The Ada Focer Chronicles

Death, Etc.

Once again this spring semester, I'm a Teaching Fellow for an undergraduate course on Death and Immortality. The professor is the hip and cool Steve Prothero, author of the best-selling Religious Illiteracy, who does the lectures Oprah-style, getting many of the 200 students to engage directly in discussion of the daily topics. Last spring students were particularly dazzled since Steve would appear in class one morning then on the Jon Stewart show that night. They could email their high school friends links to a Newsweek story quoting him. A celebrity professor!

I, of course, was just a lowly T.F. who had them--35 at a time--for two discussion sections, but the unusual nature of the course and the discussion-oriented culture converted me to the power of religious studies to open up conversations and avenues in the brains of undergraduates that often seem to be lying dormant. When I was an undergrad I recall long dormitory conversations on the meaning of life that were richly funded by the religious traditions in which various students had been submerged before coming to Bucknell. Now, however, it seems what many of these students have been submerged in is the same American youth culture where death is everywhere but insight into its meaning is nowhere. In the context of religious studies, I get to introduce a wide range of thinking about these questions and provoke thoughtful conversation about them, without having to promote one over the other.

I was deeply moved by many of my students last year. Some took the course only because they had heard that Steve was cool and the course was pretty easy (it is), but many had deep personal reasons for being there. Like the historic Buddha, they had had some experience where they had been confronted by death and had woken up to this larger drama that was taking place around them and that they, for better or worse, were in, too. A few students had recently lost parents, either quickly (cerebral hemorrhage) or slowly (brain cancer). Two others had been seriously ill themselves. A huge percentage had lost friends in car crashes in high school. Some had been shocked when, after the death of a grandparent, some unfamiliar religious tradition surfaced out of the family's history and shaped the funeral and mourning rituals. Whoa! What's this? they were forced to ask.

I got amazing emails, often written in the middle of the night. It was a blessing and privilege to be able to respond to them. So I am looking forward to the semester.

"Up" to Date

I just discovered the "7 Up"  film series. I admit I'm a few years behind the times. The first installment, "7 Up," which captured 14 British 7-year olds and their opinions on life, love, work, politics, education, etc., was produced in 1963. The director, Michael Apted, has been returning every seven years since and filming updates of all the subjects who will still sit for the camera. Last night I watched "28 Up." I cannot stop thinking about it--both the film project and about the subjects themselves.

The premise is the Jesuit saying: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man." The series asks: Is this true? So far, to an amazing extent, it is. Quite quickly, however, between "14 Up" and "21 Up" there is one, shocking reversal. Neil, one of the most lively and charismatic 7-year olds, has become homeless and clearly has psychiatric trouble. Yet there is a shocking reversal to the positive between "21 Up" and "28 Up." Suzy, the sullen, cynical, almost-hostile chain-smoking upper-class girl at 21, showed up relaxed and happy, the married mother of two at 28 and attributed the turn-around to her marriage, not exactly a popular thing to say in 1985 any more than now. Otherwise, the paths are fairly predictable, at least up until they are 28.

But even this far, the second focus of the film--the advantages of being upper class--has gotten complicated. Four of the working class participants express, at 28, that they feel sorry for the upper class ones, using quotes from them as evidence. Social position does not translate directly into happiness, at least by 28. I'm anxious to see whether that holds through "49 Up," the latest of the series. The next one, "56 Up," is due out in 2011 or 2012.

The series would be interesting in any event, but is particularly interesting to me because these subjects are only slightly younger than I am. I was no surprise to me that the director chose 10 boys and 4 girls (which he later regretted). The difficult interviews with male subjects and their new wives about roles in marriage had a painful familiarity, too. How many of these marriages end up in divorce, I wonder? Probably quite a few if these people are like those I knew at the same ages and time. But what the condensed nature of the lives captured in these films make clear is that while loss and disappointment are part of aging, there are compensating joys, too, and those are not distributed by race or class.

Mother's Gloves

When I went to go bike riding this afternoon, I couldn't find my regular gloves. It has been warm this last week and somehow I misplaced them. So I went to the big tin lard can where my mother always kept wool things out-of-season in mothballs. Hats, scarfs, gloves, thick socks she made to wear ice skating could all be found in the big Fort Pitt tin. Washing things in Woolite before putting them away was one part of the ritual because sweat attracted moths, she said. Airing them out before using them was the counterpart ritual because the mothball smell was so vile. When she moved to my house in Boston, of course she brought the three Fort Pitt tins. The other two have knitting things in them. One still is filled with winter wools.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped using the mothballs. When I opened the tin today and pulled out a pair of white wool gloves, they smelled fresh, like Woolite. I kept looking at them while I was riding, thinking about her hand laundering them year after year. She didn't consider herself a good housekeeper. I think that instead this is just evidence of a care with objects that comes when you don't necessarily assume that there are dozens just like them for the having if anything happens to this pair. It was important to make things last.

My mother would have been 95 last Thursday. In most other ways, she was an exceptionally modern woman, right up until her death in 2004. But I doubt I know anyone else who still hand launders their gloves.

Monomaniacal Focus

In this odd quest to reshape and relaunch my life in a new direction, I knew that this academic year--2007-2008--was going to be the rough patch. My coursework was done except for qualifying in German and finishing an incomplete in research methodology which was going to require that I master the range of methods available to me for my dissertation research and complete a design and a draft proposal. I am happy to report those two objectives were accomplished at the end of the first semester. What remains for second semester is taking my three comprehensive exams and raising money to begin my dissertation research next year. These both are huge undertakings and monomaniacal focus is essential if I'm going to accomplish them so I can actually do the research in 2008-2009, write the dissertation in 2009-2010, and get the Ph.D. and a job in 2010.

My house also remains unsold so I am working both as a Teaching Fellow at BU and in OB Admitting at the Brigham most evenings in order to pay my bills. Together with my academic work, that is just about all the time there is. For the first time in my adult life, I have no time for community or church or politics. My social life is limited to an occasional coffee or brunch. There is, in other words, a huge cost to all this. I miss the wonderful life I had on Ashmont Hill and Trinity Church and often wonder if, on the other side of this current effort, I will ever find another place to be and communities of people to be with that compare with them. Emotionally, this year is a bit like mud season in Vermont.....it is very easy to get stuck in a bad place.

But what carries me forward is my passion for my work and those close to me who believe in me and it. Unlike other, younger graduate students, my work is not preparing me to do something, it IS that something. I want to understand what happened to liberal Protestantism in America. I want to understand what happened to the people who were, at least for a time, its standard-bearers. And more generally, I want to understand how ideologies shape individual action and vice versa. And even more generally than that, I want to understand how values work socially....and economically. This work is not unconnected from my long time work reflected in my blog at www.bostonmortgagemeltdown.org.

My conceit is that if I live long enough I might be able to add something of value to how these things are understood. But at 58, I know that living long enough is a big uncertainty. Yes, both my parents lived into their 90s, but that is no guarantee. So on the darker nights, I see clearly that I may be trading away years of my life that I might have spent with friends and in community, where I might have found a new soul mate and have had the joy of being part of a loving partnership again, where I might have spent time just being in the moment and soaking up the sun and the smell of the earth, where I might have learned to play the guitar or ski, for goals that I will not reach if my days are cut short. That is the risk. But day after day, I decide to take it.

This is New Year's Eve 2007. If, by New Year's Eve 2008 my exams and several months of interviewing are behind me, I think none of the rest of this will matter. The doing will be enough. To get to that place is my prayer.