Trespassing the Jaws of Death 10 comments

By Caroline Langston

When I was little and acting up, my mother would periodically fix me with disapproving eyes, then trot out a trademark phrase that virtually dripped with a certain kind of maternal, possibly Southern, passive aggression: “Why, I went down into the jaws of death to bring you into the world!”

Although the phrase was designed to compel me to straighten up by inducing guilt—obviously, if someone has risked death for you, how could you even imagine causing that person to suffer any longer with your mean words, your obstinate selfishness?—it never served the intended purpose. Rather, my mother’s brandishing of the Jaws of Death served only to anger me all the more, until my cheeks burned and I clenched my own fists like that little unkempt girl on the cover of the first Violent Femmes album.

OK, it’s clear, I had issues. I see now that my annoyance at the phrase had much to do with its inherent narcissism—the martyrlike focus was on her, her, always on her, after all, not on my own behavior, which was doubtlessly execrable.

But it also had to do with the undeniable, creepy physicality of the phrase itself. Although my own delivery was a relatively underwhelming Caesarian—hardly, it seemed to me, the stuff of death or jaws or anything else—the younger of my older twin sisters had been breech, in a difficult delivery in an Army hospital during the Korean War. It was a story that my mother loved recounting: “The doctor reached right up in there with his hand, and yanked her out!”

It took my own experience of labor and delivery to have some respect for the earthiness and transcendence of the phrase The Jaws of Death, its instant ability to connote Odysseus, Dante, even—and amazingly!—Adrienne Rich’s landmark feminist poem “Diving into the Wreck.”*

It’s that image of yanking that has been on my mind of late, and just a couple of days ago I figured out why: It reminded of the Eastern Orthodox icon of the Resurrection. If you have never seen it before, Christ is represented with arms extended, lifting our foreparents Adam and Eve out of the grave, represented literally by the open coffins on which they kneel. Underneath them is the empty expanse of death, but in icons it is usually peppered with a burst of silver locks and keys, represented the bondage to death from which Adam and Eve—and ultimately, humanity—has been freed. (In one scene in the great Robert Duvall film The Apostle, a black evangelist makes a powerful tribute to this image by dancing like David, jingling an assortment of keys in his hand.)

And what strikes me about the image is the way that the Adam and Eve look powerless, startled, uncomfortably kneeling on the hard coffin wood, as Christ yanks them up. (It’s worth noting that icons aim for spiritual realism rather than naturalistic representation.) It’s an incredible image of what it means to receive grace—it comes to us from the outside, but the yanking upward, of necessity, is destabilizing and painful. The transformation comes at us from the outside, if we make ourselves open enough to receive it.

My family has been going through our own iteration of “destabilizing and painful” lately: Last week, that twin sister and one of my brothers brought my mother up from Mississippi on a Southwest Airlines flight, and settled her into an ersatz-Victorian nursing home right off the major Interstate highway that runs through Washington, D.C. It is a particularly bewildering season for my siblings, who have carried the heavy lifting on taking care of my mother—now at the mid-stage of the Alzheimer’s continuum—since my son was born in 2004.

But it is also a season of birth for me, and not only because my waist is thickening as I enter the second trimester of my unexpected pregnancy. It is now time for me to be open to grace in figuring out a way forward in loving and caring for my mother.

In some ways, it’s easier now: The loss of memory for her has meant that each moment, from one to the next, is virgin terrain, a perpetual landscape of discovery, in which she does not dwell darkly on the hurts of the past. Last Saturday I sat with her for a quiet couple of hours and the peace of it—that yanking again—nonplussed me.

God allows us to suffer, I read somewhere, so that we will not sleepwalk through our lives. Last Saturday, more than once, my mother trained her gaze on me, and with a wondrous little smile at the corners of her mouth, said, “You look so pretty!”

It wasn’t true, of course. But it served to bring me, dull from torpor and sunken in self, back to the shining surface.

* I have to thank my longtime mentor Peter Cooley for making me read those 60s feminists, even when I was a cocky, self-styled Reaganite who wanted only to be a housewife. Now I’m a housewife who sits around reading 60s feminists....