The history of caregiving, of how we as a country and people took care of our most vulnerable citizens is a history that we need to know, to remember. I’d venture to say that that history repeatedly informs our present, that some of the issues Jeneva referred to in yesterday’s post, that many of us write about over and over, are an ongoing response to how our country has historically responded to those who don’t conform, who have been born or become different. How many of us have prayed or hoped for a “normal” baby. How many of us have aborted babies whose lives would be different than the norm. How many of us have pitied the lives of people like my daughter, Sophie? How many of us have said I’d rather be dead than in a wheelchair? or When I become a burden, when you have to change my diapers, please help me to die?
The larger history of an American individualism, of a sort of cult of the individual, has enabled a kind of disconnection from what I believe we all very much require — and that is community and shared caregiving. That community and shared caregiving trumps the notion of burden, in my mind. I can acknowledge the burden of caring for a person who is entirely dependent on me for every single life need and requirement, but the burden is in the isolation and stigma, as well as the fucked-up systems of care in a culture that puts the burden of proof of need on the most vulnerable, that demands a kind of groveling and then gratitude for charity given.
It is, rather, an honor, to care for Sophie, herself. Do you understand that?
If you know me, you know how much I love and even rely upon poetry to keep me sane and in love with the world, if not living. For today’s post, I thought I’d introduce you to poet Molly McCully Brown, the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which is “haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, an epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century…”, according to her website.
Molly McCully Brown’s poems are a chorus of women who’ve long been denied a voice and, disarmingly, those who witnessed—or inflicted—their agony. Born with cerebral palsy, Brown immerses herself in this devastating past, close to home on so many levels—at first “spastic, palsied, and off-balanced. . . taking crooked notes,” then seeming to embody the patients in the Colony’s dormitories, infirmaries, and notorious blind room (site of some of its most heinous maltreatments). Yet for all the horrors it channels, Brown’s visionary book uplifts through communion: Another truck comes loud up the road / bearing another girl,” she writes. “There is whatever it is / you’re calling to. There is / however it is you call.” In her poems, Brown listens to the callers from a dark past and takes on their anguish.
McCully Brown has also written an essay collection titled Places I’ve Taken My Body, exploring “living within and beyond the limits of a body―in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder.”
Get thee to an independent bookstore.
Listen to this magnificent poet here:
Interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air”
“Wild at the Root” interview on the Poetry Foundation website
Yes, a wonderful book by Molly McCully Brown. All these essays Elizabeth should be in a book! I hope you are writing one. xo Suzanne
I read an essay by her, what a wonderful writer and a beautiful, young woman. Thank you for introducing me to her.