Standing in the den two nights ago my husband rubbed his hands through his hair, looked at me and said, โHave I come undone?โ
I said, โWell, Iโm sure you have. Listen to this. . . .โ
I opened a book and read something Iโd found earlier that very day. Stumbled across it really.
โLetโs face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite oneโs best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the otherโ (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004, 19).
I didnโt hesitate to say โyesโ to his question because weโve all come undone. And weโre always coming undone because grief and its predecessor desire are always weaving in and out of our lives.
Butler, who is a philosopher and theorizes about gender and sexuality, says in a very lovely observation about grief: “I am not sure I know when mourning is successful, or when one has fully mourned another human being. I’m certain, though, that it does not mean that one has forgotten the person, or that something else comes along to take his or her place. I don’t think it works that way. I think instead that one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advanceโ (Ibid., 18).
Now it turns out that what my husband was actually talking about is the oversized garden heโs planning for this summer. Okay garden is too meager a word. Small farm. Heโs gathered up strangers, friends, equipment, seeds and way more dirt than I care to think about. Heโs returning to his roots in a way. Iโm one more generation removed from growing my own food than he is. (Iโm still wondering what weโll do with it all if it grows.) The plan has been underway for months. And even though the planning was underway, to return to roots feels like a practice of grieving in some profound way.
Butler goes on, โSo there is losing and there is the transformative effect of the loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. I donโt think for instance, you invoke a Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. You canโt say โOh, Iโll go through the loss this way, and that will be the result, and Iโll apply myself to the task, and Iโll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before meโโ (Ibid., 18).
So farming wonโt return us to normal or help us control the outcome of the changes. And my writing wonโt make everything okay or resolve things.
But the timing feels right. Amid grief weโll dig in the dirt . . . feel muscles strain . . . watch things grow . . . toil and sweat . . . eat the fruits of our labor . . .
See how much of it we canโt control . . . rain, sun, hungry creatures . . . growth itself.
In our losses and in our loves we are all undone. As another friend put it to me, โevery lament is a love song.โ And in a loss so tender as we have felt in this season of Lent, we are undone and in our undoing we are each living in the โthrall of relationships,โ as Butler puts it, that compound and complicate our undoing.
We donโt yet know the end of the story, the transformative effect, how we will be remade in ways we canโt yet imagine. Letโs face it. We donโt know the end of the story or how we will be transformed. Only that we are being changed and undone. So maybe weโll just have to dig in and see what happens.
