BorderWest

The Things They Don’t Teach You in Grad School

By Rebecca Powell, 9-19-08

	Gram and The Boy

My grandmother is in a hospital bed in a pretty town built by oil barons hundreds of miles from my crowded desk.  I wrote a paper today on Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric, read two of Plato’s dialogues, and called my family every few hours for a report. They could not tell me what I wanted to hear—that it was okay, that the leukemia had disappeared, that the doctors predicted nothing but good health and smiles. They spoke in tired voices after a night pacing the halls of a hospital. They talked with disbelief of all she has been through. They talked with surprise of her strength.

I know how to talk with texts. I can bend and twist Aristotle to make a point about ethnocentrism or the limits of language. You and I can talk about Plato’s conception of love or his teaching ideaology. We can sit and discuss the rhetorical implications of ethos in this year’s presidential election, but I cannot imagine a world without a person I love or a Christmas without opening the door to my grandmother’s smile.

Twice today, the doctors called it done. Twice today, she rallied.

She told my aunt she has things she wants to do. The hope of those things carries her now as she is hooked to a ventilator, and we, her husband, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, are carried by them, too. We are carried by the strength she shows in every rally, by the hope of what has been and what could be.

Graduate school teaches me to explore the texts of the past to create the texts of the future. I read a lot. I write a lot. We talk a lot. I am good at these things, find them natural, so I sit at my desk while my grandmother wages the fight of her life in a hospital and I write. It is a futile act, but since I do not know how to transmit strength or health across distance and time, I will write. I will write of strength and family, of love and its limits. I will write of my grandmother.

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