Life's Afternoon, Part 3

Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary's Class - Wellesley '69
by Miriam Horn

(Page 3 of 3)

The New Age alternatives repelled Nancy just as thoroughly. She despised the idea implicit in the New Agers' self-healing practices that illness is a kind of failure, proof that one has lived with too much bitterness or anger; she would not accept that cancer, as Camille Paglia once wrote, was "nature's revenge on the ambitious, childless woman." She also found visualization, which she had tried at a mind-body clinic after her lumpectomy, "really kind of stupid. Golden beams of sunlight come into your body and seek out the cancer cells and beat them up and now you're healed. It was so obvious and without imagination and grating. They would critique your visualizations. 'Oh no, you've got the color yellow in there. That's the color for disease. That's a bad visualization.' "

At the interfaith institute, leading a group called Cancer and the Spiritual Life, she was stunned to find so many educated women "into" what seemed to her simplistic and narcissistic nonsense. "They think that if we can think good thoughts, we won't have cancer. What, you think we're that powerful? There are Zen monks who have died of cancer. It's not a disease of neurosis. One guy, a psychiatrist, had a wife with breast cancer. She was doing visualizations, refusing conventional treatment, casting herself as the guru, and is now dead. We had an Irish Catholic nun in the group talking about bioenergetics. I left. All the crystals and massages don't have a lot to do with the spiritual life, as I understand it, which is not about aggrandizement of the self but about a relationship with the Other."

Her classmates' sojourns into the New Age also perplex her. "Angels? Well, what's the theology here? Are they just benign spirits? From where? These people seem to have no questions. On other subjects they'll be scientific and rigorous; on this they lose their critical faculties. From what I've seen, the goddess movement does no grappling with tough issues. You still have the issue of evil and suffering no matter who you put up there. Make it a goddess. If she's a real goddess, she's been there all along, so why hasn't there been all this peace and ecological harmony? And why were all those pagan goddess worshipers, like the Canaanites and Egyptians, not terribly nice? If you start making up your religion, it's shallow. I'm always looking at the dark side. How does this work on the dark side? I take it deadly seriously."

Nancy's story is more harrowing than the stories of most in her class, but in midlife she feels their same mixture of sorrow and acceptance. "Sometimes I think, Shit, why haven't the things that have come to others also come to me? Why don't I have children? Such a natural thing. I'd love to have some kids around, to have a sense of life on the upswing and not just in decline. Why doesn't my life make sense, have some coherent direction? Why have I had this incredible amount of illness? It never stops, you know. I've had carpal tunnel surgery. Now a doctor wants to operate on my sinuses, and I think, Leave me alone. But I don't cry much, not too much. Oh, I cry over day-to-day disappointments. But I don't wake up in panic; I don't often feel overwhelmed. I've accepted that I live in a new place, that I can't go back to where I was. My life has been shipwrecked. Illness has thrown me out of the ship onto some other shore. All I can say is, 'Well, who am I now, and what do I have?' and go forward from there.

"The cancer diagnosis forced me to come to grips with deep wounds. Knowing I might die very soon, I wanted to make peace with all that I'd hardened my heart to. I tore the cover off a lot of things where the story had been written, realized I couldn't hold on to the set stories that protected me from having to reevaluate my life."

"I wanted to understand my parents and not hate them anymore. I found I could love them even with all their limitations. I try to help my mother, who nearly died from a thoracic aneurysm and is by herself. I've quit being angry at her for not developing her mind more. I see now that her father was so intimidating - he would not have permitted her to do other than what she did. When my father left her, she was fifty-eight and had never worked, but she got a job at Filene's and became a terrific saleswoman, working till she was seventy-three. She made the steps she could, and was forced to, make.

"She was ghastly when I was in the hospital. She talked about what a hassle it was to get into town to visit me. I finally said, 'Look, my life is in jeopardy here.' And she said, with this look of utter terror on her face: 'I just ask God, Why didn't this happen to me? You're a young person, and I've lived my life.' I was touched by her wish to sacrifice herself for me, the ultimate motherly impulse. I saw that she really does have feelings she can't ordinarily articulate. It would have given me a lot of consolation along the years to know that she was behind me in that way.

"My father, I also realized, has had a fairly miserable life. He was acutely unhappy with my mother. He'd loved being an auto mechanic and would have loved to go to college, but he felt forced to do things he didn't love to make more money, to satisfy my mother's desire to be more securely middle-class. He considers himself a failure; to me, he no longer seems a villain, but a victim of the times and men's assigned roles. That he had to be the sole breadwinner limited his life terribly.

"He waited a long time to leave my mother, feeling it a bad thing to do, a great taboo. He's a pretty tightly bound person. He wouldn't be in the vanguard, but then the changes initiated by our generation rippled upward. He finally left, and moved into a one-room apartment, and has been married three times since, not so happily. His second wife died. His third was a disaster: He was with her when I had cancer, which seemed to make no impression on them at all. His fourth, well, with her he seems pretty happy. He's certainly ended up in a far better place than he ever would have with my mother, which I guess is an argument for people to make the changes necessary to try to keep some happiness for themselves. He calls a lot now, and I go to see him.

"My parents are in their eighties, but there's this funny bond, like we're all old people wondering how much longer we have. I drew up my will and then made sure my mother's was in order. I jumped into their generation. Everyone will enter this place in time. But somehow a young person faced with her mortality, well, I speak from a place most people my age don't know.

"I never thought I'd go back to a Wellesley reunion, but for the twenty-fifth I sought them out. I was apprehensive, but wanted to understand why I'd hated it so badly, why it had been so traumatic. I ended up loving it, and came to think less about how fucked-up the college had been and more about who I was when I arrived there. I saw myself as a victim: that they were privileged and I was not, which I now think was mostly my inherited paranoia. And as much as I wish it had been happier, given who I was and my family, it was the only experience I could have had.

"In many ways, the sad tone of my life was set there. I hoped I'd find a place, and didn't. To me it felt like a cul-de-sac, that things were closing down instead of opening up. Other people whose families thought they were great had a stronger sense of themselves, and just flowered. Martha Teichner knew she was a good storyteller and found her place in TV and . . . zoom. I wish I'd had that sense of myself early on, but I couldn't have: My father was too critical of who I was, and what he told me about life was too poisonous and frightened. I thought you had to sell your soul to have a secure life. I felt alienated and lost, and that feeling stayed with me.

"At reunion, I stood up and said, 'Here's the most important thing that's happened to me,' and told them about my cancer. People were really moved, which moved me to tears. I thought, How kind to give me that recognition, to offer courage. And what a shame I had felt so isolated as a student, when I feel so close to these women now. What a terrific community I might have found. All the time I thought we had nothing in common, that they all had it made. Now I see they've struggled, too, that their lives played surprises on them, that everyone has endured grief. No one has gone unscathed. We had more choices than we knew how to deal with, and most of us still are confused. Should I be doing this, or that?"

Copyright © 2000 by Miriam Horn

About the Author

Miriam Horn writes for U.S. News and World Report. She lives in New York City with her husband.