. One line above all stays with me. She wrote, "The cause of death was having been born."

My mother never objected to death, neither in general nor - this seems rarer - in the particular. She also did not object to cancer. She did not hate cancer, did not feel especially blighted by it, bitter about it, unfairly stricken. Her orientation to cancer did not include war metaphors; she was not "battling" disease or "fighting" illness, never spoke of "beating" it or "winning" against it. In fact she was clear and unapologetic about articulating the inaccuracy of those phrases, their inability to describe her own experience. For her, cancer was not a zero-sum game.

This is not to say she wished for or welcomed it. This is not to say she liked it. This is not to say there was anything passive about her relationship to cancer, or to death, or to life.

She spoke of "living into" the experience of cancer and in this way treated it no differently than she had every other experience she ever encountered: living into each with fullness, presentness, a spirit of adventure and ceaseless curiosity. She regarded cancer as kind of teacher, and in doing so taught those of us around her it was possible to regard it this way. She regarded it as yet another in a boundless stream of opportunities to grow, and so helped us grow from it, too.

I do a terrible disservice if I give the impression of sanguinity, complacency, beatification - she possessed none of these qualities. She lived not a state of certainty and accomplishment but in a state of radiant struggle. She was at her best when challenged, when at work.

All her life she loved, almost above anything else, snow. I think of the Rilke quote, "To love is good, too; love being difficult." Only now does it strike me, and not speculatively but with strange and sudden surety: her love of snow was inseparable from snow's being difficult too.

Practice

The Dream
Last night I dreamed I was addled by grief. I was in a house which does not exist in life, but which in the dream was familiar, was home, and it was filled, even cluttered, with objects, each of which bore a singular, devastating power. Each was dense with my mother. Redolent, ringing, teeming with my mother. Each, as my gaze fell upon it, communicated its immensity. Taken together they imparted a shattering sense of impossibility, a terrible, unutterable awareness of magnitude, of infinite, untenable abundance. In the dream I was undone at my source, riven with the manifold vibrations of grief.

I woke to a sense of exhausted calm and a feeling of having been washed clean. I mean I rose from bed feeling as though my insides, my stomach and lungs and bones and endless twisting branches of nerves, had been scrubbed and rinsed and laid on warm, flat rocks to dry.

Year Seven
She is in her seventh year since diagnosis and the surgery that scrubbed her own torso as clean as possible of cancer, removing in the process her ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, spleen, omentum and inches of her intestines, and leaving behind uncountable lingering seeds of disease. "It's as if someone scattered a handful of rice," is how the surgeon described the size and number of pieces that remained. She is on her last chemo.

This spring
This spring, some days the air feels like lead. Some days it feels just like spring: lilac-sugared, ribboned with breeze.

Practice
I think last night's dream is not so much about sorrow or fear of impending loss as about the serious work of looking at enormity.

All our lives are practice for this.

On the Nature of Prizes

"Shame is endemic to the entire system of meting out prizes for creative endeavors. 

While awards are meant to commend, and thus to nurture art, 

 they also hurt the very thing that is 

essential to making it."

click for full Boston Globe article 

Short Stories, Long Career

Edith Pearlman in The Boston Globe.

Katherine Russell Rich (11/17/1955 - 4/3/2012)

On The Moth

xxl

The True Religion

* This is the true religion, the religion of snow

- Billy Collins

It might have been a side effect of one too many professional gatherings I'd attended in recent weeks, or perhaps it was the result, more generally, of an excess of performed professionalism I'd built up like arterial plaque over the past several years, but whatever the cause, abruptly last night, whilst on a black and barren stretch of the Pike, halfway home from a late night at work, I was overcome by the impulse - nay, the necessity - to try my first-ever spit take.

I swigged a mouthful of water from the bottle beside me, replaced both hands on the wheel, imagined something had caused me great surprise, and with as much suddenness and force as I could muster, blasted the liquid forth. Drops, far more copious than I had anticipated, sprayed far and wide, covering the windshield and dash, and in the darkness glittered and shone like dewy stars. I was giddy with release. It was easily the best thing I've done in weeks, if not all year, and by best I mean not simply a thing of pleasure but of virtue.

I do, I do believe in a vaudeville-loving God.

* from Shoveling Snow With Buddha, a poem my mother loves

The Dreariest Art, Or Why I Review Books

"...criticism, the dreariest of the arts."
      - Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

When I was young and Ivory soap ran in my veins, a thing I swore I'd never do was review. Critics with their clacking teeth, their hairy wrists and glinting wristwatches, their sharp nibs scratching at the very fibers of the page: an altogether scary breed. I imagined them equally zealous whether affixing golden seals of approval or administering literary thrashings thorough enough to shred whole, heavy tomes into masses of paper capellini.

click to read the rest of this essay, just published in Post Road

Eat the World

When we were little, my brother had a picture book he loved, by Jack Kent, called The Fat Cat. It's about a cat who's asked to watch a pot of gruel while it cooks, only he winds up eating the gruel and then the pot and then the old woman who asked him to watch it in the first place. And then he goes along his way and meets people, and they all say things like, "Oh my, cat. You are so fat," and he winds up eating them, too, eating just about everyone he meets, including a couple of characters called Skalinkenlot and Skahottentot and five birds in a flock and a bunch of dancing girls and a lady with a pink parasol and a parson with a crooked staff...

I was thinking about that book this morning because we have a dog like that. His motto is, "You never know, it might be food." Or in the alternate translation: "If in doubt, eat it." Whenever he goes on a walk around the neighborhood, he treats it like one long last pass at the buffet table. Whenever we come home after being out for many hours, we say to one another while ascending the stairs, "Let's see if he ate the world this time." And whenever he and I are having an especially tender snuggle, and he is gazing with his limpid brown eyes lovingly into my own, I have the unpleasant suspicion that what shines in his vision is not my own true image, but, à la the cartoons, a large, vaguely human-shaped steak.

As a teenager, I started my college application essay by quoting from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

"Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" ... "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

I had no idea I might one day find this embarrassing, no idea I was being anything but terribly original and profound. And yet - the notion of creating disturbance, and of linking disturbance with appetite and pleasure, was profound for me, in ways I could not begin to articulate. (And, indeed, did not: I have no memory of the rest of my college application essay, but feel confident it went downhill from there.)

Sometimes, when the dog has been particularly voracious on a walk, attempting to devour not only the breadcrumbs one neighbor routinely scatters on the lawn for the birds; not only the odd piece of chewing gum, half-frozen to the sidewalk; not only the broken bits of eggshell and coffee grounds sprinkled as fertilizer beneath a row of shrubs; not only the ambiguous mound of yellowish damp stuff that might be either sodden corn chips or else vomit - but even another of his own kind, another dog - then I come home feeling very glum. Why oh why, I wonder, did I wind up with a dog of such rampant and egregious appetites?

And I look him despairingly in the eye, and stroke his seal-like crown, and he wags his bottom half and sits, front paws close placed together, almost demure, and he cranes his black nose searchingly, earnestly, inquiringly toward my own, and I think, "Are you my teacher, then?" And I think, "So teach me. Teach."

Death: A Festival for the Living

A good reason to be sorry one doesn't live in London: this weekend's Death Festival, held at Southbank Centre on Belvedere Road, at which, through an assemblage of music, workshops, literature, installations, and talks "with everyone from philosophers to funeral workers," visitors will be given an unusual opportunity to explore death, this "unknowable certainty."

I learned of the event thanks to the happy impulse of a woman I have never met and with whom I have exchanged barely an email: the publicity manager at the publishing house that will issue the U.K. edition of The Grief of Others. I find myself this morning thinking about her, this felicitous stranger, with gratitude and surprise. I find it somewhat extraordinary that she would send me the link, apropos of nothing, without knowing me. I don't mean to overstate the riskiness of her action; my book does have "grief" in the title, after all. But I am so used to the notion that speaking of death willingly, wonderingly, and at any time other than strictly necessary, is thought by most people to be something very like bad manners. This was evinced all too clearly in conversations about the cover design for the American edition of Grief, in which playing against the heaviness of the subject noun was voiced as a paramount concern if the book was ever to make it off display tables and into anyone's palms, let alone all the way the cash register. (Thus the first cover, which featured lots of pink and yellow and a dress with a sash and a gay blue sky.)

The notion is evinced, too, in the slight furrowings of brow that occur whenever I mention how often I think of death (daily), and how without despair or even glumness these musings are, but rather with something more like penchant, humility and appetite. Not appetite to die, but appetite for wandering along the complex and multifarious passageways of thought and association the subject holds. The subject in our culture is rather like a grand old granite house full of forking stairways and hidden rooms and winding corridors and secret panels, with gardens and fountains and overgrown hedgemazes and neglected orchards out back - a generous, ancient estate that might beg exploration if only it hadn't been boarded up, a heavy chain padlocked across its gate, so that people, having grown used to thinking of the place as morose and vaguely sinister, not only give it wide berth but avert their eyes whenever it appears on the horizon, and discipline even their thoughts to stay away.

How I wish I could attend the festival in London. I would like to go to the puppet show, and to see Chris Larner perform "An Instinct for Kindness," and to pencil in a circle on Birthday, Sam Winston's pop up registry commemorating "the quarter of a million lives that are born and die in the space of 12 hours around the world," and to watch the masked and costumed children dance in "From Blue to Joy," a parade and party inspired by New Orleans funerals and Mexican Day of the Dead rituals.

Instead I will imagine a festival in my head, imagine the revelers sawing through the rusted chain on the gate of that great, foreboding stone house, imagine them throwing open the shutters and sashes, admitting breezes to swoop through the rooms, admitting also sunlight and leaves and blown rain and pollen and soot and the sounds of their own voices and footsteps as they venture along, trying out different passageways and doors.

The Other Mothers

We made stained glass cookies on a dark afternoon, rolling out with our bare hands small snakes of dough, whose ends we pressed together free-form to make, under the direction of my friend's mother, little windows: lopsided diamonds, divided rectangles, lumpy hoops.

This friend's mother was an artist. She made small boxes - loose vessels or sprung cocoons - out of colored silk and long, trailing lengths of thread. These were displayed, if I recall, in Lucite cases that could be set on a shelf or mounted on a wall. You could look in at them, these constructions, at once elegant and a little wanton, a little blowsy, their saturated hues evocative of yolk and raw tuna and new grass. Although some were impossibly pale, a kind of tissuey pink: they were the color of what it feels like to touch the tip of your tongue to the inside of your cheek.

We laid our finished dough windows on sheets of foil, then filled their centers with crushed hard candy, bits of hammered lollipop. We made sure to sprinkle enough candy so that once baked, and the colored granules had melted and spread, the candy glass would fill the opening, seal it completely - yet we didn't sprinkle it so densely that the light would fail to illuminate fully the colors we had chosen. While we worked, the light outside the real window panes deepened from periwinkle to cobalt, and the distant tree branches framed by the windows grew - we swore! - more gnarled, calling to mind the crooked lace of witches' fingers splayed against the sky.

That past summer, when the seventeen-year cicadas had crawled up through the ground, climbed the trees and molted, littering the streets and sidewalks of our town with their iridescent and faintly monstrous shells, this friend's mother had found art in their discarded skins. She'd gathered dozens of the near-weightless exoskeletons and made a centerpiece of them in a clear glass bowl. My own mother spoke of this with some wonder: a mixture of deep, plaintive admiration and the unspoken question of whether this might be going too far.

Once, this friend's mother gave my mother one of her silk boxes, a flushed, fleshy-blush color whose hue seemed to me for years the very definition of the word beauty. It was given in a kind of barter, an exchange for work rendered, because my mother was an artist too - though she would be quick to dismiss such a designation: no-o-o, she would utter from low in her throat, a little string of crumbs to brush away, and with them any preposterous presumption. Graphic art is the public box my own mother settled into for a stretch of years, a modest box: serviceable, useful. In this capacity she designed, at the silk-and-cicada artist's request, a business card, for which she was paid in silk: a single rosy pouch, its visible seams finely, even sensually stitched. It sat on a wooden shelf in our house for decades, a thing of beauty preserved in its small clear case.

Elsewhere in the house, my mother's art came and went, mostly on tiptoe, mostly mounted with nothing but scotch tape. I loved a pencil drawing of pears, a female nude, and a kind of geometric sculpture made of thin wooden dowels.

The mothers of my friends - the other mothers of my childhood - were by turns generous and mysterious, embracing and foreign. They were kind to me, taught me how to make stained glass cookies, took me to plays and concerts and libraries and teas. They treated me not quite like another daughter, but close enough that I sometimes imagined: what if I were hers? What if I were my friend's mother's daughter?  What if she loved me as her own? Who would I be then?

And was it from loyalty that I always recoiled immediately upon risking such thoughts? Or was it from superstition, or a sense of good manners? Or from horror, pure and simple, that I should ever be anyone but my own mother's child?

They were so proximal, so familiar, these women who remain steadily threaded through my memories of growing up, and yet I did not keep in touch with them. They had their own daughters to love, and I my own mother, and such a thing, such a love, is so immense, particular, and puzzling - more: so vexing and venerable and unsolvable and lush - that there was no room really to admit them, these other women, into my girlhood heart. Except that I remember them now with gratitude and curiosity, and in remembering I see that they are there anyway - have been all along - safely tucked there within an ignorant, inner chamber.

On that winter afternoon, after the cookies were baked and cooled, we peeled off the foil backing and held them up to the deepening light, and saw how their centers shone like jewels.

Hair, Deer, Birds

She has lost her hair again, as she knew she would, having - not without real deliberation this time - agreed to another series of taxol, one of the chemotherapies that inevitably leads to baldness. So we brought the clippers with us when we visited last week, and one mild day when everyone else was out, my mother and I stepped out onto the back porch and I shaved the last wisps at her request. They danced in the breeze like milkweed fluff and stuck to my coat. My mother had asked me, before we went out, if I wanted to put on a different coat, to borrow a raincoat perhaps. I had not. I'd wanted to know I might be plucking stray hairs of hers from my own coat for weeks. She has a lovely head, its shape and proportion appealing and right. But then everything about her body has always struck me as right - even more than beautiful - or rather, as the basis of her beauty: this essential rightness, so that in my aesthetic lexicon, brown eyes are 'right,' and soft hands, and trimmed, unpainted oval fingernails, and the set of her mouth and the set of her shoulders and the darkness and straightness and heaviness of her hair, which, admittedly, whisperedly, remains for me at memory's core a rich, shining sable, short and thick, with a narrow sliver of almost silvery white marking the part.

Behind my parent's house is a small creek, and beyond this is a wooded incline, and half-hidden, half-nestled at the base of one of the trees across the creek a deer lay dead. My father had spotted it several days earlier, and I'd seen it closer-up when I'd gone with the dog through the modest swath of woods the day before, and on the day I shaved my mother's head, we began to see the vultures mass, three and four and seven and nine of them, coming to perch on branches in various nearby trees. They were very patient, those waiting in the trees, still and heavy as stone carvings, mutely watching as though keeping vigil or sitting shiva. But of course they had a different purpose, and in the days to come, we - various members of my family - would periodically gather by the big windows, keeping watch on their watch, and we - congregating with peaceable interest, much like the family of birds - noticed how one at a time would dine on the deer, standing literally on the deer's body as it unhurriedly and deftly pried up pieces of meat. The whole thing took place at near stately pace: the birds' almost languid return day after day to the spot, the humans' observation through the wall of glass across the creek; the passage of the deer's body, the metamorphosing of it from one thing into many.

The People's Obit

Above is a single image from close to 300 that appear on The New York Times page The Lives They Loved.
The man pictured is Jay "Bronzo" Bronzini. Here is what his friend, Zac Stanley, writes about him:

This is my best friend Jay. He lost his battle with depression a mere 10 days ago. This photo is like a doorway into him at the time it was taken. A person with an absolute passion for music and songwriting, someone with a dark side his closest friends and family only knew about. Great clothes and hair, a smile that made women swoon. You are forever missed, junior, my brother.

Once you click on one of the images, it's hard to stop. So much beauty, so many stories. Such plentiful, splendid company.

We are not strangers.

We are not strangers.

We are not strangers.

In fact, I know you well.

- Liz Swados

To Scale

My mother sends an email:

Subject: moon calendar. 

Message: Shall we let it go this year?

What to say to this? We have been sending each other lunar phase calendars every year for many years. They hang on the walls of both our houses, one long column for every month, the moon waxing and waning down the line. I forget which one of us started it.

Shall we let it go this year?

I like letting things go. I like standing over the trash can and dropping things in, severing earthly ties, relinquishing things to the curb, to the ash pile, to memory's rippled black stream. I am good at it, practiced. In fact, is it the actual letting go or is it the practice that I like, the discipline, the refusal to cling, the soundless thrill of the instant of abstention, of well-rehearsed, well-performed frugality? The solace of diminution, of attenuation. Smallness.

I have always wanted to be small. And am. This, too, a rehearsal of sorts.

I have just come back from walking the dog. Without my glasses, the holiday lights strewn across bushes and porch railings looked just like cake sprinkles - like gold and silver dragees and like the tinier beads of multicolored sugar confetti - and the bushes were little dark cakes, or model train bushes, and the trees and houses like model train trees and houses, and the lawns and streets and shops all the same, so that it was like walking in a model village, everything properly small under the sky. And in the sky, even the moon was to scale, pinched and pale up there in the fibrous, endless, ragged purple landscape: it was a matte white curve, a bitten-off bit of fingernail, it was so little, the moon.

Against Indifference

Like all great questions, he said, it has no answer.
This was Elie Wiesel, last night, at Boston University. A lecture titled, "Reflections on Good and Evil."
He began his talk not by greeting the audience, nor by thanking the rabbi who introduced him, nor with any sort of preamble at all, but in direct, not to say startling, fashion, with a two-pronged crowbar of a question: Is what is moral always good? Is what is immoral always evil?
In other words he opened by cracking us open a little. Readying us for his talk with a necessary, not unkindly bit of trepanning. Or as Emily Dickinson would have it, with a kind of poem. ("If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off," she wrote, "I know that is poetry.")

All conversations about morality ought to begin on a tilt-a-whirl. The only sound starting point from which to venture forth being one that admits no absolute, no true north, no fundamental gravitational ground zero. Rather: a multitude of orientation points, an ever shifting, revolving world, and a floor that drops out when you least expect it.
How difficult and beautiful. How beautiful because difficult; because the feeling of one's skull lifting off always includes a kind of brilliant, bracing cold; because growing is never not painful, not shivery and fearsome and sublime.
I meant to write about what he said, and I find myself instead setting down words about feeling. I am talking about his talk and yet the language I am using mostly fails to address its content, describing instead the sensations it delivered.

It is the morning after. Already I and my friend who invited me to go have been consulting with each other, trying to salvage the words, the phrases, the bits and pieces we remember searingly but imperfectly. We have been alternately texting and calling each other up: What did he say about the blind person's conception of God? What was that word he used, before he said, "Then I am the problem," was it "alien?" Was it, "If I see the other as unalterably alien, then I am the problem"?
We remember how we feel more precisely than we remember the words themselves.
We learn that on this coming Sunday night the talk will be broadcast on the radio; there will be a podcast, maybe even a transcript; in time we will be able to revisit the words, copy them down, study them in black and white.
For now what we have is the feeling of the tops of our heads taken off.
We have the feeling.
We have feeling.


Elie Wiesel's great struggle is against indifference. He has said:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference.

Feeling is the tool that fights indifference. All literature - all stories, all language, all words - are useful - are moral - only in the proportion that they engender feeling.
How full, how fat I am this morning with feeling. I give thanks for that.

To Dwell in Abundance

This morning I am indulging in a rare impulse to feel just happy for myself. Two nice things:

I stumbled across a review of my novel in something called Obit Mag (who knew?). It's one of the nicest reviews I've ever received, and I am feeling unabashed, improbable joy over this line in particular: "Cohen pulls off the most pitch-perfect drunk speech since J. P. Donleavy."

And then my editor just wrote to say that "Grief" has been named one of Kirkus's top 25 fiction books of 2011. I can hardly believe it.

(Oh! Isn't it funny that seven days ago I posted about feeling happy for other people's good news?)

The Last Soft Shoe

Why Joan Didion is like Savion Glover: a review of Blue Nights in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

The Happiness of Others

 The Pilgrimage, Jean-Michel Basquiat

What higher joy than that which we take in another's good fortune? Here are four pieces of news that are giving me pleasure these days:

1. Patrick Wang, the young actor-writer-director I've mentioned before in this space, has just received a glorious New York Times review for his first feature film (which was rejected by 30 festivals before premiering at the Hawaii International Film Festival last month). The Times critic Paul Brunick writes: "Mr. Wang’s slow-reveal psychological drama isn’t just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, “In the Family” is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year...This is a career to keep an eye on."

2. Andrew Krivak, a friend whose first novel, The Sojourn, was similarly turned down by a long list of publishers before at last finding a home with the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, and who saw the book's arrival in the world last June greeted rather quietly and then seem to slip - as is the way with most literary fiction - into oblivion, received a tremendous piece of news last month when it was named one of five fiction finalists for the National Book Award.

3. Pam Ward is someone I've never met, but her recording the audiobook of The Grief of Others led to a brief, friendly email exchange. Then, just recently, I heard from her again:

Dear Leah - We won a very important award...an 'Earphone' from Audiofile Magazine.  I feel a bit like an Oscar nominee - I'm being showered with congratulatory emails from all corners of my small universe.  But before I respond to any of them I have to talk with you.  This is my first 'Earphone' and I cannot adequately express my gratitude that it's for Grief.  My deepest concern since finishing the narration has been that my work was worthy of the the gift you gave me in the manuscript.  I'm sitting here with tears running down my face because it looks like it was! This award is for both the original material and the narration, so congratulations my friend. We did good.

(Isn't she generous, with her "we"?)

4. Finally, my friend Tina, an Episcopal priest who works with a homeless congregation through Ecclesia Ministries, the Boston Common street church, has just completed a four-day, fifty mile pilgrimage with members of the congregation, walking from St. Paul's Cathedral in Boston to a monastery in West Newbury. Yvonne Abraham, a Boston Globe columnist, tells the story movingly here.
Meanwhile, upon returning home, Tina herself wrote, "We're all back...with hearts full of god-love, and joy, and knowledge of the power of community, and - most of all - with great living streams of gratitude." And on the phone just now she added, "We had everything we could need. How often can you say that? To dwell in abundance..."


To dwell in abundance, indeed. Thank you, dear people, for the brave work you do, giving so much of yourselves to create good things, and for the ambient happiness it spreads.

Poem for the Day of the Dead

 Soneto de la Noche

When I die, I want your hands upon my eyes;
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me one more time:
I want to feel the gentleness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want your ears to still hear the wind,
I want you to smell the scent of the sea we both loved,
and to continue walking on the sand we walked on.

I want all that I love to keep on living,
and you whom I loved and sang above all things
to keep flowering into full bloom.

So that you can touch all that my love provides you,
so that my shadow may pass over your hair,
so that all may know the reason for my song.

- Pablo Neruda

What would you wish upon your end, and for whom would you wish it?

A Short Interview with Echoes & Visions:

 From The Elements of Style.  Illustration by Maira Kalman, naturally.

Click here for a few brief musings on knowing, bullying, softness and tragedy. 

Also on Strunk and Barthelme.

Enlarging the Field, Enlarging the Heart

 Edmund W. Gordon

A few days ago I received an email from someone I did not know. The writer said that she had been reading my new novel, was "really enjoying it," and therefore felt profoundly disappointed to come across the word "retard" in the text. She wrote in measured, intelligent language of the derogatory and damaging nature of the epithet, and expressed her view that even when the word is used to express the point of view of a character, its appearance in print is still harmful.

I wrote her back, thanking her for her thoughtfulness and care in communicating about this issue. I told her of my own view that in fiction, when one hopes to represent a complex world, full of goodness and sorrows, and full of human beings - themselves complicated mixtures of valor, weakness, compassion and limitation - every word may have its place.

Ten years ago I might have left it at that.

But I went on to add that I heard her disappointment over my choice, and was grateful to her for her impulse to connect. I told her I'd like to think more deeply about what she said, and to consider whether the use of such a word, even given my explanation about why I chose it, might best be avoided.

My first boss was a man named Edmund W. Gordon, professor emeritus of education and psychology at both Yale and Columbia, and Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College. I worked for him back in the late eighties, while he was acting director of Yale's African American Studies Program, and my job consisted of various duties ranging from office support to editing his articles to chauffeuring him to some of his meetings and speaking engagements. Among the many wise gifts I received from Ed was a particular locution he would use.  Whenever, during the often thorny conversations that would arise in his field - that is, conversations concerning historical and ongoing inequities and anti-bias work - people seemed to reach an impasse, a place where entrenched beliefs on either side prevented forward movement, Ed would say, "Under what conditions might it be possible to envision [whatever was at stake]?"

With this modest formulation, he invited people into a space where, without having to abandon any convictions they felt the need to clutch tight, they could proceed further in conversation with others, and further in conversation with themselves, expanding the boundaries, perhaps, of their own imaginations.

This phrase informed my whole family. It became part of our regular parlance and way of thinking. Another phrase, similar at core in its movement toward keeping alive difficult dialogue, both between parties and within the individual speaker, is one I associate with my father: "I'd like to think about that." How often he has used this simple utterance as a way of granting dignity and validity to the opposing position, without relinquishing or invalidating his own perspective. And note how it isn't a flat submission or commitment: "I will think about that." It's, "I'd like to." As in, I welcome it. As in, I believe it will benefit me to entertain a different viewpoint. To lend my imagination to walking around in your shoes. To enlarge my mental field, my field of consideration and empathy.

"I'd like to think about that," I told the reader who shared her concerns earlier this week, and I meant it - not simply that I will think about it, but that I'd like to. Meanwhile, she shared with me a link, sponsored by the Special Olympics, that I will share here: Spread the Word to End the Word.