Salon.com > Judith Levine

The last days of my mother, the control freak

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:01:00 +0000

Two weeks after my mother's final stroke, it occurred to me she might not know she was dying.

The symptoms of her impending death were all there. She was too tired to open her eyes. She was subsisting on ice chips the size of a baby's fingernail. Her extremities were cool, the traffic in her veins so lazy that the hospice nurses couldn't find a pulse. Her breathing would cease for many seconds, then resume with a deep drag -- until the next hiatus. She fiddled with the bedclothes and asked me what that dog was doing in the room. There was no dog.

"Do you know you've had two more strokes?" I asked her.

"No!"

I wasn't surprised by her surprise. All year she'd expressed fresh astonishment each time she was informed of her condition -- the first stroke that robbed her of memory and sight; the second and third that rendered her more demented, and incontinent; the fall that fractured her hip and propelled her further into frailty and confusion. "This is the first time anyone's told me!" she'd declare.

My mother was a woman proud of being in charge. In fact, she could bear hardly a moment of not knowing what was coming next, of intellectual ambiguity or emotional irresolution.

The case against thrift

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:58:00 +0000

Mildred in Minneapolis calls in to offer pointers on buying food in dented cans, along with homeopathic cures for botulism. Betsy in Boston says she boils and reuses her dental floss. Norbert, outside Nome, Alaska, reaches the radio station by solar-powered Web phone to boast that he’s been boiling his floss since 1977. Tran, a Buddhist in Aspen, Colo., warns of the dangers of attachment.

And then the host, who today is focusing on personal economies during the recession, turns to me: "Isn't this all a blessing in disguise, Judith? Haven't we lost our way, and aren't we now discovering new, and better, values?" I'm getting such questions regularly these days; my 2006 book, "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping," has unexpectedly made me an oracle.

Well, yes, sort of, I stammer. But, uh, actually, no. On one hand, who can argue that the grow-grow-growth consumer economy is outgrowing the limits not just of our bank accounts but also our finite Earth? Part of me is ecstatic to wave goodbye to the $20 martini and the 20,000-square-foot house.

And then there is the other hand. The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday's White House proselytized shopping, today's is shaming bankers for their greed.

I surf, therefore I am

Tue, 29 Jul 1997 11:55:00 +0000

"Obviously, I'm somebody who believes that personal computers
are empowering tools," Bill Gates said after he bestowed a $200 million dollar gift to America's public libraries so they could hook up to the Internet.

"People are entitled to disagree," Gates said. "But I would invite them to visit some of these libraries and see the impact on kids using this technology."

Well, I have seen the impact, and I disagree. Many of my
students -- undergraduate media and communications majors at a
New York university -- have access to the endless information
bubbling through cyberspace, and it is not empowering.

Most of the data my students Net is like trash fish -- and it is hard for them to tell a dead one-legged crab from a healthy sea bass. Scant on world knowledge and critical thinking skills, they are ill-equipped to interpret or judge the so-called facts, which they insert into their papers confidently but in no discernible order.

I surf, therefore I am

Tue, 29 Jul 1997 10:49:00 +0000

"People are entitled to disagree," Gates said. "But I would invite them to visit some of these libraries and see the impact on kids using this technology."

Be all that you can be

Fri, 02 May 1997 19:00:00 +0000

what? Soldiers of the United States Armed Forces hurt people? They stick pins into recruits' bare chests?

They force women to have sex?

The blizzard of "sexual misconduct" charges at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and the conviction this week of Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson on 18 counts of rape have elicited a chorus of "Shocked, shocked!" responses from the press and the military itself. Simpson's rape conviction, said the New York Times, has "raised questions about whether the military is, as it is supposed to be, a haven of discipline and safety or whether it has deteriorated into a dangerous place in which women are afraid of male superiors."

Guess what. The military is supposed to humiliate, intimidate and instill fear into people. Electrical engineering, weather forecasting, Being All You Can Be -- nice, but beside the point. Meteorology is what warriors do when there's no interesting killing to occupy them. Violence is the military's job.

And masculine violence is the military's creed.

Just before the Persian Gulf War, George Bush had been worrying about "the manhood thing." Saddam Hussein showed up, and (not to oversimplify) $44 billion and an estimated 200,000 deaths later, the cartoonist Oliphant stopped drawing the president with a purse.