Tricky Triumphs

There’s a part of my story I haven’t told. Only family and close friends know. From my earliest days, I instinctively knew, too. I would personally care for my father in his old age.

Dad and I had a close relationship from the beginning. My caregiving role began modestly in COVID lockdown. Widowed and living alone in Tempe, Arizona, he was isolated in a new way. At the time, I lived in DC with spouse, cats, condo, and a job.

That year, both our parents received a subscription to StoryWorth, an online platform that encourages family members to share life stories. Mom dove into it, producing an extraordinary collection of essays in under a year.

For Dad and me, it was a chance to talk by phone every Wednesday evening (late afternoon for him). We would do a health check, get groceries ordered online and delivered. Then, I’d transcribe a story from his life into StoryWorth.

The keyboard is a bit beyond him now, but Dad is a good storyteller. He listened to his folks and previous generations. As a result, his memory and observations follow our family migratory patterns from Europe, through Canada and the east, into the American midwest, through to our peculiar branch in Arizona. He has traced our genealogical lines back centuries, and related families, too.

Today, I’m writing from Dad’s office as it is becoming my own. He’s sitting nearby at the dining table in a familiar hunch listening to a mystery on audiobook. Cool green beat-style headphones atop his head, streaming audio from his phone. I’m here wondering what to make of his half-written tome. Also, what about mine?

I renewed his StoryWorth subscription for another year, but we got nothing done in 2021. We still talked quite a bit and got food ordered regularly. A doldrum set into the second year of COVID, and we lost a bit of our weekly creative partnership.

Then, a leadership role in Arizona came up. I moved home to take a great job and become my Dad’s primary caregiver. The first six months of the job were bliss. I took time to get established before moving in with Dad.

When I did, I promptly got COVID. Not a bad case, but four weeks of illness and family worry. A quick lesson in how all plans go wrong.

Two weeks after that, the roof blew off his golf course townhome.

Three months later, the job evaporated.

By Thanksgiving, we’d finally moved back from the temporary housing at a nearby hotel.

Everything intended that year had gone painfully awry. I’d gone to great effort to help my Dad and got much more than I could handle. I was invited to provide a vision for the arts in Arizona, then shown the door ten months later.

It was (and is) very hard. But you know me, it fuels a curiosity, too. His audiobook is the most recent in a series of unmistakable clues.

My somatic healing journey began in my early thirties when a flutter in my left eyelid became so reactive to stress that I couldn’t control my face at work.

Luckily, I found a U Street yoga studio. Up a narrow staircase, a quiet low-lit space allowed me to sit in guided meditation and the company of strangers. Every Monday night, I was reminded that each of us is a precious human birth and that worklife stress is our collective anxiety. That deepening peace in one’s life is available in each breath, and that social peace can only be handwoven.

Peace and productivity, it was a tough juxtaposition in DC. Sadly, I worked in an arts organization that struggled to operate humanely.  Activities to promote transparency, creativity, curiosity, fairness, and teamwork were lost on them. The narrative performance of power was not. It was morally injurious to me.

Moral injury occurs when one is forced to take action against personal dignity, ethics, or social judgment in a way that causes harm to self and others.

Experiences of moral injury can be repetitive and neatly couched in company culture. Get over it. It’s just the way the job is done. Those who react badly are often scapegoated and soon ousted.

A colleague recently described it perfectly. She slowly realized nothing was actually happening from all this talk, except paychecks and a show.

Those moments in the yoga studio helped me ground a creative practice focused on self-healing that has served me well. It has also informed a professional journey that puts me at odds with the majority of my colleagues.

The arts are not ‘at risk’ in American societies, as we’ve been led to believe for nearly half a century. The folks in DC prefer that narrative for their own reasons.

Our cultural exports very definitely cause moral injury in the production and distribution systems, and also through our content. Violent gaming. Dead Women TV. Doom scrolling. Psychotic conspiracy theories — all cultural products of our time. No one one wants to perceive this, much less say it. Mass shootings have become a spontaneous public ritual far more powerful than the ones we plan.

What the field has been taught is ‘scarcity’ was actually a series of great cultural openings. But as policy analysts, bureaucrats, and lobbyists, we were unmoored. Unlike our global peers, American arts leaders missed many of those awakening moments. US cultural policy is now catching up.

Remember Tipper Gore? What we’ve done to export misogyny, racism, and terror in the decades since makes those hearings seem quaint. The current controversy over drag — ironically, arts leaders fostered it to the great benefit of white-walled arts institutions. Uncomfortable bedfellows in an era of profound infidelity to each other, to country, to climate, and to global peace.

How was that ‘scarcity’ constructed? Structural bifurcations that separated arts from humanities, history, the sciences, and education. Intentional distance from language and land policies, the greater social safety net, and international relations. Also, a legendary refusal to relate to philanthropic, corporate, and small business leaders as anything but a check. From the 1990s onward, US arts leaders adopted the ‘cultural wars’ as the leading frame for our work along with the culture of greedy transactonalism characteristic of the era.

Fine, but what does this have to do with Dad’s audiobook, a mystery about a female detective and a dead child?

The promises and perils of today’s cultural industries are neatly summarized in his budding ritual. He’s kept alive, alert, and entertained by the audiobook stories. The plots are still page-turners. Improvements in audio technology have made them accessible in a new and novel way now that his eyesight is failing. Those stories piped through his headphones bring great satisfaction in his days, along with the neuroaesthetic benefits. He has symphonic music (mostly European) on the radio 24/7 in the bedroom. That helps him sleep.

Turns out, our obsession with criminal violence and police procedural makes him happy and content, a worldview I hope diminishes as his generation powers down. Listening only to the great works he knows is a balm at this age. Exploring other genres or traditions, that is a future reach.

Dad expected to die much earlier. Though the technologies are marvels, he doesn’t always want to be alive. As his daughter (and a bit outdated myself) I can relate. I go to the studio to write, draw, dance, and design; to enact and embody thoughts and emotions. Creative practice is a way to connect my own dots, stay lively, and grass-side up.

I know I need it and can’t help but notice the positive effects on Dad. But it still flies right in the face of my old career. American arts continue to be asphyxiated by leaders who have long lost touch with democracy, lived experience in communities, and healthy cultures of productivity.