Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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The Comfort of Strangers

Adrift in a landscape of grief after her husband's death, a teacher finds a sense of home among strangers

By Melissa Madenski

Twenty years ago, when my husband, Mark, died of a heart arrhythmia, I became a foreigner in the country of grief. Navigating the landscape would be a long learning. In the immediacy of sorrow, even the familiar was strange. I'd stare at a toothbrush for long periods of time trying to remember what it was called. I'd find my glasses in the refrigerator, my keys in the laundry. I laugh at the memory now, but in the beginning, even laughter was gone.

I'd been to the country before, briefly, but not to a region as remote as this. Six years prior to Mark's death, we'd spent two months visiting the intensive care unit where our son, who was born eleven weeks prematurely, grew his fragile, complex body. Unfamiliar hospital customs--having to scrub with Betadine soap every time I picked up a piece of lint or a pen, having to sit in a room with no windows where light was artificial and monitors sounded twenty-four hours a day, having to jiggle my son's toes so he could breathe again and his skin would turn from gray to pink--became ordinary. Once you are no longer the stranger, once you've adjusted your behavior to the culture in which you live, the "normal" looks odd. Full-term infants seemed obese with all their rolls of fat and pudgy cheeks.

Just after Mark's death, I was offered a job teaching English to nonnative dairy workers just finishing up their shifts at local farms on the central Oregon coast. The class ran for two hours, three mornings a week, and was held in a Forest Service building backed up against Mount Hebo. The first day I opened the door I was blasted with temperatures more frigid than those outside. It would take the bulk of those two hours to warm the room enough to take off our coats.

This barren, icy room was where I started to heal, where I climbed those first hills of grief and could see out a short distance. At home, with two young children, there wasn't time to grieve. Sorrow broke through, of course. Sometimes I found myself hiring a babysitter so I could drive around and cry without scaring my son and daughter. I told my children that I was sad now, but I would get better. I believed this. I just couldn't figure out how to make it happen.

The first day I taught in Hebo, I found the students' stories so absorbing that I forgot my own. Just as I'd learned that moving--bicycling, jump-roping, walking, running--exhausted me enough to allow sleep, I found that hearing the stories of other foreigners helped me better understand my own. Some of these men had families they were sending money to, children they saw maybe once a year. It would be easy to romanticize these stories, but that would be missing the point. Like me, these were people flawed in the land of the unfamiliar. We were trying to figure out how to do the best by our families, how to survive in a strange land.

While this foreign country felt odd to my students, my own country felt equally strange to me. What were the cultural customs for grief? How would I help my children heal? Would I ever feel at home again? Customs, vocabulary, even completing a trip to the market felt like tasks that had to be relearned. I couldn't communicate in the same way I had before. I felt alone. Students told me that when they went home, nothing felt the same. They were not citizens of either place. I was beginning to understand what they meant.

After a year, the Hebo job was over. I took a job teaching ESL to students in Newport, a coastal town with a large fish plant as well as restaurants and hotels that supported the tourist economy. Many of my students worked in these industries. Thrown together by need and circumstance, people from countries that were historical enemies sat close to one another, ate together, studied together--the trio of women from Japan, the Philippines, and China; the students from Spain and Mexico. Stories united us more than they divided us. Homa, from Iran, told us about the holy days of Ramadan. Marta said she had two birthdays because the census-taker came only once a year to her tiny town in Mexico, and her mother had forgotten to mark the exact day she was born.

The notion of an all-embracing Lady Liberty who welcomed the tired and poor didn't operate as advertised. My students experienced racism and discrimination as well as acceptance. They were certainly tired and poor, but the restrictions on immigration were tightening, causing those welcoming arms to close.

If the world saw my students as strangers, inside the classroom we built shared customs through celebrations of birth, baptism, and new jobs. We learned to say, "Could you please speak more slowly? I'm just learning English," or simply, "Help." I asked repeatedly, "How is it in your country?"

Learning the language and culture of place was at the heart of every lesson, but it was the stories that connected us. They allowed us to carry more weight together than we were able to bear as individuals. The author Rick Bass says that when we live in a place, it becomes "storied." "Story" becomes a verb. We become "storied." This is a good thing to remember for people who have built themselves on the notions of a melting pot. Underneath our different colors, experiences, religious and political beliefs, my students and I found similarities. We loved our families; we wanted better things for our children; we didn't want to feel like the stranger.

However, as a stranger, I learned to listen carefully, without the distractions of familiarity. I was more alert both to my students and my family. I grew more aware of what I retained instead of what I lost. Each new job I took, each new experience, helped me live the answers to my earlier questions about grief.

In spring, I took a third job coordinating a grant on "life skills" at the local jail. Two days a week I entered the lobby where a receptionist called the control-booth guard. She unlatched the first door after I passed through the metal detector. After the first door was unlatched, I passed through three more doors, which led to the control booth where I checked in. I learned to listen for the click that indicates a door latch is released. I had to adjust my normal, rapid stride. Not once was I able to fling a door open in my usual manner and enter a classroom at will. Like my students, I learned to wait, to adapt to an unfamiliar situation.

People in jail adapt to living elbow to elbow with inmates who are at best instructive and at worst disturbing and extreme in their behavior. They learn to read not just strangers, but the strange. They read the air for signs of anger and map their movements to avoid conflict. They gauge whether a situation calls for collaboration, confrontation, or escape.

My students didn't know about the weather on any given day. They didn't see the wind ruffle the fields where the cows grazed. They didn't see the mallards rise in the spring, didn't feel the warmth of the sun on their faces or see the pink sky to the west at dusk. The air they breathed was never thick with the scent of wild lupine in the spring or honeysuckle and briar roses in summer. A baby's cry was rarely heard, and the sound of wheat swishing would never be a part of inside life.

Sometimes I asked my students what they missed. Surprisingly, what they longed for was similar to what made my ESL students homesick. It was the ordinary, the familiar: driving a car, grocery shopping, tucking children in at night, drinking coffee in the morning sun, the light filtering through alder or maple, fresh air. Their losses, regardless of the choices they'd made, transformed them--and me.

At one time, I believed I'd lost nearly everything, but I still had a life that mattered because of how I was able to move within it. When I left the jail after teaching, the sky was not just blue, but brilliant blue. The trees were a deep, inky green; the meadows shone, and even the smell of cows was welcome. There were times I wanted to fall to my knees in the concrete parking lot in gratitude for my life, for the air so crisp, for my daughter's deep laughter, for my son's health, for music on the radio, for touch. I took big gulps of fresh air.

I moved forward while hearing stories that shape the human tribe. Nothing helped me do this as much as the fragmented roles I was piecing together into a whole. If my children had given me reasons to be alive, my students had returned to me a sense of belonging to life again; they had given me a place, albeit impermanent. I couldn't locate the exact moment when that intense grief transformed into thankfulness that I'd had Mark in my life at all.

Some of the answers to grief's questions were available; some I no longer sought. I carried community in an interior landscape. One can be a stranger in a hometown, or a community member in a strange place. Being a stranger among strangers, I was able to feel as if I'd come home.


Melissa Madenski has taught in the Pacific Northwest for thirty-seven years in public and independent schools, businesses, and correctional facilities. Her writing has appeared in regional and national anthologies and periodicals.

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities