Sunday, August 5, 2007

A Grief Observed?

Perhaps the most jarring thing among the many jarring things I saw at Lana's apartment this week must have been the small collection of books on ghosts, death and spirits, sitting in their very used condition next to her computer. These were the reference materials for her book. When I first made the connection some time back about the topic of her developing book, I couldn't help but pay attention to the blazing irony. Many of her students have commented similarly on classes they have taken with her on loss, memory etc. It is all quite jarring. And as the weeks pass, I begin to form my own sense of understanding for the phenomenon of ghosts and spirits. Because it has been a few weeks and I still cannot shake the sense that she is with me. This is probably mostly because I still can't register the reality, that she is no longer here. But I really feel like she is still with me...of course then there are the moments when I am overwhelmed with the sense that she actually isn't...but many times it is the opposite, and I feel haunted by her, not necessarily in a bad way, but haunted nonetheless. The relationships we form with the dead are bizarre, perhaps even oogy, and "tricky that". When people are no longer physically present, when they revert back to merely the theoretical, we too begin to theorize about them and about our relationship to them; we have the freedom to do that, since they are not physically present to object.

Yet is that really true? An eerie sense trails me that I am not alone in my fabrication, that even in death, relationships continue to be two-sided. And I am not merely speaking about the connection from the past that we carry with us and therefore keep alive and present, and make part of the future. But something real and present and developing, in another sort of way. As people become concepts, we have the unique opportunity to connect to something more essential than in life perhaps, or rather, that we trpically don't or can't connect with in life. The place we wished to get to but could not, intimacy, in the spiritual sense, maybe, just maybe, that happens in death? Whether or not there is a "place" or reality called heaven or hell is not even what I am talking about...and maybe this is actually what they are. But there is a sense that trails us that this cannot be it. Not even in the sense that one day, after death has taken us both, we will be reunited. But we cannot accept that in this life, when one has left, that there is a real stop, and end, that the connections we make have a finitude to them. And don't get me wrong: not the affects of the connection, because we knowe we can keep that going; but the actual connection itself. The meaning we create through connection to people is simply too strong, too stalwart, too real, to be snuffed in an instant by a physical change. It just cannot be. I don't exactly know what I mean; this is all the beginning of my musings on life and death etc. But there are so many moments that I feel that she is with me. And I am not one to believe in any and all of the unrevealed, especially without some sort of empirical proof.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Comment from Jack Lynch

Thanks to the students at Stern who've started this blog -- Lana Schwebel was one of my closest friends for fourteen years, since we started graduate school together in 1993. She was one of the quickest wits, best teachers, and liveliest people I've been lucky enough to know, and I'm glad to see her students appreciate her. I've been in touch with a few of her friends about finding some more lasting way of memorializing her, probably through Stern, and will be grateful if anyone has suggestions on an appropriate tribute.