Two things happened on December 17th: Jules died and Willa lived. Willa’s survival was no sure thing. When we drove her from the birth center to the hospital, the doctors rushed her to surgery, just like they do on television, shouting “go, go, go.” After everyone ran from the large intake room where we arrived, I sat there in stillness and anguish, listening to my breath, resting for a time in the silence that is only found within. The nurse midwife came back from the operating room to relay updates. She told me it wasn’t clear if either Willa or the baby would make it. In that moment, time stopped. I was overcome, pulled to the ground, pleading and prostrating myself to whatever god might hear me.
Later, the medical staff told us several times that Willa almost died. “She gave us a run for our money,” one nurse said. Clearly they were shaken up, too. By the time they got Willa into the OR, she looked like a ghost and had lost a great deal of blood. She aspirated as they put her on the ventilator. She required multiple units of blood to survive. In the world of adverse perinatal experiences, this is referred to as a “maternal near-miss” — as if the gods were gunning for you, and didn’t quite succeed.
Jules’ death is a life-changing experience, but so too is Willa’s survival.
Already, for the nine months leading up to Jules’ birth, I had been filled with awe — and I will admit a good deal of jealousy, too — at the fact that Willa was bringing forth new life into the world. This is a god-like power: to physically reproduce our species, to grow another human. It is no surprise that some of the oldest artistic artifacts are the Venus figurines of pregnant women, dating back more than 21,000 years.
Even after witnessing the terror and danger of childbirth, this dual experience of the thin line between dying and living has left me with a profound, almost mystical, sense of amazement that any of us are alive at all. If you are here, you’ve somehow made it through the danger of birth. You have gone on living in this fragile world, where you could be struck down at any time.
How are we not astonished in each moment by the fact that our heart is pumping blood through the soft fruit of our organs, that our synapses are firing in the jellyfish tucked between our ears, that the whole operation is humming and whirring beneath our paper-thin wrapping? Our beautiful, bewildering beings — children of parents stretching back billions of years to a few proteins trapped in little lipid bubbles — those beings can unwind in an instant, as the trillions upon trillions of processes that make up our lives come to an end.
Most of us, most of the time, go about our days completely oblivious to the sheer contingency, fragility, vulnerability of our lives and the lives of those we love. For all of these complex processes are the infrastructure that enables our living, and when things are going well, when we are getting on with our business, it is mostly invisible to us. Sudden death brings it so starkly into view. Death gives us new eyes to see the world around us, and perhaps, most particularly, the people we love and could lose at any minute.
My wife Willa is a wonder.
In the days since her survival, my admiration for her has only grown. Willa and I met in a friend’s living room in Chicago more than a decade ago. She had just moved to town to study religion at the university, where I was studying philosophy. It was a hot, muggy evening, and we were savoring the slowness of summer, of a time in our lives when we had little to do. Willa and I got into an argument of some kind or other about Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, and I knew that I was in love immediately. She has a fierce, keen, stubborn intellect — and what could be more electric and enjoyable?
In the years since, I left academia but she stayed the course, tenaciously navigating long hours in lonely libraries, a discipline still largely dominated by men, and the gauntlet that is graduate study. She has spent most of her career thinking about the role that hope plays in the moral life, especially in the face of widespread and increasingly catastrophic environmental collapse. It’s difficult work, and at the end of the day, I find that she’s been reading cheery titles like “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.” Nonetheless, she is a careful and persistent scholar. The mere doing of her work embodies the human ability to maintain hope under less than ideal conditions.
Willa has had a temporary position here in Pennsylvania and the future has been far from certain. Academia, like so many other fields, has become an increasingly precarious place, filled mostly with temporary, part-time, and low-pay positions. There are typically only 4-10 permanent positions in North America each year in Willa’s field, and there are hundreds of qualified candidates who apply for each job. This was her seventh year looking for a permanent position. Each year, we imagine our lives unfolding somewhere else: Northfield or New Haven, Santa Clara or Seattle, Waco or Princeton or Ontario or Chicago or Baton Rouge (to offer a sampling). Though mostly, we find ourselves here, again: waiting and wondering, with an undercurrent of anxiety and unease. You feel like a passer through, not just of this house, this town, but of your own life; everything is marked by a temporariness that never lets you fully settle down.
This fall, Willa had a number of interviews scheduled around the time of Jules’ arrival. One search committee had reached out to request an interview on her due date, and Willa had proposed instead to do the first week of January.
So, less than 3 weeks after Willa nearly died and we lost our son, she had a phone interview with half a dozen professors at Davidson College. If you’ll remember, after she was released from the hospital, Willa developed an acute viral infection and lost her eyesight for about a week. Astonishingly, she managed to do this interview just days later, when she could still barely make out her notes.
The committee then invited Willa to travel to North Carolina for a campus interview, which took place 9-weeks to the day after she was released from the hospital. She was still having trouble walking more than short distances. The nurses had told her that she’d feel like a “rag doll” for several months after receiving so much blood. True.
Academic job interviews are a grueling affair. The schedule typically includes more than a dozen events spread out over three-days, and requires giving a formal lecture to the university community. This all takes a good deal of preparation — frankly, applying to academic jobs is a part-time job in itself that keeps many academics occupied in an endless loop of temporary teaching work, low pay, and an intensive search for more stable employment.
Even as she recovered physically and grieved Jules’ death, Willa mustered up the stamina and the courage to prepare herself for the interview. Each day in late January and early February, she went up into our attic for a few hours to try to do some work preparing for the interview. She wrote and practiced her lecture, prepared notes for every one of those dozen meetings, and even tried to go on longer walks so that she’d have enough stamina to get around the campus.
We drove the ten hours down to North Carolina together for the interview on President’s Day weekend — getting caught in a show squall along the way — and remarkably she made it through those three days of meeting upon meeting.
More remarkably still, Willa got the job. Now, I am married to Dr. Willa Swenson-Lengyel, the Holmes Rolston, III Assistant Professor of Religion and Science at Davidson College. (How about that for a title, eh?)
Since Willa got the job, we’ve found ourselves pulled back into the busyness of life. We’ve made that 10-hour drive down to North Carolina quite a few times now, watching spring emerge little by little as we pass through the Shenandoah Valley, passing the site of John Brown’s historic raid. We bought a house and have been working on getting it fixed up before we move in. We are packing up our belongings and preparing to leave this house at the end of the month, this place where we had waited with anticipation for Jules’ arrival.
In our internal world, these still feel like happenings, not events. Which is to say: we struggle to experience them fully at the level of feeling. Or perhaps: we struggle to let ourselves feel joy through our sadness. (They do not tell you that even joy will be painful.) For everything that has happened since Jules’ death unfolds in the shadow of his absence, in this land where time has stopped.
Still, we know that these things are good. They reassure us that to be alive is to have possibilities, some frightening and terrible, yes, but others good and desirable and beautiful. That is a reason for hope, as we slowly re-enter the stream of time, the busyness of life.
As we make our way, I am amazed that Willa could do all this in the weeks after she almost died, after we lost our son. Her surviving alone would have been enough. To do all this, too, well that is really something. She is fierce, and tenacious, and courageous — and I wish I could see how our son would have inherited these traits from her, what he would have done with them. But I am glad that I have her with me, to mourn with me, yes, but also to shimmer here alongside me in all her beautiful, bewildering being.