personal

So tonight, I’m gonna find a way to make it without you. Have you ever tried sleeping with a broken heart?
What you did to me was a crime. Cold case love . . . Your love was breaking the law, but I needed a witness.

The first line is from Alicia Keys’s “Sleeping with a Broken Heart” and the second Rihanna’s “Cold Case Love” (notably co-written with King Timberlake himself). These lines stick with me as I round out the end of February (and at this very moment, avoid doing the dishes). Why? Because they are so conclusive and so pained, and that’s kind of how things feel right now. In a few months I will be wrapping up my doctorate, and I now know, at least for now, my time in Canada. I’m going to be starting a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellowship at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD in September, a position I chose instead of one in Trieste, Italy after incredibly difficult deliberation.

In exchange for the effort I was rewarded by a rather nasty email from a member of my family that included lines like this:

Then of course you will be with people who are there for the money, with no consideration for the social implications of the identity they are undertaking. Is this really what you want to do? The latest US imperial move (aside from the wr in Afghanistan) is to begin to occupy Haiti, depriving it of the one remaining legacy of the revolution: its independence. Is that what you want to stand for? . . . Among many other influences, your boss and also your colleagues will expect your compliance, and you will soon expect that of yourself if you are not to ‘fail’.

I wrote a rather lengthy response at the insistence of my biological parents, who both felt that if I was going to do something productive with my fury, I should channel it into a clarification of what kind of person I am and what I stand for. I won’t get into the details of that because they don’t matter for what I want to say here. And I know that what I wrote wasn’t enough because I still can’t climb out from underneath the weight of an email that accuses me of being a follower, right to pulling the switch in the gas chamber. What I do want to say is that it will be a while before I can experience a sense of pride in what I have achieved, as a scientist who is a person of conscience, as a person who has always known that conscience must take precedence before science, and who hoped to encourage others to see it the same way.

This isn’t the first time in the last year or so that my integrity has been called into question. That seems to have been the theme of my life, whether it’s because of my professional decisions or my personal ones. I’ve been very lucky that along the way people insisted on retaining faith in me. Notably my mother. Narinda, who flew thousands of miles to get me through my qualifying exam. Ryan who began as a confidant who was also experiencing lost love and became an incredible best friend. The lovely Cantabrigians (02138) who hosted me, spent time with me and listened to me, repeatedly. Others here in Waterloo who made me welcome in their social circles, their homes and in one case, their church.

Last night, thinking over the email from my family member merged into thinking about the collapse of my marriage that slowly crept up and then seemed like a sudden explosion. However people may view the many mistakes and missteps I made, the unfair things I said and did, I am able to recall that underneath it, I was trying, at each step, to do right. Much like I try to do with my work. And I’ve learned that it’s not easy to figure out what those things are, and that people will try very hard to hurt you or leave you to suffer if they can’t understand your choices or trust your goals. I know my partner in that collapse, my ex-wife, has her own remorse to deal with, her own mistakes, her own version of pain. I know I have faith in her redeeming qualities, despite that, and I am glad that I do.

It’s heartbreaking to have the people closest to you accuse you of being willing to become complicit in murder. It’s also heartbreaking to make irreparable mistakes that injure others and live with others’ irreparable mistakes. These things are tangled in my mind, perhaps because in the end, like T.S. Eliot said, “What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.” Present and compassion. Present compassion. The question is are you a compassionate person? Well, for very few of us there is a constant answer to this question. More often it is complex, wavering with the ebb and tide of our ability to cope, our sensibilities and values. So the question that we must ask almost constantly is: am I a compassionate person in this moment?

And I would be lying, and so would most people, if I said yes every single time. But I know I’m trying. I was then. I am now.

I should be celebrating. But I can’t celebrate in the midst of the enormity of the perceived and actual failures of my character that have been thrown at me. I want the best for the people around me and even the people not immediately around me. Sometimes I go too far in my thinking about how to bring this about; more often than not, I get lost trying to balance the equation of fairness, equity and justice. But to think my goal is anything else . . . the fact of this thought, it weighs on heavily on me. And to think that in my confusion I would cross the line into assisting mass murder for the sake of my career? Well, that’s just as insane as the ideas that drive genocide itself.

Hopefully people can remember that I too want to be able look myself in the mirror in 20 years.