Over the years, I’ve done a bunch of demolition on old houses, owned and squatted. I’ve learned a thing or two in the process.

For instance, there are always surprises within every wall — a postcard inserted into long-hidden studs when the home was first built in 1885, as a marker of its birth; a signature etched by a worker in about 1860 into plaster long buried behind lathe, as pride of craft; accidentally misplaced tools, sealed-off windows, layers of wallpaper, or faded photos of smiling faces, as mementos of past lives. Other surprises aren’t so pleasant: ancient newspapers, probably the stuff of makeshift insulation, with headlines screaming “WAR DECLARED!”; carcasses of mice who thought they’d found a safe abode; or costly additional renovations now revealed, like having to reinforce joists or redo electric wiring.

Smashing down walls with crowbars is thus a gleeful and sobering task, filled with ups and downs — not to mention exhaustion after a long day.

Another lesson concerns just how hard it is to undo what was constructed over months and years, by many hands, no matter how dilapidated it looks. I remember the effort of ripping down an almost three-story open and enclosed porch, already leaning precariously off the back of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Italianate house that I and others called home in Vermont. We enlisted the participation of friends and neighbors, attached strong rope to the top, and had this plan to pull together on the count of “three” — at a healthy distance — and watch the ramshackle monstrosity easily tumble. We’d then kick back to drink some beers in our large yard. But it took lots more rope and many more people; pry bars and hammers and elbow grease aplenty. That on-its-last-legs porch stood its ground for hours.

This past nine months since my dad contracted severe West Nile Virus and hasn’t moved from a bed or life support, but especially these past four days since his ventilator was turned off at the most calming, caring, and gorgeous of hospices, the two simple yet startling lessons of demolition projects seem apropos to this dying process, this deathwatch.

For all intents and purposes, my mom, dad, and two sisters have moved into this residential-hospice room with a view, redecorating it, living in it, making it our own. We didn’t bring along a crowbar, and all the walls are still intact — fortunately, because I’ve fast become a huge fan of hospice in general and this hospice-home in particular. Yet family photos and grandkids’ (biological and not) drawings as well as potted spring flowers mingle with borrowed blankets from the hospice, leftovers from takeout meals, and small piles of dirty clothes. When we first arrived, I moved several bird feeders in front of our window and filled them with a delicious-looking blend of eats, and one of the feeders especially has attracted a constant traffic of birds of all feathers and sizes, an acrobatic squirrel, and last evening at dusk, a deer, who stood silently outside our glass “porch” door and stared in at us — just at the moment when we all thought, yet again, that my dad was about to die.

But time and again, minute after minute again, he has decided to hang on. Or rather, to die at a leisurely pace, since at long last, after almost nine months of a life not worth living, he’s finally in a place that feels like home, living with my mom — a singular wish he’s begged me to fulfill for months now. So no matter how close to death he looks — and is — the final count of “three” has been held at abeyance. Or as the hospice folks keep saying, my dad, like so many others here who have found respite to die with dignity in their own way: he is holding death at abeyance for a while longer.

Those extra minutes and hours have revealed “surprises within every wall,” such as stories and laughter we haven’t shared before; nice moments that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, like all listening to Irish music via “The Thistle and Shamrock” — my dad’s favorite radio show — to the accompaniment of my father’s slow, erratic breathing inside the room and a gentle sunset outside it, or watching my parents hold hands — my mom, I should say, taking his hand in hers — as she fell asleep next to him last night; changes we’ve never witnessed personally before that take place on a dying person’s body, along with the peaceful roller coaster of my dad’s process — near to death one second, and then a bit further away the next, but always moving toward it; and emotions of every kind that we’ve never felt, even if the range and depth is bewildering. For these surprises aren’t all pleasant. This morning, for example, we all felt agitated and weary from the strain of this waiting and watching and not-knowing-when. We realized that we need to tell him, gently, with empathy, that it’s OK to go. Because like the old multilevel porch of mine, at some point soon, my father won’t be able to stay in this place, nor will we.

Another lesson of demolition is how it opens up space for reconstruction, renewal.

Using bartered labor with a neighbor in Vermont, we collectively built a big, solid, vernacular porch off the kitchen at our late-nineteenth-century home, and in return, and our neighbor got lots of help from us on his own hundred-plus-year-old fixer-upper a block away. Torn-down walls allow for reconfigured rooms that make much more sense for present and future living, for making other memories. I can’t think past the five or sometimes-seven breathes per minute, and twenty or twenty-five seconds of apnea per minute, that I hear in the background from my dad as I type these words in this home-away-from-home hospice. We’re still fully immersed in the labor of undoing.

I do know, though, that these hours and days here — extra ones, that my father seems determined to fight for — are good ones for my dad. They are filled with things he adores, things he deserves after so many months of agony, made far worse because of the naked inhumanity of a capitalist-driven “health care” system. Here there is softness. Respite. Tenderness. Classical music is playing in the background; the wife he has loved from the first and never stopped loving is near him, along with us “kids.” And spectacular spring scenery and wildlife makes its way though the cycles of life, including death, right outside his window.

I’m glad he’s taking his own good time to die, even if it’s hard work for the rest of us.

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, Stoneleigh Hospice, Lansing, Michigan, 2013)

in between sun & clouds, cold & warm, wind & calm.

in between “hours or days,” not “weeks or months.”

in between life & death.

squarely situated in strength & beauty.

waiting.

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photo: Stoneleigh Hospice, Lansing, MI, May 11, 2013 (Cindy Milstein)
]]> http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/waiting/feed/ 0 cbmilstein photo-5 http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/deathwatch/ http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/11/deathwatch/#comments Sat, 11 May 2013 05:07:23 +0000 cbmilstein http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/?p=2350 Continue reading →]]>

I woke this morning, May 10, in the same homey hospice room as my mom, one of my sisters, and my dad. We’d done a slumber party of sorts on two hospital beds and one foldout couch, facing a wall of windows that open out to birds and flowers of all colors. On this misty-rainy morning, the new-green grass surrounding a pond of orange koi appeared extra brilliant, framed by the branches of what’s become my new favorite tree, the Redbud. The day before, May 9, was the day my dad was supposed to die. But he didn’t.

After nearly four hours of an amazing hospice nurse slowly sedating him into a peaceful, deep sleep, then turning off the ugly noise of his ventilator equipment — machinery meant to tide people through short-term medical situations, but that’s now turning into the cruel, dehumanizing technology of a new “growth industry” — rather than lasting a few minutes, my father decided to breath on his own. It’s not enough breathe to sustain him. Yet it’s plenty to allow him to stay in this peaceful, deep sleep as his body follows its own natural course of winding down. It’s enough for him to do what I’ve wanted for him since the start of his West Nile Virus hell almost nine months ago: die on his own terms, with dignity. And it’s providing plenty of breathing space for us to process this experience with him, within this commons of death that, more and more, I’m understanding hospice supplies in abundance.

I’m about to sleep next to my dad, on a sort of wheelchair-like recliner, with his breathing starting to slow down and the gaps in between his breathing stretching out a bit wider, as we move into May 11. Another sister has joined us in this shared space on this second night of extra life that my dad seems determined to share with us. I can hear peepers outside. Last night, when my mom and sister and I were outside at one point, on this 22-acre hospice nestled at the bottom of an old quarry, some twenty deer converged on our left and right; we became the “deer in the headlights,” transfixed by the magic of these quiet creatures seemingly come to join us in this communal send-off.

There’s so much more that could be written about this anachronistic, anarchistic experience of hospice — a gift that’s being bestowed on my whole family, if that makes any sense to those who haven’t gone through death as it used to be, and in some places still is. Those reflections will have to wait, I suspect, for a time when my dad’s breath stops for good. But I will say this for now. If you’d asked me two days ago about whether I’d want to camp out in a room with my two parents and two of my sisters — sharing food, laughter, birdwatching, tons of visitors, memories, talking to my dad while he sleeps so deeply, and the constant transformations taking place on his body (dignified now by a good-looking shirt, fresh-clipped toenails, and the lack of life-support tubes, and covered in cozy quilts) as he dies in his own good time, in a good way — I’d have said no. This afternoon, while walking through the sublime palette of this hospice landscape outside my dad’s room, the word “deathwatch” sprang to my mind, now not simply as a word, but instead as heavy with lived meaning, as lost art, as necessary practice. We are here together, listening to his breath tick away the remaining days, hours, and at some point soon, seconds of his life, watching over him and watching over each other. The hospice folks (who now feel almost like friends and certainly like empathetic participants in this deathwatch) keep telling us that the last thing that goes is the hearing. My dad seems to be “watching” us through listening, responding in minute ways to our conversations with him and each other. All those breathes he’d “saved up” while on that accursed ventilator that was breathing for him are now being given back to him, to us, so that we can do the work as a community — transparently, in this hospice neighborhood — of easing ourselves into what’s ahead.

Like barn raisings and town meetings, also being lost to time, we need more places and spaces for deathwatches. This evening, in the wee hours of May 11, my place and space is a room I’m sharing with an eccentric bunch of characters (myself included) who I love, faults and failings included.

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, Stoneleigh Hospice, Lansing, Michigan, 2013)

Hospice room with a view, where for the first time in nearly nine months of the “cruel and unusual punishment” of severe West Nile Virus, my dad finally experienced what can only be described as a good, joy-filled day on his move here this May 8 afternoon. Odd how this moment of moving toward the end of life can seem such a new beginning, filled with smiles, sun, and warmth. My dad said that he wasn’t scared of death, in response to one of my sisters asking him today. Apparently he also told my youngest sister at some point today that his “signal” to us after passing would be chicken soup. She joked with him, “Not matzah ball soup?” as complement to our late uncle’s, his beloved brother’s, “signal” of pastrami on rye, which I wrote about a couple days ago (http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/comfort-food/).

I, two sisters, my mom, and my dad all silently watched the sun set beyond the gorgeous flowering tree in this picture, right outside the open door of his hospice room, as our hands touched arms. We three sisters then saw my dad pat the bed that the caring hospice staff here moved close against his hospital bed, gesturing that he wanted my mom to lie next to him for the first — and perhaps last — time in nearly nine months, after decades of what can only be described as a good, joy-filled marriage. I kissed his head (like his dad used to do for me when I was young) and squeezed his hand; “It’s like your second honeymoon,” I joked. He beamed up at me, and I somehow almost didn’t notice the vent that for nearly nine months has been breathing for him, suspending him in hellish nonlife. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring; we never do. And it’s hard to describe today as happy, but that’s strangely the best word that leaped to mind as I left my folks lying side by side in an intimate homey hospice in Michigan set on 22 acres where people come to die.

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, Stoneleigh Hospice, Lansing, Michigan, 2013)

My only uncle, Alex (or affectionately, Sascha), was and always will be my favorite uncle too. He was a psychoanalyst and also swore he was a vampire, “nibbling and nibbling and nibbling at your neck,” having come from Romania (or as he claimed, Transylvania). He practiced both therapy and dracula, loudly, in public places — and likely was insightful with his patients in the quieter privacy of his office, or RV, when he decided at one point to follow his gypsy heart and be a wandering psychoanalyst. He was a Jewish intellectual and comic who lived life to its utmost, and swept you up in his wild adventures, which seemed frequent. He loved horses, helping people, and laughter. He and my dad also loved Jewish delis with their enormously tall sandwiches.

As kids, we went to numerous such delis with both of them in mostly Jewish neighborhoods in big cities, where the Jewish waitresses and waiters would yell at you in Yiddish, and there was big bowls of big (free) dill pickles on every table, and my dad and Alex would embarrass me by trying to stuff unbelievably overstuffed pastramis on rye into their mouths while telling Jewish jokes we’d heard a million times — many involving deli food. Of course, first Alex would always do a pre-sandwich schtick that was even more embarrassing. He’d take a straw in one of those white wrappers, tear off the end, scrunch the wrapper down the straw and ease it on to the table into a tiny white accordion-like ball, then suck water into his straw, and drop one or two bits of liquid on to the paper. As the paper began wriggling, Alex would jump up from his seat and scream at the top of voice in those always-crowded delis, “A snake! Ahhhh!! A snake!”

He also took me under his wing when I most needed it, as he did so many others; showed up on my doorstep, from thousands of miles away, unexpectedly, and then sat on my front stoop to talk about politics and Freud late into the night; scooped me up and took me to extravagant restaurants or plays, and then would decide we had to rush off for a fast drive through hills or by the ocean; gave me advice and comfort and joy whenever I asked (or even when I didn’t). He was fully alive every minute, even when those minutes were painful.

Alex, like my dad, didn’t believe in gods and heavens per se but instead held to a sense of wonder at all we know and don’t know — at the beauty and mystery and humanity of the world. And so when he was nearly at the end of his life, he used to proclaim that after his death, he would reappear at just the right moment for us in the form of a pastrami on rye. That would be his signal that he was there for and with us, with good counsel and good humor. Several years later, my youngest sister started going into labor for what would soon become her precocious daughter just as she, my mom, and my dad were eating pastrami on rye at a Jewish deli (it’s true!).

I’m more of a rationalist. I don’t believe in such signs, other than as the silly stuff of family jokes. But today, this long long long Thursday, May 2, 2013, after hours with my dad in his dispiriting nursing “home” where he still lies tethered to breathing, feeding, and other tubes some eight months-plus since contracting severe West Nile Virus from one damned mosquito, I and another sister arrived back at my mom’s assisted living facility to find her at dinner with her longtime best friend. We saw them in the distance, across the dining hall, and both of us paused, sort of catching our breath before perhaps the most difficult yet in a series of difficult conversations these days. Right next to us, almost simultaneously, we both saw the menu for that night’s dinner: pastrami on rye. My mom’s “home” of these past eight-months-plus, since she’s quite sick too, rarely serves that particular food (it’s true!). My sister and I both looked at each other, then both laughed nervously, incredulously.

My only uncle, Alex, was and always will be my dad’s only brother — his big brother who was also his best friend, and who took good care of my dad in many ways. They loved each other dearly. I don’t think my dad ever quite got over the loss of Alex, his confidant, his mentor, and maybe his shrink in certain ways, and someone who could make my dad laugh.

Earlier in the day, my sister and I asked my dad if he wanted pastrami on rye — as part of the preparations around what was his decision this afternoon to likely reach the end of his life soon. This was hours before we knew what was on the menu at my mom’s place (an hour from where my dad lies, immobilized and increasingly “ready” to move on to whatever adventure Alex is now scampering through). I said I could somehow try to mash up the pastrami enough to, perhaps and hopefully, give him what they call “pleasure food” — a small taste, for flavor, but not really to swallow. He can’t do that anymore.

There’s so much he can’t do anymore, this dad of mine. My only dad, who is, was, and always will be my favorite dad.

I can hear one of my dad’s favorite jokes in my head: a wandering Jew, lost in the desert for days on end without food or drink, is nearly about to die from lack of water. Suddenly a genie appears. The genie says [and here, my dad always had 3, 4, or 10 minutes of embellishment], “You have three wishes. Whatever you desire, I will grant you.” The thirsty Jew, with great relief, responds, “Thank God! I’m saved! Make me a malted!” “Poof,” exclaims the genie, “You’re a malted!”

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, East Lansing, Michigan, 2013)

New York City is perhaps one of the best places to be a flaneur, engaging in the act of idly strolling through the streets, taking in the little moments that otherwise go unnoticed, appreciating them as pinholes, turning the world as we know it upside down, all the better to see it for what it is. New York City is also perhaps one of the best metropolises to experience alienation in all its rawness — accessible, visible, and celebratory at every turn. One doesn’t have to wonder at one’s own estrangement; it’s plain as day, especially through the camera obscura of everyday details that one stumbles on, repeatedly, endlessly, as a loafer on foot. Somehow this savage rawness makes alienation a tiny bit easier to bear, although in another pinhole effect, likely a whole lot harder to contest.

New York City, too, just might be home to one of the greatest — if not the greatest — concentrations of cultural workers, whether in the form of one’s waged labor or through laboriously endless weight of creating culture in one’s lifestyle and on one’s body. Capitalism retains it’s basic “cell form” logic of commodifying things — material and increasingly immaterial — but its growth logic has nurtured that capacity to expand from the realm of production (with us as producers), to consumption (with us as spectators), to the very sociocultural fabric of life (with us as way-too-enthusiastic participants). As James C. Scott talks about in a section of his recent Two Cheers for Anarchism, rather than a world aimed at a “gross domestic product,” we’ve moved into the aspiration of “the production of human beings.” Hence, the culture of capitalism isn’t incidental; it’s the pinhole through which we can see who we’ve become in this upside-down world, or what we’ve been reduced to, and may just be the terrain of where social struggle, resistance, and reconstruction in particular is most crucial. For we need to be different human beings if we have any hope of populating, humanely, other possible worlds.

So here’s what I hope is the beginning of photo-word pinholes onto the culture of capitalism, from me as a part wordsmith, part flaneur, part agitator. Perhaps, over time, these fragmentary snapshots will offer a less-dim picture of the present, what we’re up against and what bits of light still shine beyond it.

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Pinhole 1: If utopia is, etymologically, “no place” or “good place,” under neoliberalism, we may have reached a true no-good place, where capitalism holds out the never-reachable “good place” of a purported utopia, achieved through fame, luck, fortune, or simply averting disaster, but always in the form of an increasingly proliferation of micro-commodities to fulfill micro-desires that leave our macro-desires lonely, empty, and empty-handed, materially and psychically. We troublemakers and misfits and rebels are left with only feebly offering representations of apocalyptic dystopias. After all, military-industrial climate change has created a future with no future, and it seems all we can do is offer up notions of a world of “it’s already too late,” even as we try valiantly to make the present a tiny bit more comfortable.

Capitalism in New York City, meanwhile, smiles broadly, and declares, “Don’t say good-bye to life!” Instead: “Come Buy!” Or as a sign declared on the outside of a new micro-niche series of specialty stores in Manhattan, as seen during one of my meanderings: Come inside to our lovely “space where everything you encounter is for sale.”

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, midtown Manhattan, 2013)

This evening, February 20, 2013, several hours after standing around outdoors in chilly winter weather at a rally beneath the clock tower of Cooper Union and a giant “free education for all” red banner high above, a young Egyptian revolutionary, an active and articulate organizer these past couple years in Tahrir Square, said that freedom isn’t just a word; it’s how one practices it and tries to enact it. That’s a paraphrase, from snippets of his pronouncements in snippets of a forthcoming film titled The Square and a Skype interview he did from Cairo to New York City. That second event of my day poorly, embarrassingly, tried to conflate Zuccotti and Tahrir; former OWSers who still seemed under the illusion that Occupy was alive and well in lower Manhattan tripped over themselves to not listen to, much less understand, those in attendance who had helped — and still were doing so — to make a revolution, and are still resisting in ways that involve tremendous organizational savvy and attention to transforming social relations, complex and difficult as that obviously is. I had to walk away.

I couldn’t walk away from Cooper Union, even though my toes began to feel numb. The 1 p.m. rally was about the deferral of early-decision applicants by the school’s administration, which is trying every trick in the book to tear asunder the founding mission of free education, paying particular attention to the pesky art students. Here’s some regular old media coverage about it, if you want a bit of background: http://hyperallergic.com/65545/cooper-union-saga-continues-as-administration-refuses-early-art-acceptances/.

I’m not an especial fan of hierarchical forms of education that also, even with no tuition, shape students for job markets, even if there are increasingly no jobs. Yet similar to the six-month Quebec student strike of 2012, which too aimed toward free education for all (although with the additional weapon of a long tradition of highly participatory, autonomous student assemblies), the Cooper Union resistance has a beautiful ring of social goodness to it (for one of my observer-participant stories on this, see http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/social-goodness-abundance-montreal-night-108/). There’s an aspirational quality — or “hope,” as one prospective student noted — in imagining that education could indeed be free for all, not only monetarily, but also in terms of freedom. That no tuition, even within a hierarchical and select structure, still manages to engender a tangible freedom to imagine social goodness, and the freedom (of thought and financial constraints) to organize in more imaginative as well as qualitative ways, seems distinct in relation to other US student organizing in places that cost tens of thousands annually. When people, students or otherwise, are freed up from the burden of struggling to survive, it creates space for a different kind of human being, with time to pursue one’s dreams alongside others. It supplies a sense of already-there promise and possibility. Fighting for lower or no tuition is — or at least could be — a path toward opening up minds to critical and creative thought, which is essential in moving us humans toward forms of social goodness, thwarted as that is by a commodifying structure/system that does its best to inculcate uncritical and uncreative thought at every turn, or just make us so damned tired and dispirited that we don’t have the energy for envisioning and organizing toward better communities and better tomorrows. That Cooper Union is one of the last remaining “free schools” in the United States also underscores how pivotal this battle is in terms of siding with increasing public goodness or squashing it still further.

Aspirations, however, aren’t enough. What is noteworthy and compelling about the Cooper Union resistance beyond the already-extraordinary sense of a common good embedded in all its slogans it how, when you take freed-up art students and give them a cause they are personally and collectively passionate about, well: watch out! They will unleash their imaginations, in the same way that a plethora of upward-spiraling imaginative interventions marked the Quebec spring and summer. Sure, there are the usual sloppily painted signs, sometimes with misspellings, that characterize any US demonstration. And there are protest moments after protest moments, as in today’s rally, designed to be a spectacle of sorts. Yet there also seem to be twists in the cultural production for this rebellious campaign to keep education free, such as transparent banners asking for transparency from administrators even as they reveal how transparent the student, alumni, allied teachers, and community supporters are being in this contestation. Or an oversize Cooper Union student ID for one of the now-deferred prospective early admissions, with a cutout indicating their potential absence come fall 2013 (happily filled in, for a photo-op moment, by a probable current Cooper Union student).

Such creativity, from what I’ve seen, extends to kitschy and good-silly cultural production for online and social media — not tired memes, but rather smartly faked, funny photos or a humorously false Cooper Union Web site — to wearable artifacts like buttons and “Stay Free or Die Tryin’” patches — to crafty gadgets — such as during their late-fall occupation, to “fly” pizza up the outside of the building to the occupiers via pulleys, ropes, and balloons — to well-written newspapers, communiques, and press releases, to today’s moving testimonials from deferred early admissions students, read by some of those prospects themselves or read for some of the ones from places around the United States. There’s a way in which the spectacle and end-run maneuvers that the administration keeps trying to make just get outspectacled and outrun by the dynamism of the art students conjuring up new visual, new visions, new strategies — again only underscoring the “value” of free and freeing education.

Perhaps most important, though, I was reminded today of what good organizing looks like. Or to be more precise, I was reminded of what organizing — versus activism — is all about. There’s aspirations, imagination, and also substance backing up these students’ resistance, and the substance is all about both winning and doing so by forging increasingly widening and deeper circles of social relations, and social relations that appear, from my outsider vantage point, to be far more comradely and nonhierarchical than those in many social struggles. That’s not to say that this cold afternoon’s rally was large; it wasn’t, attracting maybe a couple hundred folks at most. But as now-deferred prospective student after student got up to read their varied, often-eloquent remarks, or have them read by a current Cooper Union student or an alumni, for upward of an hour, it became clearer and clearer how much work went into finding, educating, involving, and gaining the support and participation of these frequently far-afield potential students. In fact, one of the statements mentioned how current Cooper Union students, faculty, and alumni had reached out to the current higher schooler applying for early admission to explain the deferral (an administration tactic and, as several prospects noted, “betrayal”) and draw them into this cause — a cause, as several of the prospective students mentioned, that wasn’t about them necessarily getting into Cooper Union but instead about extending the idea that education should be free and available, sustaining people’s self and social exploration in a life of the mind and arts, and thus bettering our world.

Organizing, good organizing, is to my mind the slow, steady, one-on-one building of relations and interconnections that are at odds with how people are treated under capitalism. Instead of instrumentalizing people for what they can give us or do for us, we look to each other as having worth unto ourselves, and for how we can cement relations of sociability, collaboration, and solidarity — as some of the speakers observed today. Expedient activism falls apart under its own flimsy weight; there’s little there to sustain it, especially when the going inevitably gets rough or disappointing. Here, patient and what appears to be joyful organizing might just have a fighting chance of leaving something in its wake: a win for free education perhaps, or if not, a yardstick of how we can reignite our imaginations and rekindle qualitative social relations.

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photos by Cindy Milstein, and cultural creations by Cooper Union artist-organizers, NYC, February 20, 2013. For more pictures from Cooper Union’s “Free Education for All” struggle, see http://free-educ-for-all.tumblr.com/)

It’s hard to know what to say or do to mark a six-month anniversary that isn’t something one wants to remember — that almost got forgotten. The human brain is, in fact, a kindly sort of friend at times, aiding us at certain moments by somehow not recalling those things that will, as our mind knows, only trigger a tailspin of emotions like grief, pain, or estrangement. But that helping hand only holds difficult emotions at bay for a while, and regardless, feelings come out one way or another. Some of us lash out at others, as displacement; some of us become reclusive or cranky; some of us turn into our own worst enemies; and on down the line of “spillovers” when we don’t take the time to remember, to mark, to sit with what isn’t at all comfortable to cuddle up next to.

What I nearly forgot careened into my consciousness this past weekend, when twice — on Saturday and again on Sunday — my dad was moved from his nursing home to an ER because he couldn’t breathe.

The first time, a sister (in Wisconsin) and I (in Brooklyn) talked our mom (still in her Michigan hometown, but now in an assisted living situation, an hour’s distance from the closest facility that can take someone in my dad’s situation) into getting a friend to drive her through an impending snowstorm on country roads to the ER, where she found my dad acting like a completely scared, frantic kid, and pulling the additional tubes out of himself. Apparently, the nursing home had forgotten to give the ambulance crew one of my dad’s “lifelines”: a worn and tattered 8.5 x 11 sheet of white paper with an alphabet printed on it, stuffed into an equally worn and tattered see-through plastic envelope. It’s how he’s able to communicate, and because of that, he’s attached to the beat-up alphabet “card” and won’t let us replace it (although he’s trying to learn how to use an electronic version of it on a tablet, slowly, with difficult success given that he has severely destroyed mobility). His other lifelines are the life-support tubes, particularly the one that keeps him breathing, that I gave permission to insert almost a half-year ago when he first landed in intensive care in a coma. The ER couldn’t really find anything wrong with him, save for the fact that it seems to me and my family — and my dad too — that everything’s wrong with him. That everything’s wrong with the picture of his life now, and how that has made the pictures of all our lives askew too. A few hours later, I got a call from the Michigan ER to me here in Brooklyn: “We sent your dad home.” Those five words felt like a 2 x 4 on my head, hammering in the reality, deeper than ever, of what is now his “home.”

The second time, just as a small group of us were closing up shop at Interference Archive after installing our upcoming exhibition Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press, I got a text that my dad had been returned to the ER because he was “nonresponsive.” In phone calls and texts, my mom and two of my sisters and I all talked about my dad’s death, and trying to feel at peace about it, rather than guilty, knowing that he knows we all love him and have been attempting to help him as best we can — in a scenario where there really isn’t any way to help anymore, just visit, or keep in touch through nurses and a speech therapist, or tangle with mixed feelings about whether it would be better if this nonlife of his ended or if we made a mistake letting it get this far by agreeing to various medical interventions, and/or strive not to continually contemplate the stress and sorrow of it all. One and then two of my sisters wondered why, if he was nonresponsive, the nursing home and the ER had ignored the “Do Not Resuscitate” form we signed on his behalf –based on his living will — when we signed him into the nursing home some three month ago. Two hours and a bunch of diagnostic tests later on this past Sunday night, the ER again maintained that there was nothing wrong with him. He was now responsive and smiling, they reported, and they returned him “home” to the nursing home.

This worn and tattered roller coaster of a six months since one little mosquito bit my dad — likely by some beautiful lake or river on a summery Michigan day — and passed along severe West Nile — a disease likely the result of climate change induced by capitalism and its military-industrial complex — slammed into me forcefully with those two ER visits.

One tries to forget and go on with life. Or so we’re taught to do in this amnesiac society. It’s a big part of what makes the current social order so immiserating — life can’t go on when we erase memory, eradicate history. This past week, I tried to counter both forgetting and not-living but remembering to dish love out in as hugely qualitative quantities as I could. Grinding sorrow, like grinding neoliberalism, can make a person way too self-absorbed and inward, way too individualistic and needy — none of which usually characterizes or suits me, but all of which have overtaken me, along with other debilitating, emotionally induced behaviors. Much as I hate capitalistic holidays, I took the sentiment behind the crux of what Valentine’s Day could or should be into my heart: a marker to recall that we need to share and gift love, in all sorts of magnificently expansive and fabulously diverse ways, in order to have it grow in all sorts of breathtakingly expansive and surprisingly diverse ways. I was being exceptionally good at practicing that, and for a couple days, my newfound non-self-absorption (in sorrow) and exuberant outwardness toward others seemed to have brought me newfound life — even with my dad still in mind — in a way I hadn’t felt for six months.

And then I recollected, or rather viscerally felt, the heaviness. The two ER days this past weekend seemed to pull calendar pages off the wall for me, backward, toward a night in August — a perfect summer night in a perfect stretch of summer nights, in the dreamlike time I spent in Montreal participating in a social movement that reshaped the social fabric around notions of social goodness — when I got a call that my dad had fallen out of his bed and was increasingly becoming incoherent, so my mom called an ambulance, and he went to an ER. He went into a coma. Tape those calendar pages hastily back on the wall, and on this day in February, he now lives in a home that’s not anywhere near a home, by any good approximation of that word. Overnight six months ago, everything changed for everyone in my bio-family, never to go back again, just as overnight six months ago, I booked a flight and left a perfect sunrise morning in Canada to find myself in an imperfect medical-pharmaceutical nonlife lifeworld in a dead and dying Mid-Michigan town and one of its hospital.

Today I tried to somehow mark this anniversary. Or rather, I meant to do so, with remembrances of things past in relation to my dad. But for one, when I think of him, all I can visualize is the awfulness of how he looks now and where he “lives” now. And second, life does go on, and intrudes whether we want it to or not. A string of totally unrelated (to my dad) emails this morning at first unsettled, then triggered, and then hurt me. I almost responded, breathed deeply, and then engaged a newfound practice: pausing. Not responding. Still, I watched almost helplessly as I saw how my grief over these lost six months, the losses that won’t be regained, spiraled outward to amplify things like misunderstandings or not-so-nice tones in emails. I felt that generous spirit of love and loving that I thought I’d refreshed seem to vanish, and those emotions that don’t usually characterize or suit me start trying to reassert themselves.

That’s a big worry in the loss of memory, personal or societal: that we become wholly different people and a wholly different society, for the worse, without any notion of how or why we got to such points. We take on a character, through happenstance and not being cognizant of the markers of our own changes for the worse, and begin to play it so well, we completely blank out the “us” that was there beforehand. My dad has lost himself not through his own choosing, and whenever I see him, I see how painfully hard he’s trying — fighting — to reclaim his own self. For me, and for others languishing in the land of mourning, it’s a matter of being brave and strong enough to battle the drift into becoming something and someone we don’t want to be through actively intervening, which is all about being aware of the history dogging our present conundrums — look it and ourselves fully in the face, and bring something and someone better out of it. The grief of this world can destroy; indeed, that’s probably part of its mission, and why so much of it is heaped on humanity by the structures of domination. Maintaining and sustaining our selves — and much more than that, always-becoming increasingly more of the selves we could and should be — is a form of resistance against a social system that would happily turn us all into despairing, self-obsessed “I’s” tearing each other apart from the enclaves of our separate sorrows.

When I arrived home this evening, feeling my whole body slumping toward despondency again on this unhappy of six-month anniversaries, I did what way too many of us do when we’re blue: I flipped absentmindedly through my Facebook newsfeed, sans enthusiasm. And there I ran across a post by a friend who just lost his mom to sudden death a week or less ago. He spoke of how he’s become suddenly stupid, as if 50% of his IQ has disappeared. He wondered if it was normal, and if it would be permanent, and expressed a sort of clinical curiosity about it all, even though he also mentioned being stressed and filled with grief. All the comments, gifting and sharing so much love, spoke of pausing. Of taking time — suggesting, too, a sense of us taking time back in order to better learn to mourn over the time spans of a week or six months or far longer. They spoke of how we’ve lost the rituals of grief and mourning, like sitting shiva. No one mentioned this, but I recall someone telling me how the notion of wearing black for a year as and in mourning was this beautiful public way to project a visibility and awareness to ourselves and others of what was going on inside us, so as to hopefully better acknowledge and thus process it.

A friend today, in the flurry of what felt like unpleasant emails, observed that there were invisible sorrows and stresses among us, and referring to me and my parents, and how it’s good to be mindful of that. I realize more and more I talk about it less and less, because as the days and months stretch out, it seems unseemingly, a burden, not the stuff of public or even close friendship conversation. Maybe I’m even beginning to (try to) think about it less and less. If this is my and my bio-families new normal, it must therefore be unremarkable and beyond remarking about. Beyond marking, even for myself, and especially in any sort of communal (and thus in my book, healthy) way.

I think today I triggered, talked, and troubled myself out re-marking: pausing to notice — both with myself, who I love, and with others who I love — all that I’ve experienced, practiced, felt, seen, suffered, done, enjoyed, and discovered in this past six months, and though it sounds odd to write, celebrating that, alongside celebrating my dad and my whole bio-family for all doing our best to be good, decent, loving people in the worst of situations, despite our flaws and failures.

As my computer clock strikes 12 midnight, I’m taking a big quality moment of remembrance. It’s just one minute, but I’m gonna make it count. To my dad, who taught me “to think” and think for myself, to believe in myself, but much more crucially, who taught me that life is about giving of oneself, being honest and open, always striving to care about and if needed try to help others, taking a genuine interest in everyone and who they are, having a constant sense of wonder and curiosity, and always striving to make the world a better place. With love, to my dad, on this most strange of six-month anniversaries.

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If you’ve run across this blog post as a reposting somewhere, you can find other blog-musings and more polished essays at Outside the Circle, cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Share, enjoy, and repost — as long as it’s free as in “free beer” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, image from a Brooklyn wall, next to a stencil that reads, “Graffiti keeps me clean”)

Photo-words du jour: fragility.

Or, how utopia might look in this “[twenty-first] century with no future” (Franco Berardi): “beneath the snow, pavement.”

If the neoliberal variant of capitalism seems gleefully, triumphantly, able to offer near-endless representations of utopia, does that leave us, rebels warped by neoliberal subjectivity despite our best efforts, only able to counter with near-endless representations of dystopia?

(photo: Cindy Milstein, flaneur, on the neoliberal streets of brooklyn)