All this went unsaid. Given the indirection our family practiced, perhaps it’s no wonder that when Jeff and I were kids both our play and our disagreements were fiercely physical. I’m sure I wanted to take his place and the nebulous privileges he enjoyed as the son who was the firstborn—older than me, but just barely, and not as big. I know for sure that he felt bad about that. A real struggle for precedence motivated the competition we elaborated over the years. All that faded into the background as we got older, and I found my own sense of self in lesbian-feminism. He was twenty-one when he married, and I had not yet reached that auspicious age. I remember thinking there goes the golden boy, as he and Beth drove away towing a small U-Haul trailer full of wedding gifts—curious, because I truly didn’t want all that stuff. To the contrary, I was happy that everything I owned, including my stereo speakers, could fit in a VW bug. In August 1974 I believed that I didn’t care about the fact that the whole wedding thing made very much of him and very little of me. I now think that I both did and did not want what he had, a flat-out contradiction in the light of reason, but perfectly consistent with unconscious thought and unavowed feelings. The roiling, unconscious underside of family life is beyond the reach of reason.
Jeff did well in law school, passed the bar exam, and became a lawyer. He and Beth started a family. And then, as I neared the end of graduate school, the terrible fact of MS and its multiplying sclerotic destruction of myelin laid him low. The competition that had structured our relationship, both for good and ill, was suddenly over, and I was the winner, by default.
That’s ludicrous, of course, but I guess that’s my point—MS separated Jeff from me more profoundly than gender, and that’s saying a lot. I didn’t want to win that way, if I wanted to “win” at all. There was no joy in such a triumph, yet I can’t help but think I must have felt guilty as the fit and flourishing one. The difference between us was more and more evident every time I visited. Every time the intervening months had worked their changes. Perhaps that made me more attached to the idea that there was a strong family resemblance between us, the similarity that I saw so clearly in the birthday photograph. I could hold onto that. That photo had always made me happy, in part, surely, because I saw him as a handsome man and enjoyed the reflected glory. I was sad to see the changes in his body as the muscles in his legs began to atrophy, his torso muscles weakened, and he slowly lost his upright posture. The sicker he got, the more different from me he was, the more I wished I could help him. The more I wished he were like me.
Alas, no. We were not twins, mirroring each other in an eternal likeness, and never had been. Our lives had taken different trajectories, which continued even after I broke my neck. At first, Jeff and I would sit together in our wheelchairs. Before long, however, the labor of getting up became too much for him, so snapshots show me in my chair beside his hospital bed. He remained, despite these changes, such an alive person that it never occurred to me his death could be imminent. The shock of that event seems to have decisively changed how I see Jeff, and I mean that quite literally. We were always more different than my unconscious mind would admit. I couldn’t see it while he was alive, but evidence of that difference is right there in the birthday photograph. We don’t look uncannily alike. No. Our facial features are very similar, but not the structure of our faces. My face is rounder (like Mother’s), while his is more angular (like Dad’s). There’s a strong family resemblance, that’s all.
My mother died in October 2008. We waited until a beautiful day in July 2009 to scatter her ashes at the Peace Chapel at Juniata, which was designed by Maya Lin, the site-specific architect who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. You go up an unmarked dirt road climbing through woods that open out to a field on the knoll of a hill. Grasses and wildflowers have been cut in a large circle, and at the center there’s a smaller circle about twenty feet in diameter excavated a yard deep. The grass inside is mowed near to the ground. This grassy interior is lined with a circle of granite blocks flush to the earth, which invite you to sit down to take in the tranquil woods and mountains in the middle distance. Summer insects buzz in the grasses, and you can hear birds calling in the woods. A wide path mowed through grasses and wildflowers, and laid with large, smooth granite steppingstones set some distance apart, runs uphill and into the trees. Up there you can find a granite disk set flush with the ground, making a place for private meditation that’s spatially connected to the circle below. When we scattered Kenneth Ward Crosby’s ashes one May dawn in 1990, Mother said that he was “universalized,” and I ran, crying, alone up the hill and into the woods to find that stone in the still light of the very early morning. The whole of the chapel is very simple and very beautiful. Jane Miller Crosby’s molecules are now mingled with the air, soil, and water of the place that years earlier accepted what remained of her dear Ken. The last time I spoke face to face with Jeff and enjoyed his presence was on that warm July day the family gathered to remember Mother, and commend what remained of her body to the elements. A year later, the family took a portion of Jefferson Clark Crosby’s ashes to be blown by the breezes and disappear into the grasses on the same peaceful hillside looking out to the Appalachian mountain ridges running off into the distance. I don’t know when I will next go to Huntingdon, though I’m sure I will, drawn there by Kathy, who for many years worked as Mother’s aide, and became her loving—and much loved—companion. The memories of my family will also urge me to return. I’m so vividly aware of how much I love them, which has confused me, given the distance I took. Jane, Ken, and Jeff are gone. I draw close to them in my memories with no reserve, and see them anew. I am not Jeff’s twin. I don’t even resemble him as much as I had thought. That revelation helps me to see him more as he was—and is yet another loss.
11
Bowels Lead
“I’ve got to get to the bathroom. Now.” Jeff spoke with real urgency as he pivoted his wheelchair away from the kitchen table where we were sitting drinking coffee after breakfast. “I hardly ever drink coffee—it can be a problem for me—makes me need to move my bowels,” he anxiously explained as he rolled down the hall. The MS was robbing him of sphincter control, and Janet and I shared his anxiety about getting him onto the toilet in time. I positioned myself behind him, grabbed him under his armpits, Janet got his knees, and we did our best to boost him onto the toilet. As it turned out, his bowels let loose just as he got his pants down and began to transfer, so by the time he was actually on the toilet, he’d made a real mess. Shit on his underwear and jeans, shit on the floor, shit smeared all over the toilet seat. Not much in the toilet. “I’m so sorry,” he repeatedly said with frustrated anger. Then more calmly, “Sorry about the cleanup. I hate it when this happens. Hate it. What a mess! This is why I’ve been thinking about a bowel program, but once you start, that’s it.”
I was really focused on reassuring him that I didn’t mind cleaning up his shit, so I didn’t ask what he meant by “bowel program.” I had no idea, and I certainly didn’t want to imagine having to embrace further decline, so didn’t stop to ask. At that moment, I had to get his pants and his underwear off, rinse off the worst of the shit in the shower, and then give the clothing to Janet to throw in the washing machine. I was busy wiping up the floor, the toilet, and Jeff’s bottom, as best I could. While it truly was a mess, I didn’t mind cleaning up because I loved Jeff. It only saddened me that the MS made his life so hard. At forty-eight years old, here he was revisiting the toilet training that we passed through as toddlers on our way to becoming adults. Mother used to rinse out our soiled diapers in the toilet before washing them, I thought, as I helped him pull on fresh underwear and clean jeans. Here his bowels are once again unreliable and sometimes out of his control. I can’t imagine living as he does, I thought to myself, I really can’t.
The “bowel program” remained vague to me, since I never really inquired into what the phrase meant. So I don’t actually know when he started to use laxatives and enemas to regula
te the passing of stool from his body. It wasn’t until I was introduced to my bowel program in the rehab hospital that I came to understand what Jeff faced. The MS first disabled his legs, then his hands and arms and the muscles of his torso, and slowly eroded the neural circuits governing his organs. Years ago, he slowly stopped singing as he could no longer project the air strongly enough from his lungs to produce his lovely baritone. I worried about the future, which held the certainty of ever decreasing lung function, the threat of aspirating food, the horror of a respirator. His bowels began imperceptibly, and then more evidently to slow down, until he needed more than the erratic stimulation of coffee to stir them into motion. By the time he was living in a nursing unit of the Moravian Manor, he was wholly dependent on an every-other-day program of laxatives followed by an enema—the laxatives given the night before, the enema on the day of the bowel program itself. The nurse would turn him over, insert an enema into his anus, squeeze it into his rectum, and then turn him back over onto a bed pan. The chemicals would work in about thirty minutes, and he would passively move his bowels—he could no longer “push.” Then a nurse would roll him slightly off the bed pan, so as to insert a gloved finger into his anus to check for any stool that remained. If she felt something, she would move her finger in a rapid circular motion to manually stimulate the muscles of the rectum and create the contractions necessary to empty out completely.
“Bowels lead.” I don’t know where I picked up this phrase, but its two-word simplicity states a simple truth. Maggie’s grandfather was a dentist who would dismiss his granddaughters’ complaints of discomfort by saying, “If you don’t have a fever and you’re moving your bowels, you’re fine.” True enough—failure to get rid of your body’s waste will certainly kill you. But what about all the suffering in between, now diminished into nothingness by this dismissively hyperbolic comparison? My bowels are moving, my temperature’s normal, but I’m far from fine, because my bowels are now a great mental, emotional, and physical trouble to me. In fact, my own bowel program sometimes horrifies me—it’s mine, it’s unavoidable, unpleasant, and sometimes downright nasty. What troubles me most, however, is a simple fact—I’ll never not have an insistent and unforgettable bowel program in my insistent, unforgettable future. The future of my body can only be worse than it is now.
Of course, any bowel “mistake” is deeply embarrassing—just ask the toddler who has successfully graduated from diapers, but has somehow inadvertently dumped in his pants. Further, who among us has not released upon the world a quiet, evil-smelling fart and then pretended to know nothing about it? As you know, even before my spinal cord was injured, I suffered from intestinal gas. One day when Janet and I were driving a U-Haul from Arizona to Connecticut we stopped in a McDonald’s for coffee, and I quietly farted the world’s worst fart when paying at the cash register. The woman serving me glanced around and then said to no one in particular, “What’s that horrible smell? Yuck—it smells like something’s rotten or dead.” Believe me, I wasn’t owning up to that mortification! I’ll bet that you can think of at least one similar disavowal of passed gas, though perhaps not as dramatic. But unless you, too, are living with partially paralyzed bowel muscles (or are caring for someone so paralyzed), I doubt you know any more than I did about bowel function and paralysis before I broke my neck.
Jeff no longer moves his bowels. He’s dead. I, however, am very much alive and move my bowels on an unvarying schedule: two days off, three capsules of a powerful herbal laxative and stool softener on the evening of the second, followed by a morning enema on the third day, then an hour or two—or even, at the very worst, three—sitting over the toilet, with digital stimulation when I think I’m done. That’s when everything’s going well. Sometimes everything doesn’t go well. In the past year I’ve twice suffered through the second day feeling real heaviness in my bowels, which gathered into a near certainty that I had to go—NOW. I had hoped to get through the night, but no. Both times I’ve had to ask for help around midnight, once rousting Donna from her sleep and once delaying Janet’s bedtime with me. No one was in bed before 2:30 A.M., because I shower after my time on the toilet. I can feel my sphincter muscle, and flex it—as I can feel and flex all my muscles—but it’s not innervated enough to stop any stool that’s on the way out. You can’t imagine how helpless I feel.
One of the most significant victories a young child wins, for which she is trained and praised, is control of her bowels. Sphincter control matters, as does the ability to “push.” Here’s what happens when you have a bowel movement:
When the rectum is filled, pressure within it is increased. This increased intrarectal pressure initially forces the walls of the anal canal apart and allows the fecal material to enter the canal; as material is entering, muscles attached to the pelvic floor help further to pull the anal canal walls apart. The rectum shortens as it expels material into the anal canal, and peristaltic waves propel the feces out of the rectum. In the anus there are two muscular constrictors, the internal and external sphincters, that allow the feces to be passed or retained. As feces exit, the anus is drawn up over the passing mass by muscles of the pelvic diaphragm to prevent prolapse (pushing out of the body) of the anal canal.1
This complicated process is what we ask all toddlers to control, using the euphemism of “accident” to name any failure. The child nonetheless knows that an accident is not neutral, but is rather her responsibility, to be chalked up to her account. Freud emphasizes this understanding and the slowly advancing control the child gains. Indeed, psychoanalytic theory goes further back still, to the raw “hommelette,” in Lacan’s play on words, the unformed infant whose brain is still growing when she is born, and whose cranium is not yet whole, who slowly, slowly grows up being handled—being cooked, as it were—by adults. Her body is repeatedly marked out for her nascent contemplation by the special attention given to all of her orifices. The child successfully trained to use the toilet is on her way to understanding the adult world and its mysterious imperatives and rewards.
Writing these details, I’m reminded of the pregnant phrase “too much information.” Indeed. Yet as you know, a good bowel movement can be a real satisfaction, even if we don’t discuss moving our bowels in polite company. W. H. Auden, despite this conversational norm, wrote a ten-stanza poem about that pleasure, “The Geography of the House,” and dedicated it to his friend and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood. He begins with the fact that we all feel better when our bowels are regular, saying that we should “Raise a cheer to Mrs. / Nature for the primal / Pleasure She bestows.” As the poem progresses, the speaker arrives at the psychoanalytic insight that links the work of toilet training with adult creativity.
Lifted off the potty,
Infants from their mothers
Hear their first impartial
Words of worldly praise:
. . .
All the arts derive from
This ur-act of making,
Private to the artist:
Makers’ lives are spent
Striving in their chosen
Medium to produce a
De-narcissus-ized en-
During excrement.
The poem continues to gather in consequence as it nears the end.
Global Mother, keep our
Bowels of compassion
Open through our lifetime,
Purge our minds as well:
Grant us a king ending,
Not a second childhood,
Petulant, weak-sphinctered,
In a cheap hotel.
Auden understands that the phrase “Bowels of compassion” renders a merciful and generous emotion visceral and deeply, internally felt, while the poem itself embodies generosity. “Mrs. / Nature” becomes humanity’s “Global Mother,” who compassionately endows with pleasure a function necessary to life. He develops exfoliative ramifications from this unsung, lifelong pleasure, and links it to creativity itself. Every time you “go” after breakfast you (
unconsciously) recall the satisfaction of making something that pleased your earliest caretaker, and all artists hope to create a “De-narcissus-ized en- / During excrement,” a thing made with another in mind, so that it can be truly valued by others. The poem happily reminds its readers that the m/other-directed pleasure of controlling our bowels motivates “All the arts,” because artistic creation is profoundly reliant upon the unconscious bodily life of the artist. The speaker goes on to petition the Global Mother for an old age free of bowel incontinence, and links that failure of control to an impoverished life. Then his final stanza returns to the present moment and the “primal pleasure” of the poem’s opening:
Mind and Body run on
Different timetables:
Not until our morning
Visit here can we
Leave the dead concerns of
Yesterday behind us,
Face with all our courage
What is now to be.2
The poet turns to the future, and the infinitive “to be” brings his poem to an end. Auden leaves readers with the verb of being—I am, you are, s/he is. We are, you are, they are. Quite truly, bowels lead.
A Body, Undone Page 10