Living in the After Image with Jenny George

Poet Jenny George was always drawn to writing about death and dying, even before she lost her wife to ovarian cancer. In her latest collection of poems, "After Image," Jenny uses the lens of grief to describe caring for and losing her sweetheart, and to explore what it means to live in the shadow of her death. Jenny tells Sarah about the challenges of writing about dying, and also why her grief sometimes makes her feel like "an old baby."

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Jenny George: Being with somebody who dies, it would be my guess, that's nothing like dying itself. Like I, I don't know what it is to die. I won't know until I do. So being able to describe what I experienced, to ask the questions that animated me, but knowing that the big mystery isn't mine to know. Not yet.

[00:00:18] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is poet Jenny George. Jenny has published two books of poems with Copper Canyon Press, “The Dream of Reason,” and most recently, “After Image,” which was written after Jenny's wife died from ovarian cancer. Many of the poems in After Image address the powerful grief Jenny was feeling, while also recognizing the beautiful and strange rhythms of life in the wake of death. In this conversation, Jenny and I talk candidly about the honor of [00:01:00] caring for a loved one who's dying, and what it's like to live in the after image of such a profound loss. We also discuss why poets and other creatives are compelled to interpret their own experiences of death through art.

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

[00:01:16] Jenny: Oh, Sarah, it is so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Do you remember, what are your earliest poetry experiences?

Jenny: You know, I definitely identify as, like, having been a poet all the way back from when I was a kid. Like something about the mindset of observing or listening in the world and going to the library and being moved by literature and kids books of poems and that type of thing. And I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the home of Emily Dickinson, and we heard them in school, and also the figure of Emily Dickinson lived in my imagination. Her house was right there in town and her grave is in the graveyard that, like, if [00:02:00] you cut from the pizza shop to the middle school, you walk through the graveyard in Amherst and there's her grave, and people would leave little offerings on top of it, little pennies and dried flowers and pretty rocks and shells and that type of thing. So I had this sense of like, oh, a poet is a, a real person of significance or even a sense of myself as like part of the legacy of Emily Dickinson, this female poet in this town where I was myself a little kid. I think maybe the first time I had the experience of myself, like, really as a writer or as a poet at a kind of deep personal level, and not just like swimming in the notion of poems or the sounds of poems, was in elementary school. I remember I wrote a line, it was something like, “the moon is hanging from a silver thread,” or “the moon hangs from a single silver thread.” And I liked the sound of it, and it just seemed dreamy and magical. And when I got the homework back, the teacher had marked along that line, [00:03:00] something like, “this isn't true.” And even as a little kid, I remember this conviction of like, no, I wanted it to say that, that was my line. And I sometimes think back at that little fiery conviction I felt as a second grader.

[00:03:13] Sarah: I love that story because oftentimes when teachers make those kind of corrections, it's crushing and it can derail, you know, your calling. What themes have resonated with you as a poet over the years, and what do you find yourself returning to?

[00:03:29] Jenny: I noticed that I, I write a lot about dreams and animals and childhood that has been like a long, you know, set of themes that have run like a current through my explorations. And then to be honest, like death and dying is a big one. I'm glad to be here for that reason too, and that was before even my last book, which really focuses on an experience I had of death and dying directly, like this experience of intimate loss I had because my wife died and I was taking care of her and [00:04:00] right there when she died. And that ended up being this very significant thing in my life that I wrote a whole book about. but even before that, I think I've been interested in, leaning towards, baffled by, curious about, seduced by, like, the questions around death and dying and going all the way back to when I was a kid. And I think that has been a very central animating question for me as a human and then has come into my work and poetry. What better form for taking up that big question?

[00:04:30] Sarah: What was your first memory of loss?

[00:04:33] Jenny: I think loss as a concept or as a feeling is something I have been attuned to my whole life and my sweetheart was the first person that I was close to that died in my life. So I made it all the way ‘til almost 40 years old without someone very close to me dying.

[00:04:52] Sarah: What about a pet?

[00:04:53] Jenny: Yes. Oh, pets. They really do teach us that, don't they?

[00:04:59] Sarah: I was like, [00:05:00] there's no way you live to 40 without some kind of loss.

[00:05:02] Jenny: I mean, of course, nobody lives to 40 without some kind of loss. No, of course. You're so right. I think, yeah, so the first significant human loss — that happened to me later in life. But of course a string of very short-lived hamsters when I was a kid. The cycles of falling in love with little creatures and then mourning them was deeply ingrained from when I was little.

[00:05:22] Sarah: Was that mourning allowed in your family? Were you able to express that in words or did you write poems about them or —?

[00:05:30] Jenny: I think I, I think in my family, I might have lived a little bit like an emotional aberration. The intensity of the, the mourning, the keening, the like, being like right in the teeth of that experience of love and loss. I guess I do have a sense of, like, burning a little brighter than my family of origin when it comes to that level of the emotional truth of, of the ever-presentness of loss.

[00:06:06] Sarah: Well, let us talk about your beautiful book. “After Image” is a beautiful love song to your wife who died, such an exploration of grief's landscape. It's clear you grew up in nature because of all your references there. How much have you written about death prior to this book?

[00:06:28] Jenny: Not nearly as specifically as it ended up in this collection. I think I've had a disposition that has been tuned towards what's fleeting, what's fragile. and then when my sweetheart died — I mean there was the process of taking care of her. She was sick with ovarian cancer for five years, and then she died at home in our bed, in my arms, you know, and I was there when she took those last breaths. And whatever else that was, it was an experience that was radical and upending and mysterious and I learned so much about life watching it leave her body. It was an absolute threshold moment for me. And then when I washed her body after she had died, it was unlike anything I had ever done. It was an utterly new experience to be like that close to the realities of death, and sad and strange and shocking, but also it opened me up to something incredibly profound

[00:07:37] Sarah: What does the title “After Image” mean to you?

[00:07:40] Jenny: I mean after image is a, is a phrase that comes from optics or photography, you know, and it means that the image that remains even after the stimulus itself is gone. Like if you look at the sun and then you look away, you see an after image of the sun. That seemed to me like a good metaphor for the effects of real extreme human experience, like sometimes we [00:08:00] go through things that even when the experience itself is done, there's the shadow or echo of it that continues on through our, our bodies and our beings.

Sarah: How does the metaphor of snow to you reflect in your work?

[00:08:41] Jenny: There's certainly the quality of snow's kind of like ability to suddenly arrive, change the landscape. It's also ephemeral, it holds and then it melts. It's obliterating, it's beautiful. And then on like a very concrete level, my sweetheart died in, at the end of [00:09:00] April. It was already springtime here in Santa Fe. And then the morning after she died, when we were still spending time with her body, there was a sudden very dramatic snowstorm. And it just covered the garden, built up on all the walls and on the roof. It was just like a very dramatic weather shift. And then the sun came out and it melted and sparkled away. And so I think I, I couldn't help but transpose the kind of sudden life shift that was her dying and this just dramatic, gorgeous, slightly devastating weather event that also took out all the early spring flowers. And so lots of snow ended up coming through the poems.

[00:09:41] Sarah: Does she have anything to do with that storm?

[00:09:44] Jenny: You can't help but wonder.

[00:09:49] Sarah: Shall we read a poem? Would you mind?

[00:09:50] Jenny: I would be happy to. Which one did you have in mind?

[00:09:52] Sarah: Well, this time I had in mind the poem, “The Kindnesses of Death,” page 26.

[00:09:59] Jenny: Hmm. [00:10:00] Yeah. In this poem, I was imagining the aspects of being dead that could be a relief, and like trying to pull forward aspects of that state that could be kind or, or gentle. So it's an imaginative exploration of that state.

So this is the poem, The Kindnesses of Death.

First, that nothing touches you. No silks unnerve your skin. No sunlight splashes your empty face. Next that you cannot hear the separations in the cries of birds. At last, all things stop changing. The wind stays undisturbed in its enclosure. No hour grows long with awful feeling that others are released from love. No one has to bathe you now [00:11:00] like a worn out child. The kindnesses fall down on you like steady snow under which you always neither sleep, nor don't.

[00:11:15] Sarah: Beautiful. Was it difficult to write during your wife's illness? It sounds like it went on for quite a long time, for five years. Or was it cathartic during that time?

[00:11:27] Jenny: I didn't write almost at all, I would say. Like I was very absorbed in just the daily asks of caretaking and being immersed in the medical system. So I had a little time to write, but I was also distracted and scared and tired and stressed out and all of the things that come with being with somebody who's very ill. And then I didn't write for about a year after she died. I think I was just too flattened. The project came kind of like slowly back in as I think as I was thawing [00:12:00] somewhat, and trying to make meaning of that experience and images and memories were returning to me. You know, the book is called “After Image” — there was an after effect quality of the writing itself where I was returning to make meaning of that experience, not really writing as it was happening. As it was happening I was doing it.

[00:12:16] Sarah: I can imagine. And you know, I've heard from other authors too that whenever the writing starts, it feels like a process of metabolizing that grief. What are some of the big questions poetry allows you to ask?

Jenny: Ooh. I just love that question. I feel almost a little chill as I'm thinking about it. What comes to me is like all of the questions that are in that category of aliveness. Much of the poetry that I love is also very steeped in the senses. It helps me ask into the questions that are, like, really about that texture of aliveness. Like, how much of our own aliveness can we even bear? What knowledges are made possible when we are really tuned, [00:13:00] like open to the world? Like our senses are really tuned to the physical world and the bodily world.

[00:13:05] Sarah: We could talk for a few hours about those.

[00:13:08] Jenny: We really could. And of course, the questions are almost better than the answers. I mean, answers what, what answers? There's just the, there's just experience.

[00:13:14] Sarah: There just the questions.

[00:13:15] Jenny: Yeah. So there's just those questions.

[00:13:16] Sarah: So you told the Santa Fe reporter, “My beloved, can't tell that story. And I'm the one left with access to telling, with access to language, and yet I didn't go through it directly.” What comes up for you when you hear those words?

[00:13:31] Jenny: Part of my wrestle in writing this was being the one alive, feeling that guilt at having survived, not having been able to save her, keep her alive. So just that like kind of mortification is almost the word I want to use. Or like, oh, I'm the one who's still here. I'm the one who can tell this story. I didn't earn that, I just happened to be the one who's still here. And also [00:14:00] being with somebody who dies, it would be my guess, that's nothing like dying itself. Like I, I don't know what it is to die. I won't know until I do, actually. She's the one who knows what it is like to make that transition. So holding the bothness of being able describe what I experienced, to ask the questions that animated me, but knowing that the big mystery isn't mine to know. Not yet.

[00:14:24] Sarah: That's where I think poetry, you know, it gets close. We never can express exactly what it is 'cause we've never been through it, but it, it gets really close.

[00:14:34] Jenny: I think it's the genre that gets the closest. That would be my sense. Yeah, like using these concrete little words to try to catch that larger, ineffable, mysterious thing that lives beyond language. Like poetry really lives in that paradox, which is why it's so thrilling that closeness when we encounter it, it just, It just gives us chills.

[00:14:54] Sarah: So you reference Greek myth in a few poems. Orpheus and Eurydice were star- [00:15:00] crossed loves in Greek mythology. and the only way Orpheus could rescue Eurydice in the underworld was to walk her out and not look back. And I was thinking about your book and it's almost as if you're looking back and describing your love and a way of saying, I can't save her from death.

[00:15:22] Jenny: Yes. And that sense of like, the failure is built in. The Orpheus and Eurydice myth, for a lot of reasons it seemed like it rhymed with my experience, and it was available right there to make use of. The humanness of that move where he looks back and all is lost like that, that really we can't, we can't bring people back from the dead and we can't rescue anyone from the fate of mortality, including ourselves, and the relentless impulse to try. The combination of love and failure that seemed baked into the story really resonated with [00:16:00] me. I think, like, extreme human experience has a mythological dimension to it. Like it has an archetypal dimension to it. That dimension of timelessness and myth really felt present, even as sometimes I was very tired or things were very mundane or tedious at home. That scale of the big and the small really felt true as I was going through that experience. I mean, I think that's probably always true even when we're going to the grocery store, but it really felt true, in the years and months and hours and moments of her death.

[00:16:30] Sarah: It's almost as if it forces you into mindfulness moment to moment because there's nowhere else to be.

[00:16:36] Jenny: So true.

[00:16:38] Sarah: Back to the book — in “After Image,” you write a few poems in the third person entitled “Jenny George.” What does writing to your own persona give you freedom to do?

[00:16:50] Jenny: You know, we were talking a minute ago about the mythological dimension of life and extreme experience having that big grand quality, and that's absolutely true. [00:17:00] I stand by that. And like another thing is also true, which is like, we are just these fragile little bozos, you know, like we're so human. And I felt like that's true in life, that the big and the small are simultaneous. And I also wanted that represented in the collection, like the book also had that earthiness or that just like day-to-day truth about what it is to be human. And so I did write a number of poems that are called “Jenny George” and that are about someone named Jenny George, who is just embarrassingly human. I like your question, like there absolutely is a freedom to, yeah, speak directly to the uncomfortable truths of the day to day, or to get to like poke fun at myself a little bit, which I think is an important part of moving through a grief process or any kind of extreme human process, where as hard and bad as things are, life is also funny.

[00:17:57] Sarah: How did you use humor in [00:18:00] the five years that you were caring for your wife?

[00:18:03] Jenny: Oh, the best moments were definitely those kind of humorous moments and the absurdity of, oh, like the cancer world, the hospital world, like sometimes it’s so difficult and painful, but also absurd and human. And like getting to remember that in certain moments or to share the truth of that between us were like little explosions of sweetness and reality in what was often really hard times. When I think back a bit, like moments where the humorlessness of life was revealed and shared are definitely some of the best moments in my memory of those years.

[00:18:41] Sarah: In one of these poems titled “Jenny George,” you write, “there are things you simply can't know until you have lived through them.” Did you feel this way about anything else before living with your wife's illness and death?

Jenny: Not to that same degree. I think I would've thought we [00:19:00] have imaginative access to all aspects of human experience. Everybody who's a human gets to know what it is to be a human, you know? And that there's no threshold over which you can't at least wonder about or speak to if you're genuinely interested. And it occurred to me that like all of us here alive writing about death, which many artists and writers are doing, are kind of writing about something which we really don't know yet. And then there's the kind of wryness of when nobody who really knows can write about it. So I think that's part of the poke I was making at myself in that line, in that poem. Like, oh yeah, here I am writing about something that I really don't know what it is. I won't know until I quote unquote live through it, which is a funny way of thinking about what we do when we die. But I guess it could be thought of that way.

[00:19:49] Sarah: One of the things you did live through was your grief and one of those poems, “Someone Should Help Jenny George,” sounds to me like you're expressing something about [00:20:00] grief.

[00:20:00] Jenny: Yeah. The abjectness of it, the utterness of it, that kind of like, plea to be helped when it's not helpable. It's inevitable and you have to live through it and nobody can take it away from you. Sometimes I had the experience of wanting an out, not wanting to have to live through it, wishing somebody could just, you know, quote unquote help me with it or take it away, while also knowing it's the universal assignment and we don't get to get out of doing it.

[00:20:30] Sarah: Did she ask you to care for her?

[00:20:32] Jenny: Do you mean like during her cancer?

[00:20:35] Sarah: Yeah, when she accepted her own death, did she ask you for anything?

[00:20:42] Jenny: I'm not sure she ever accepted her own death. I would say that was a place of existential pain in our house and in our marriage during that time. She was young. She got cancer in her late thirties. She absolutely didn't want to die [00:21:00] and tried everything possible not to. I think it was her job in a way to — I mean her, like her psychic job, her emotional job — she would've said to not give up, to not accept that she was gonna die. So it was a place of divergence between us. Like even in the last days and months of her life, she was pretty determined to keep living. And so she definitely asked me to care for her. It was my honor to do so, I would say I, I never could have imagined doing otherwise. Sometimes when I am in a crummy situation, I'm in a traffic jam, or something isn't going right in life, I think, oh, she would've given anything to be alive right now in this traffic jam, in the just like absolute muck of life. She wanted to live. And so carrying that forward has been something really significant that has come out of that experience for me.

[00:21:51] Sarah: So in the year following her death, when you were grieving, did you allow others to take care of you?

[00:21:59] Jenny: I [00:22:00] did, and I think it's been one of the most, like biggest human learnings for me. People took incredible care of me. Also while she was sick, friends and family just did amazing, like radical and generous things for me and for us. I'm a person who cares a lot about my own competence and my own ability to muscle through, and I think the lesson of softening and letting people in and letting people see me be a total mess — I feel a lot more trust in, in life and in people now because of that. I think I'm better at offering care and support to others in that same circumstance. Letting people care for you is sometimes a generous thing to do for them. Being allowed to help is actually a real gift.

[00:22:46] Sarah: Well, since we're talking about grief, we read another poem. Let's read “Spring.”

[00:22:51] Jenny: Spring.

I hate my grief. The way it keeps repeating the same [00:23:00] question over and over. At Woods Edge, the crows congregate in large numbers to sleep. When the sun appears, it sets off the great exchange. Melt pools flash. Her perfume bottles, unmoved on the bureau, glow like glass fruit.

[00:23:24] Sarah: I love that image of glass fruit. I had a bottle of my mother's perfume. She died 23 years ago, long time, and so it soured. Eventually I had to let it go because it no longer smelled like perfume. It smelled like alcohol

[00:23:37] Jenny: Yeah. Vinegar. Mm-hmm.

[00:23:39] Sarah: Or vinegar or something. It was, Ooh. Let's read another one. This is a bit of a shift because I'd love to talk about the body. Um, how about “Hello World”? It's a bit more about aging in the body.

[00:23:53] Jenny: Hello World.

Someone gave me this. A body. [00:24:00] Big, disappointing form I cannot control. I attach to it a series of names. I tend the garden of immediate decay, comb the strange stars from its hair. My lungs inherit the weather through an open window. How am I supposed to keep at this difficult task? Life lasts so long now.

Yeah, I can really hear in that, the like weariness and wonder of what it is to have a body, to be born into one and then have the job of caring for it and carrying it all the way through life.

[00:24:45] Sarah: You seem keenly aware of the body, its limitations and losses, and yet you also seem so young to me.

[00:24:55] Jenny: Sarah. Yeah. What, [00:25:00] wait, tell me, what — I mean, I'm 47. That's young. Is that what you mean?

[00:25:03] Sarah: That's young. You're a spring chicken.

[00:25:05] Jenny: Oh my gosh. Such a baby. When my sweetheart died, I had this feeling of like, oh, I feel like an old baby. I'm so young. I mean, I was barely 40. I'm so young, but also I feel so raw and like I hardly even know what to do, how to take care of myself. I would have these questions like, what do I like to eat for breakfast? Like I hardly, I don't, I hardly know, like without the rhythms of that long family life. Or like, what shampoo do I buy? I don't even know. But also old, like, oh, I've just been through a lot and I feel tired and ground down and like really acquainted with all of the kind of like muckiness of death and dying. Yeah, the old baby

Sarah: Well, you seem young to me.

[00:25:45] Jenny: You know, sometimes people say this thing, oh, getting old is terrible. Don't get old. You know, they mean all of the kind of pains and humiliations and changes of, of aging in a body. And I always think, yeah, but the alternative is to [00:26:00] die young. Don't do that either. You know? Like, I hope I get old. My sweetheart didn't get to and she would've been a great old lady, so I will try to be

[00:26:06] Sarah: What was her name?

[00:26:08] Jenny: Kate's her name.

[00:26:09] Sarah: Kate. Beautiful name.

[00:26:11] Jenny: Yes. Beautiful girl.

[00:26:13] Sarah: Was there anything surprising about what the body does in death?

[00:26:18] Jenny: So many things. She died right around midnight. I was there with her, after she died. The other folks that were in the house gathered. We turned the lights on. There was a kind of vigil, I guess, over those next hours. Kate's mom was here with us, and then in the early morning hours we washed her body. It was before she became totally stiff, washed her body and changed the clothes that she was in. And there was a moment when we lifted up her torso to clean her back and organize the cloth around her body. And we [00:27:00] lifted up her torso, the last breath that was in her lungs came out of her. The breath that came out of her dead body — that was a surprise. The combination of she's here, she's not here, she's herself, she's not herself, there's breath, there's death. And that her last breath had been a breath in — it's almost like she swallowed the room and it was still there in her lungs so that even, a number of hours later when we moved her, that breath came out. And that is something I will never not know after having lived through that. And that was a surprise.

[00:27:41] Sarah: I have a few more poems I'd love for you to read, but I wanna offer to you. Are there any that you would love to read?

[00:27:47] Jenny: One I might like to read is the poem “Eclipse.” It transposes the features of a total solar eclipse onto my personal experience. There actually was a total solar eclipse that happened sometime after my [00:28:00] sweetheart died. And so this poem puts the two experiences on top of each other, so you'll hear that overlay.

Eclipse.

All the birds are ill. They flood the elms, driven to roost by a noontime dusk. The trees are full of eyes. One body blocks out another body. Isn't that how it works? She died. It floats on my vision like a burn. Hands folded like a bride, dark cave of the mouth open, as if a great sound were being drawn in. We were very tired. We covered her in flowers as she cooled. The crescent of her foot hung off the bed. Now the birds are quelled, disturbed and quiet. A strange [00:29:00] hour of silk descends. They settle in the trees. If not to sleep, then to obey the dark

[00:29:10] Sarah: I love hearing you read your poems.

[00:29:12] Jenny: Oh, thank you for listening. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so.

[00:29:15] Sarah: You have a beautiful voice. I think as a photographer I often notice when poets use light, and I love what you're talking about earlier about after image being that impression, and again, with the solar eclipse, It kind of leaves this imprint, if you will. Light leaves kind of an imprint. Would you read “The Problem of the Lantern”?

Jenny: The Problem of the Lantern.

The dead are difficult. One of them was looking at me last night from the hallway. Although seeing me, I don't know. There was a quality like unmoving pond water, and a peculiar glean like a false dawn. [00:30:00] The dead are not personal. That is part of the difficulty, like the problem of the lantern. It illuminates without seeing unless seeing is itself the element that falls on things in the form of light. I often lie awake in the dark for hours. Death is a brand new experience, but it's not clear who it happens to.

[00:30:30] Sarah: That's one of those last lines when I just went, oh.

[00:30:36] Jenny: Yes, that that poem is definitely, you know, it's in the form of a philosophical puzzle. So that's definitely my kind of thinking mind, at work, trying to make sense. Like, what is this phenomenon? How does it work? Who does it happen to? Who are we in the face of it? Of course not a question we can answer.

[00:30:51] Sarah: I love the poem, “Tin Bucket.”

[00:30:53] Jenny: Maybe I'll read it now. It's a short little poem. It's also one of my favorite poems in this collection. It's the final [00:31:00] poem in the main body of the book. I was thinking about that quality of time, maybe at the end of life when you're caring for somebody. It's sort of like past the point where there's anything to do. There's just the work of being with someone as they're dying. I had the experience of that time being very uncomplicated. Not by any means painless, but uncomplicated in the sense of sort of pared down or stripped down. So I wrote this poem to try to capture some of that quality.

This is the poem, “Tin Bucket.”

The world is not simple. Anyone will tell you, but have you ever washed a person's hair over a tin bucket? Gently twisting the rope of it to ring the water out. At the end of everything, dancers just use air as their material. A voice keeps singing even [00:32:00] without an instrument. You make your fingers into a comb.

[00:32:07] Sarah: So did you figure out what kind of shampoo to buy?

[00:32:10] Jenny: Oh my gosh. Finally I did. My sweetheart was, she was a person with great skill when it came to potions and lotions and she, she always bought really nice shampoo and then I just used whatever was in the shower. And then as an adult I had to figure out like, what shampoo do I buy? Not nearly as fancy as the kind that she bought. But yes, I found some, some basic grocery store shampoo that works for me.

[00:32:33] Sarah: Excellent.

[00:32:35] Jenny: Thank you for asking.

[00:32:37] Sarah: What does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:32:40] Jenny: When it's my time, I hope I'm there for it. Like that would be my, my version of a peaceful exit for myself. I hope I can know some amount of what's going on. I hope I can be, like, alive to [00:33:00] it. Of course, I hope I'm with folks I love and maybe at home myself, but mostly I think it would be lucky to get to know that I'm dying when I die. That kind of like special consciousness that mortality makes possible. That for me would be a pretty remarkable and essentially peaceful way to go. Not fighting it, but collaborating with it.