Hosting the Moirai

A few weeks ago, my aunt died. She was my mother's elder sister and, owing to my family's complicated history, one of the few members of the extended family to which we were all genuinely close. Like my mother, she was a proud, force of nature of a women. Based, in part, on the fact that like my mother, she was more or less on her own from a young age.
My mother's mother was born in 1900. She died six months after my birth. My mother was the youngest of all her cousins (on her father's side, she had six aunts and uncles, so there were many cousins). And I, born 83 years after my grandmother, am the youngest of her grandchildren. My eldest cousin is more than 20 years older than me. My mother's cousins (those she was still close with) were grandparent aged to me. I saw them once a year, and though our relationship was pleasant, it was never close. They were part of the holidays. And besides, when they got together with their youngest cousin, they talked of family mostly long dead, and memories long past. I learnt a lot from them about how the world had changed, and about my history, but mostly through listening to the stories they told each other.
My aunt was different. She never missed a birthday or Christmas to call us. None of us would consider going to Paris without visiting her. My mother and she did not have the easiest relationship, but they have never waivered in the affection they have shown each other's children. Perhaps sometimes, that was easier than speaking directly.
I miss my aunt dearly. And beyond her, with her passing I have lost the closest thing I ever had to a physical home in France, her holiday house in the Alsatian Vosges mountains, to which my mother always had a key. Now that I will no longer take the train to her little Paris suburb for dinner or lunch when I visit that city, it will become a little less friendly to me. I am thankful my husband got to meet her twice. I am thankful she adored him (despite the language barrier). I am thankful for the beautiful cross stitch sample she made for us, despite cancer and chemo and caring for her husband as dementia and ill health weakened him. She survived him by less than six months.

But as hard as loosing my aunt is for me, for my mother the sense of loneliness is vast. In the past years so many of her old friends have become weak and frail, have started one by one to take their leave of us. When they started weakening, my mother, who has the energy and physical fitness of a woman twenty years younger then she is, was irritated at them for not going on walks with her anymore, for no longer staying up until 2am to talk. Now she understands; she is resigned; and talks with her old friends, though more important, no longer bring levity and joy to her. She returns from trips to France drained, and needs time with her younger friends, her children and grandchildren to regain her energy.
With the loss of my aunt, only one person, a friend from Kindergarten, is left who remembers my mother's childhood. And the first five years (which for my mother were defining to her life story) are now remembered only by her. She has entered a period where, increasingly, more and more of her life can be confirmed by no one. And, as my brother points out, there is now almost no one left with whom she can speak the dialect her own grandmother (born in 1870) taught her. Strands are being cut, and my mother feels it.
Of late, she has begun to speak more of her own passing. Not in a morbid way, but in a pragmatic way. She is counting down. She knows she can no longer count on an endless bounty of more time. She senses both the urgency of doing what can still be done, and the knowledge that less is possible. In part, this is because of what is happening around her. In part, and I know my mother enough to know this, it is because of what she has read. She is preparing herself, training herself for a new phase of life. I know this because the same thought that is animating her has returned to me: the French philosopher Montaigne's famous aphorism:
"que philosopher, c'est apprendre a mourir"
"Doing philosophy, is learning to die"
To which I would add, it is also learning that others die.
With my aunt's passing, and my mother's words and stories, a new presence enters my life: the Moirai, the three sisters of Greek mythology. In the past, they have visited suddenly, and departed. But now I see they are here to stay. They are in my house, and it does not do to deny the Gods. Clotho is spinning thread more slowly, and Lachesis casts a more judicious eye on how much she draws out. And Atropos, having just used her scissors, has put them down. But they hang from her belt, always within hand's reach.

The Moirai are here, and their presence is a warning, but also a gift, in the manner of Greek gods. They are here to tell me I can no longer ignore them, and I must act accordingly in what I do.

What my husband sees

A propos of many things preoccupying me right now.

My husband doesn't see the stalled papers, the floundering analysis, the discovery of unforeseen sources of error that send us back to the drawing board. My husband doesn't see that the first trial of new experiments to yield the preliminary results for my grant didn't quite pan out. My husband doesn't see the deadline get skipped, the need to do a second batch of experiments unplanned between now and the all hands on deck summer.
My husband only hears second hand the balancing act of resources between projects: the grant that pays me, the project that may be my own grant, the preliminary data for my PIs new grant. My husband isn't there for the meetings to plan what happens next, to allocate time, to discuss overcoming setbacks, to distribute tasks. My husband doesn't feel the continuous, ever present feeling that there are not enough hours to do everything. My husband isn't there when my PI and I have long, frank conversations about what I need to do to get hired, and how to balance that with what I need to do for the grant that pays me.
All my husband sees is that I have worked most weekends in the past two months. All my husband knows is that I asked to move our first year anniversary weekend trip by a few weeks to put in those few extra experiments. That almost all weekends between now and mid august are booked, taken by science. There'll be no back country camping trip, or trip to the beach, this summer. All my husband knows is that every get together with friends starts with a list of evenings I can't. "You go, but I have pigs. Maybe I'll join you later".
My husband also sees me exhausted, and defeated, when things go wrong. He sees me after I've been kept awake for hours wondering how I'm going to get everything I need to get done done. He sees me work long hours, then come home and always be tempted to run to my office to do an analysis, or read a paper. He knows when I'm going to negotiate a Saturday morning at work. He sighs wearily when I say "I'm taking my laptop with me on the weekend".
My husband has been with me since grad school, and he understands that I need to work hard. He understands this is a grueling game I'm playing. But in his eyes, I already put in more hours then I should. In his eyes, my work is already everywhere, like a Virginia creeper that needs to be watched and fought lest it stifle the house.
I'm currently working very hard on eliminating counter productive time sinks from my nine to five, to maximise what I get out of the day. Partly, it's for me. I need to be more productive, I need to use my time better. But partly, it's for him. I've begged and borrowed and stolen enough hours from us. There needs to be a limit.

When lightning strikes a crowded room

When I met my first boyfriend, lightning struck. We had never met before, but the moment he walked into my friend's kitchen, he was my sole focus that night. It turned out to be mutual. We talked to each other, and for each other all through dinner. We walked to the bus stop for me to catch a bus, he wheeling his bike so he could keep talking to me. It was only the part of my screaming "you're not out yet! To anyone! Do not make any rash decisions!" that stopped me from kissing him that very night.
We texted incessantly, and began a rapid, dramatic courtship. We went on dates, walked through London at night, kissed, fought, made up, spilled our hearts to each other. It was passionate and powerful and joyous and liberating and melodramatic in a way only the first encounter with those feelings can be. I have no regrets about that relationship.
It lasted three months. We broke up (with much elegant drama), saw each other a couple more times, then went off on our separate lives once again. The only fallout from that relationship was a bruised heart, and some lessons about how to treat other people.
I was young, and single, and my boyfriend was a stranger. Lightning struck us, and it was exhilarating. If any of those parameters had been different, the lightning strike would have been at least inconvenient, at most terrifying.
There is a reason Anna Karenina flees the ball after her encounter with Vronsky. There is a reason Olivia's response to meeting Viola/Cesario is "Soft, even so swiftly may one catch the plague?" There is a reason Elinor Dashwood will not speak of her feelings for Edward Farrars, when she does not know (and has reason to doubt) that any good may come of it.
The lightning strikes of love guarantee nothing: not that the lightning strike is reciprocated, not that the fit is good, not that happiness will befall. To use them as the sole guide of behavior is foolishness. To claim they are the pathway to goodness and happiness and should be given special consideration above all other factors is adolescent petulance that results in real pain.
People take risks for love yes. They sometimes must. And they sometimes pay a heavy price. You probably know several people who've moved for love, only to have it not work out. They rebuild their lives in a new place, alluding only rarely to the circumstance that brought them there. We often, if we are friends with people making those choices, have misgivings, fears. "Are you sure? Is this wise?"
Literature and personal history tell us that lightning love is a poor guide of behavior. And yet, when some suggest that, in situations were abuse of power is easy, where all outside factors conspire to suggest that following the guides of Eros's arrow is foolish and dangerous, and enables much worse behavior, how quick we are to demand that love be given primacy.
How many of you would counsel a friend or daughter to run off with someone they'd met only once? How many of you would counsel a married friend to start an affair because of a moment on chemistry, rather than to make quite sure they were never alone with that person again? And yet you would not counsel someone not to start a relationship with their subordinates? And yet you would not tell them that is ill advised? And yet you would not tell them to protect both themselves and the one they claim to love? I call shenanigans.
Edward Farrars, as it turns out, was as enamoured of Elinor as she of him. But he had gotten engaged to Lucy Steele much younger, and to break that engagement (because of the fucked up social mores of Austen's time) would have ruined the young woman. Edward chose to honor his promise to Lucy (until circumstances relieved him of it). Had he not done so, not only would he have ruined Lucy, he would not have been the honorable, kind man that Elinor fell for in the first place.
In contrast, Willoughby, the Villain of sense and sensibility, pursues Elinor's sister Marianne. Here is the point though: Willoughby's love for Marianne is not insincere. But because he is selfish, he does not recognise that pursuing that attraction can only harm Marianne. This is what Elinor cannot forgive in him: that he put his own pleasure ahead of her sister's wellbeing. Austen understood only too well that to be in love with someone, is not the same as to care for them.
If you wish to do well by people, you cannot rely on the lightning strikes of passion to guide you to goodness. Austen knew this, Tolstoi knew this, Shakespeare knew this. Scientists should remember it too