|
|
|
ON-LINE
ISSUES
V.4
N.1, March 1997
Seams
to Me: STO(stories)RIES of Death
by
Margot Rosenberg
Center
for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction
University of British Columbia
|
 |
-
This paper addresses the current development of my Master's of Education
thesis around death. It tells of sharing, grieving, and writing. Within
these tightly intertwined strands of struggle are the voices of preschool
children, my mother, and myself. I invite you to travel this sometimes
arduous path as we follow narrative zigging and zagging as pedagogical
thread through a fabric of death and life.
Children
and Death Stories
- One
strand of my research was conducted at the University Child School,
a preschool located in an urban area of British Columbia, where I
am employed part-time. A children's story with a death theme was read
by either a colleague of mine or myself to four groups of children
aged three to five. I read the book The Very Best of Friends by Margaret
Wild to two groups of children, and my colleague read Badger's Parting
Gifts by Susan Varley to one group, and The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico
to another group. These story sessions are a part of the children's
weekly routine, and relationships between these children and their
respective storytellers were previously established. I am striving
to portray how these particular children and storytellers/teachers
interacted with death through the medium of children’s literature,
rather than hypothesize how children in general respond to the notion
of death.
- I
also interviewed this storyteller/colleague and a preschool teacher,
asking them to share their thoughts regarding both how to discuss
death in preschool classrooms and how they had been affected by their
own personal experiences with death. I kept a journal of my own thoughts
and feelings, believing it important to document the ways in which
the biases and experiences of the researcher impact the research.
For the purpose of this paper, however, I focus on my interactions
with the children, and how these interactions affect my experience
of grief.
- During
the story sessions, the children displayed a wide range of verbal
and behavioral reactions. Emotions such as sadness, fear, anxiety,
and denial were apparent. Some consistently tried to change the subject
or began to fidget and bother their neighbours, while others showed
disbelief, misunderstanding, or apparent indifference. Questions such
as "How did he die?" "Where do you go when you die?" and "He didn't
really die, did he?" were often asked and, at times, pursued with
fierce persistence. However, most often children shared experiences,
memories, and stories of death. For example:
Bradley:
And my grandpa died, because he started with too, too um, too
brave, he was too brave, and he just did some, actually, he was
too too too smart, and he, and he did something, but he wasn't
smart enough, and it didn't work, and you know what he was doing?
He was trying, like to climb, like to be, like, jump to a building
to building, but he fell off.
Stacey: Um, my mom died in, and, and, when uh, and one, and one
morning, um, for Christmas, I got a um, um...
Me: Stacey, your mom didn't really die, did she?
Stacey: No.
Me: No. She's still alive.
Stacey: My mom didn't die, and, and, for Christmas I got a um,
um, a puppy.
- Although
my goal was to foster an open environment in which the children would
share their stories about death, I had not planned to share my feelings
on the subject. How could I bother with such emotional issues when
I had stories to read, sessions to tape, and interviews to conduct?
But the children pulled me in. When I did share a personal experience
of loss, when I did relinquish pedagogical control and allow the children
to guide the flow of conversation, our relationship became reciprocal;
we all learned from each other, and common experiences were acknowledged.
Bradley:
You know what? My grand, my grand, my other grandpa didn't die,
only one of my grandpas.
Me: Yeah. Sometimes our grandparents are alive and sometimes they've
died. My grandparents died too. A long time ago.
Bradley: How?
Me: Well one of them actually, she was very old, and so she died.
Bradley: Just of, just of old age?
Me: Yeah, she died of old age. And you know also why she died?
Because a long, throughout her life, she had smoked cigarettes,
and so sometimes when you do that, your heart, your lungs get
very sick, and that's what she had done for a very long time in
her life.
Deborah: She didn't quit?
Me: No.
Sarah: My grandma Lilly did it, but she quitted, so she didn't
die....
Bradley: Well, my nana kept on smoking, but I got her to quit.
Maxine: My mom, um, she smokes cigarettes too much, but she stops
sometimes.
Sarah: Um. Somebody else smokes cigarettes, and she smoked for
55 years. She will die.
- What
happens when we risk disseminating ourselves in the public space of
a classroom? We witness the blurring of the traditional separations
between teacher-student, student-student, and knower-learner. I found
that much sharing occurs around stories, be they read from books or,
particularly, be they lived stories pulled from memory in bits and
pieces. These shards of the past, inscribed with beliefs, ideas, and
common experience serve to burst isolated bubbles of self; they expose
and make vulnerable, but they also create connections essential to
learning and growth in the preschool classroom.
Struggles
with Grief
- My
mother died of colon cancer on 4 December, 1994. After I returned
to Vancouver from the leave I had taken to spend those final months
with her, I could not conceive of isolating the two areas of my life
that demanded the vast majority of my time and energy: my grief over
my mother's death and my thesis. The autobiographical elements of
my thesis were an unavoidable outcome of my life experience. I couldn't
discuss sharing stories about death with children and their teachers
without sharing my story. Some fragments:
- It
is my birthday and something is missing. A card, a present, a phone
call, flowers-from my mother. Every phone call from other reminds
me that she does not call. My family consciously and unconsciously
attempts to fill her role, but we all know it is impossible. I am
lonely and miss her. Today, her death is most poignant. It hurts.
- It
occurs to me that while one's birth is celebrated, a mother's pain
and anguish preceding it remains unappreciated and forgotten. Twenty-eight
years ago today my mother lay in a hospital bed screaming, giving
birth to the next generation. And now that she is dead, the weight
of next generation pushes heavily on my shoulders. Unbearable weight;
mine alone.
- I
write and delete, write and delete. The words are not flowing today.
I cannot express what I am thinking, cannot think what I am feeling,
cannot feel. I don't have time to feel my mother's death because I
have to write my mother's death. Strange. I realize these concepts
cannot be compartmentalized; my procrastination is evidence that I
cannot ignore my grief while simultaneously writing about it, organizing
it, editing it, and handing it in. The writing must be of me and from
me. If I do not allow this process to unfold, no words will be placed
on this page. I only wish that my words could drip and spread on this
paper as easily as my tears. Then I would have pages and pages and
pages and ...
- I
take time away from my mother to be with my mother on my birthday.
I light a candle, we talk. Twenty minutes is all it takes for me to
touch her, exchange ideas and feelings, reminisce. It makes such a
difference. It (en)lightens me, it helps me write. Tension dissipates.
Relief radiates. Happy birth day, Mom.
- I
am angry a lot. I was angry a lot before my mother died, and often
at her, so in some ways it's not such a big change. The reasons are
different, or, rather, there's just one more reason added to the long
list: she died. Now that there is no hope of ever letting her know
how angry I was and still am, the anger stews inside me. I can't even
be rude to her on the phone anymore. When I'm really mad I tell myself
that this whole thesis thing is a waste of time-she's not here, she
doesn't care, there's no blurring of boundaries, she's just dead and
I have to deal with it. In a lot of ways my thesis puts her on a pedestal,
the perfect mother, Saint Sandra-far from it. My mother bought herself
a Lucite key chain with the word "bitch" on it and used it even after
the end broke off and she was just a "bit".
- It's
very difficult to be angry now that I am writing about her day in
and day out. I feel I have to squelch this rage because I know that
if I let it bubble to the surface I won't ever finish my thesis; I
won't be willing to put in the necessary time and effort. So I suppress
it and literally beg myself to let it simmer for a few more months.
Although this process of writing and reflecting about her positive
attributes helps me grieve, and I realize, most of the time, it is
something that I need to experience and integrate into my images of
her, it also prolongs my grief, as I know that I need to deal with
my anger-understudy wishing for catastrophe.
- This
public space of thesis is not where I want to talk about the deep-seated
reasons for my anger. I just want you to know that they're there.
I just want you to know what's not in this thesis.
- My
mother is dead but she is in this thesis. Alive in this thesis? Living
in this thesis? Do I live in my thesis? Does my thesis live? It works,
it grows, it teaches, it annoys me, it scares me-like life, life-like.
Most grief literature touts letting go as the final stage in the grief
process. I don't want to let go. I won't do it; my mother's stubbornness
pervades me. So we talk, we negotiate, we reminisce. I am forced to
dwell with my mother in new ways. It's tiring keeping up these new
forms of communication, but I am becoming accustomed to them. She
is a captive audience, and they're cheaper than long-distance phone
calls.
Struggles
with Writing
- Although
I believe that including these fragments of myself in my thesis was
inevitable, as it would have been impossible and undesirable to decontextualize
my experiences with death in the classroom from those outside the
classroom, doing so has been a continuous struggle. However, moulding
these struggles into text initially enabled me to begin, and now allows
me to continue.
- I
constantly vacillate between thinking that there is too much and not
enough of myself in this thesis. What am I supposed to write in here
anyway? How much do I want to share? Yet, isn't this all me? The quotations
I choose to include as well as those I choose to omit are me. The
connections I see and those I do not see are me. Every thesis is autobiographical,
from the topic that we choose to the font we use. Why am I only figuring
this out now? Objectivity doesn't exist.
- I
don't know if I can write this way, think this way. I am told to locate
myself, contextualize myself. What is myself? Who is myself? Where
am I? If I use their language, it is not me. I want to find my own
voice buried beneath the rubble of my experience. My own words, my
own language, my own priorities and values. I cannot pretend to know
what I do not, to have read what I have not. I know I must be true
to myself even if I am still unearthing what that self actually is,
and whether there is such a thing.
- The
production of this thesis is quite a production. I write, and I read,
and I attempt to subjugate this explosion of ideas into this str(u/i)cture
of thesis. At times this task seems impossible; flattening experiences,
corralling thoughts into paragraphs, under headings, onto lists. It
is so dispersed, so unmanageable. My mind is a revolving door of ideas.
On a bad day, it seems as if everything worth including is out and
nothing worth including is in. I reread my words. Does this make any
sense? Self doubts abound and I recall the self doubting I experienced
during my research at the University Child School. Every part of this
process has been a struggle.
- I
realize I spend a lot of time trying to figure out just what, in this
process, is so difficult for me. Maybe if I spent half as much time
just doing it, I'd be done by now. But maybe these ponderings are
the doing of it. I've lost track of what doing it is. Maybe I never
knew.
- I'm
depressed. I'm procrastinating. I grow increasingly anxious throughout
the day. I finally lace up my boots and go for a walk in the rain.
Sometimes a walk on the beach will turn my mood around, but today
it doesn't seem to be working. I become even more anxious. I keep
saying to myself, over and over, "the only way out is through, the
only way out is through." For a moment I am confused. Out of what?
Through what? Grief over my mother or writing this thesis? And suddenly
it dawns on me-both.
- The
emotional and intellectual processes that surround me are difficult,
at times agonizing. Waves of grief and productivity wash over me.
The only way out is through. Avoiding either process increases my
anxiety and decreases my ability to cope. Although the journey of
my grief and of the writing of this thesis are similar, I know that
the latter will end and that the former will not. My grief continues,
although it becomes less innocuous, more subtle.
- I
continue walking. I don't know how long I've been standing here or
how many people have passed me on this path. A few moments later a
bald eagle flies low, directly over my head. Thanks, Mom.
Concluding
Thoughts
- Part
of me died when my mother died, yet through me part of her lives.
I dwell in this space between life and death, as I dwell in the space
between public pedagogical moments in the classroom and private pedagogical
moments of reflection and life-writing. As I linger in these seams,
watching narrative zig and zag between multiple parts of my self,
I see stories being worn, stretched, washed, pressed, and then worn
again. David Jardine (1992) says that learning is concerned with life
and hope. My mother gave life to me at my birth, and, as I write these
death words and learn from them, she gives life to me once again.
She whispers patience, strength, and guidance-I can hear her. With
this legacy, I will return to the classroom and I will speak about
death. I will tell my stories and listen to the stories of my students;
and from this sharing of stories, we will all learn and grow. My mother
will be with me in the classroom. As I teach, she is also teacher.
In the words of William Pinar (1992, p. 100):
Cries
and whispers of the dead who live; cries and whispers of she who
dies, who is resurrected, whose death testifies to life. A phenomenology
of death might trace these moods and metaphors of death and life,
enabling us to affirm those who have gone before us, those who,
like us, are dying now, and those children born and unborn who
bring life to our dyings, all of us, past, present, future, blessed
by death, blessed by life.
|
|
|
References
-
Jardine, D. (1992). Reflections on education, hermeneutics, and ambiguity:
Hermeneutics as a restoring of life to its original difficulty. In
W. Pinar & W. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding curriculum as phenomenological
and deconstructed text (pp. 116-130). New York: Teachers College.
-
Pinar, W. (1992). Cries and whispers. In W. Pinar & W. Reynolds (Eds.),
Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed
text (pp. 92-102). New York: Teachers College.
|
|
