The luxury of choice
I recently told a friend, who happens to be a former colleague, that I watch House for professional development. She laughed. Nevertheless, it's true-- my training focused on the molecular level, and not until my current job did I need to know much about organismal, particularly human, biology. Medical story lines on the show are pretty well researched, and they make interesting and weird connections-- all pluses in my book. But the real reason I can watch the show in that particular way is the writing. No, not because it's that good, or because they place all the clues out in the open. No, it's because they are forced to write the episodes starting from a medical scenario.
What that means is that while they can and do develop the characters of the doctors on the show to reveal facets of personality or elements of background, to fill in the dimensions, to make them believable, at least to a degree, they have far less flexibility with the patients. If the patient in episode N needs to collapse unexpectedly in the opening sequence, pee blood right before the first commercial break, go into v-fib seven minutes later, fail to respond to the first several treatments House was sure were going to work, lie about something or other, and finally recover or die with enough time to spare to give some screen time to the storylines about doctors' personal lives, well, that just doesn't leave much room for dramatic and believable character development, does it? Which suits me just fine. If I don't buy the patient as a real character, I can concentrate on the medical aspects. So yes, professional development. With a side of ahem... eye candy, as my sister calls them.
One teeny tiny complication there-- they do develop their doctors as characters. Which is normally a good thing in a TV show. Completely messes with my frame of reference, though, when they make one of their own a patient. Can even make me cry when they then kill her. Yes, the season finale. Very well done episode, wherein they try and fail to save the life of one of their former colleagues who is also the newish girlfriend of the title character's best friend.
Tears show up for me a lot these days. Any report about collapsed schools in China is guaranteed to make my eyes water. Music can get me to well up, and I won't even watch some movies that I expect to be upsetting. And yet, over the last week I watched over a season of House on DVDs (thanks, sis), learned a bunch of new stuff, made some cool connections with the things I learned over this past semester, but didn't cry once. I cried over that season finale, though. Couldn't articulate why. So I watched the second half again. Brilliant move, I know. But my need to know what was affecting me so much was greater than my need not to be affected again. I guess I can be analytical like that.
The second time I saw it, I knew right away. It was the dying doctor. Not that she was dying, but that she was making a choice, and articulating that choice. Her boyfriend asking her why is she not angry, why is she ok with dying. Because, she says, that is not the last emotion I want to experience.
She was dying. There was no way out. No choice, it seems. But she found something she had control over, and she made a choice. And the reason it made me sad, profoundly, deeply, for days after, is that I realized not everyone gets to make choices.
One of the things I try to do in my parenting, one of the things I articulate for my daughter is the issue of choice, of responsibility, of consequences. Most choices children make are not of great consequence. You can choose to wear X or Y today. You can have this or that for dinner. But slowly, as they grow, so do their choices, and the consequences of those choices. Watching my daughter make increasingly more weighty choices has been one of the subtle pleasures of parenting.
I have appreciated for a long time, from the very beginning, actually, that after A died, we did have some choices. I chose to start the induction that same night, and to eventually accept pain relief, even though I wouldn't have likely for a live birth. We chose to name him, to hold him, to take pictures, to follow our doctor's recommendation and ask for the autopsy. We chose things after that too. Telling Monkey the truth, but not taking her to the funeral. Leaning on our friends, but not letting them come to the funeral either. Going back to work when each of us did. Many, many choices.
What I didn't appreciate, the way I never looked at this before was that making choices is yet another thing my son never got to do, will never get to do. Babies have preferences, but no choices. His entire human existence passed, and he had no control of it, he never got to choose. I don't know what the last thing he experienced was. I do know he didn't get to choose it.
Maybe I am nitpicking. There are so many things that our babies won't get to do, so why am I focusing on this? My son also never drew a breath, but that thought has never made me sad for days on end. What is it about choice that makes it so fundamental to me, a loss in its own right? Perhaps it's all about what choice means to me. Autonomy, ownership, even avoidance of guilt. Because to me making a thoughtful choice means making the right choice.
I know that not everyone feels this way about having choices. I know people who hate having them, hate having to make them. So this is what I wanted to ask you today-- how do you feel about choices? Are they a cornerstone of human experience or a giant cosmic torture?
julia
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Ahhh... choices... a blessing and a curse, no doubt. We have had to make difficult choices recently for our living children, watch them suffer the result of that choice, and now we wait for the outcome. Still, beyond all of the headache, I am grateful to have the choice at all.
However, there are those Sophie's choices so to speak. That is still how I look back on the choices we did or didn't make regarding our twins short lives. I do sometimes wonder what they would have said if they had the capacity to choose. It's a sad, sobering thought.
I have to agree with Lori and say simply 'both'. They make us feel confident and validated (when we happen to have made what turns out to be the right choice) and torn apart (when we happen to have made what turns out to be the wrong choice).
But my thinking is that all of our choices are important to who we become as human beings. Or more particularly, it's the way those choices reverberate - do we actually *stay* torn apart, or do we rise up again, learn how to forgive ourselves? That's the tricky part.
I think choice is fundamental to our existence as humans, and I guess my belief comes from my both my faith (which we all have to make choices about), and from my work with my students, who I firmly believe need to learn about the power of their choices and experience the natural consequences that follow. I think the choices we make shape who we are and who we are becoming. Our children who never took a breath have been denied so much, but the choice thing hits me hard, too, since I see it as such an integral part of life, and such a deep reminder that their lives were never lived.
As humans we demand to be able to make choices, cringe when we have to make them and often try to back out of things gone awry by saying "I didn't have a choice." Well, I've found there is always a choice - though sometimes the things you have to choose from really suck - which is life.
With my tubal pg it was choose between terminating a pg that was dying or not terminating and we both die. So, it became them or both of us. Most people would say that there is no real choice there, that I didn't have a choice - but I did choose, I chose myself, the one with the greater chance. I made the logical choice - but yet I still feel guilty sometimes for it. Even if I hadn't agreed to the surgery, I still would be making a choice - a choice to do nothing. Even the right, most logical choice can feel like the worst choice.
Excellent post.
I've noticed within the deadbabymama community that many of us who had to make a choice about ending the lives of our babies would have preferred the choice be taken out of our hands, and many who had no choice in life vs. death would have wanted more choices. It just goes to show how awful this is from any angle.
Choices = power, but sometimes having the power feels like way too big of a responsibility.
I remember when I was young, just idling my twenties away, my aunt told me that she thought one of the most important things she could teach her children was to make choices. She felt like making the choice was generally more important than the actual choice. I often think back to that moment when I'm wasting away in my own indecisiveness.
Like during those days leading up to the decision to terminate==that period of indecisiveness was sheer hell. Nonetheless, I distinctly remember feeling liberated when we felt as if we had made a decision. There was something about moving past the weighing, the imagining, the what if this and the what if that period.
So although the process of making choices sometimes feels to me like being locked in a medieval torture chamber, there is some solace that comes from having chosen--from knowing that I am no longer standing still.
This is a wonderful post.
Personally though, I don't really believe that any of us have choices. I guess I'm kind of a fatalist and think that, at best, the act of choosing gives us some illusory sense of being able to govern our own destiny. But, in fact, what happens to us and how we feel about it are completely out of our hands and beyond our control.
I used to think it is so great to have choices, that it gives one dignity. But now I tend to think more like Niobe.
i want choice, but want absolution for my choices too.
beautiful post, Julia.
Choices are only good when we can look ahead and not backward..when we start to envison the results of OTHER choices....the life streams created by those...then we go quite mad.
Hindsight sucks
Like JuliaS, I rather feel that my "choices" really weren't at all. Those I'm comfortable with.
What gets me most is the overwhelming responsibility of having to make Maddy's choices for her, based on my judgment and what she'd "probably like" as a baby and a human. Of course I make choices on a daily basis for my three-year-old (even though she thinks she's making decisions, I'm circumscribing them fairly severely when I say "Pepper or Carrot?"), but I get some feedback and reward when she does it herself. I got none of that with Maddy. Even though I think I made the right ones.
To be honest, most days the choice I regret most deeply is the one I made to try and get pregnant with a second child. It's that place I most want to return to with my 20/20 vision, and stop everything in its place.