Here and Now
If I try to say how I envision turning survival into achievement for myself over the next ten years, or what is the critical factor that may serve to get me from here to there, one term that springs to mind is "synchronicity." A buzzword of postwar film criticism, this word came into my awareness during the 1960s when it was used to convey what certain filmmakers sought to achieve through their works. Beyond the imitation of reality, the technique of synchronicity in film was supposed to expose the cosmic connectedness of apparently unrelated situations and events. Today, if you try a Google search on the same term, you will find that it has entered the popular vocabulary of movie reviews and fortune-telling.
But whatever the context, a core meaning persists that brings together the concepts of coincidence, causality, and significance. And it happens that survival in the year 2001, for me, entails maintaining an authentic profile in a number of competing situations, revolving at weekends between greater Boston and Eastern Connecticut, and touching down at regular weekday intervals on the campuses of MIT, Simmons College and Harvard University. Moving serially among these parallel universes, I strive to maintain continuity in each of the following different roles:
- Caregiver for my mother, Roberta Bitgood Wiersma (born 15 January 1908 in New London, Connecticut)
- In this role I must supervise and remain on friendly terms with Roberta's three personal helpers; interact with her hometown friends and professional colleagues near and far, most of them members of the American Guild of Organists; remain in regular contact with clinicians, providers and case management agencies, most importantly with Connecticut Community Care, Inc. (CCCI), the organization that helped me to design and implement Roberta's plan of care in 1998 and which maintains ongoing oversight; and keep up with a weekly payroll and related accounting, insurances and taxes
- MARC Database Quality Technician in the MIT Libraries
- As a member of the Database Maintenance Section in Bibliographic Access Services, I am in closest contact with the Database Manager as we work to ensure the quality of bibliographic information that is delivered through the online catalog to MIT's wider academic community; increasingly I am involved in collaboration with all monographic cataloging staff to develop and standardize new local documentation, terminology and workflows as we adapt to working in Aleph, the new "3d-generation" integrated library system which went into production at MIT during the summer of 2001; recently I contributed a page of "links about Aleph" to establish an ongoing resource for the collection of news and relevant case histories; and I also enjoy occasional contacts with technical processing staff of the various divisional libraries in the course of carrying out bibliographic problem-solving
- Library school student enrolled in the master's program at Simmons College, Boston
- In what is perhaps the most comfortable role for me, that of "perpetual student," I look for inspiration to the insights and experience of like-minded faculty mentors and special classmates; with the help of the Simmons program I have identified promising directions for future research and affiliation; currently, I am enrolled in LIS 520R, a course which I regard as a key enabler in my quest for synergy between my own scholarly activities and the practice of East Asian librarianship
- Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center of East Asian Research, Harvard University
- As an independent researcher I share the need for community, infrastructure support and exposure with other East Asianists who make up the Fairbank Center's constituency of affiliates and visiting scholars; and while time constraints currently permit me to attend only the occasional seminar, the electronic Asia Center Newsletter keeps me in touch with the full range of scholarship on East Asia despite my commitments elsewhere; but the really indispensable benefit of the Fairbank affiliation is in having access to the fine East Asian library collections on the Harvard campus: the Fairbank Center's own library, the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Harvard Law School Library, and the Rübel Collection of the Sackler Museum
It's easy to see how becoming a family caregiver can encourage one to simply let go of other accustomed roles and achievements, yet I know that allowing myself to respond to Roberta's situation in such a way would have been anathema to the particular person that my mother was. It is interesting that among the best advice on care delivery to patients with dementia one finds a recurrent theme: the imperative to keep in play the caregiver's expert knowledge about the person who has dementia. This imperative was aptly expressed by the president of the Alzheimer's Association of Australia in her opening remarks to last year's annual conference. Recently, I was surprised by nomination to receive an "Exceptional Caregiver" award at the 2001 Annual Meeting of CCCI. I have to admit that when I first received the invitation to attend this meeting I heard a small, inner voice which said: "Why bother?" and "Who cares?" But upon reflection I see that this recognition brings with it a positive comment on the choices I have made, choices which might easily be misinterpreted (even to myself), and I am grateful for this acknowledgment and reinforcement at a time when I might otherwise turn against my own best instincts. Attending the meeting on October 18, I felt honored and moved that my choices had been noticed, and found to compare with the choices of women who had, indeed, given up their other work to care for an elder parent. If you are interested, you can learn more about CCCI and its forward-thinking approach to state supported elder care at home by reading their Fall, 2000, Newsletter.
Retrospective
I returned to the United States (my native country) along with my husband, in June of 1998, after an absence of some years during which we worked and lived in Hong Kong. At first, we thought we were embarking on a routine trip "home," scheduled in part to coincide with my mother's receipt of a lifetime achievement award from her professional organization, the American Guild of Organists. We had arranged for her to fly with a close friend and colleague from Connecticut to Denver, Colorado, where the 101st annual convention of the AGO was to be held.
We made the 20-odd-hour trek by air from Hong Kong to Denver, and as we came through the revolving door of the convention hotel I heard my mother's voice: "Is that Grace?" From that moment until now, I have been captive to my mother's advancing dementia, and to my own desire to maintain for her a semblance of familiar routine that she can use to sustain virtual identity and orientation, in the face of increasingly absent links to the authentic life that she has nearly lost.
After the Denver convention and a brief stay in Connecticut, my husband Stuart returned to Hong Kong as scheduled to resume his work, while I remained in Connecticut with my mother to regulate her daily life with a new kind of supervision, set up an adequate care program with the help of state and local agencies and renovate her home to accommodate a full-time staff of hired caregivers. By summer's end, change had turned my own life upside-down. The international law firm I had been working for in Hong Kong had all but closed its doors in response to the so-called Asian Financial Crisis; Stuart had accepted a position in the Boston area; and my expatriate sojourn in East Asia was nearing its conclusion. I returned to Hong Kong, once Roberta's plan of care had been fully implemented, only to wind up my affairs there, give one last talk, and help pack up our entire household for trans-Pacific forwarding.
Once relocated within driving distance of Eastern Connecticut, I began to seek an approach to the US job market that would not involve forfeiting recognition of my prior academic experience and knowledge of Chinese. I was fortunate to find employment as a temporary replacement for faculty on leave from a college Chinese language program for one semester. Meanwhile I also enrolled in the MLS program at Simmons College, acting on the strong desire to resituate myself in a professional capacity that would involve performing and facilitating intellectual work on Chinese scholarly materials. As it turns out, the program has inspired me to reshape my career path to encompass more of the "information science" side of librarianship than I thought I could handle, while retaining a focus on East Asian librarianship, engaging my long-held ambition to master the information technology and natural language processing techniques that will be needed to support significant research on East Asian languages in the 21st century. Having come through the program halfway, I now see my way forward from a situation of nearly catastrophic change and dislocation to a future that offers the hope of reconnecting with a world I feared I might have lost.
