The day before the defense, I had not heard from any committee members, which I read as a good thing. No emails means no one thinks the dissertation isn't ready. My adviser writes to say it in fact looks very good. We meet and talk briefly about the defense procedure and address a concern that another faculty member had raised (remedied with no trouble at all).
The committee put me at ease immediately at the defense's opening. After joking for a few minutes about the agony they had planned for me, they asked me to address the project's history and its outlook. I did so, and no one seemed worried or confused. The protocol calls for the committee chair, my advisor, to provide each committee member the opportunity to ask questions in order, so each gets a turn. That didn't really happen at my defense. As I concluded my initial presentation, a committee member pointed to what she rightly saw as a major weakness in the introduction. My stomach fell when she asked me to articulate the argument of the dissertation; as it happens, that wasn't presented clearly enough in the introduction. All suspense was dropped, however, as she explained that she would happily sign off on the dissertation, so long as I refined the introduction. My presentation of that argument was strong, and the committee seemed to agree that the dissertation generally made its case, even if the introduction didn't.
We talked about the ways to frame the work in the criticism of life writing, the routes toward book-dom, and the ways I might work with the urgency of life writing in our contemporary moment, one that most of the committee agreed is frought with accomodating both the constructedness of the Real and the material risks of the political. One committee member looks me dead ahead and asserts that all of this poststructuralism is well and good, but aren't these life writers each trying to be true to something. What is it? I got a bit worked up, too, and said that, yes, of course they are - they're committed to bashing their heads against the conditions that mean their memoirs can't simply be accounts of what's happened to them, that memory and stories construct as much as they remember, that their class of remembering is construction... Even if the whole conversation was a little over the top, it was great because it seemed to accomodate the scholarly without being too laden with the boundaries of the academic. I had five very dissimilar committee members, and they were all nodding their heads.
We also talked about the need to raise a more precise gender and class critique, to account for my absence throughout the dissertation, the unreliability of the word "unreliable" in my work, the need to devote more attention to China Men as a response to Frank Chin, and the risk of using postmodernism as a critical frame when poststructuralism alone gets it done.
They kicked me out of the room for two or three minutes. I was then congratulated. The only provision was the aforementioned revision of the introduction.
I took the rest of the day off but worked on the introduction Thursday and Friday. It was approved Saturday, and I submitted the dissertation electronically on Sunday afternoon.
At the moment, as far as I can tell, all bureaucratic hurdles have been hurdled. I seem to be done with grad school. That was the idea all along.
The defense presented me with a number of what look to be very promising ideas. Now, I'll start looking at ways to work with and through them.
I am very lucky to have had the committee I found.
Measuring these things out by days and weeks seems not right, but there's a lot to be said about last Tuesday and Wednesday.
Evvie had been dealing with some sort of progressive lung disease for nearly a year. Her breathing was relatively shallow; sometimes she went into coughing fits that could be unsettling; sometimes her breathing was raspy, wheezy. No less than five vets worked with her over ten or eleven months, and the possible diagnoses ranged from asthma to pneumonia to cancer. She had steroid injections and antibiotics; Evvie was not the sort of cat that liked to be picked up, so holding on to her and getting pills and drops down her throat, sometimes for weeks, never pleased her or us. Early on, the medicines seemed to help. Later, not so much. Each X-ray looked worse.
When we first noticed audible breathing, her vet also noticed a murmur and started talking about Feline Cardiomyopathy. That fairly well freaked me out, as every prior checkup had earned her high marks as a very healthy cat. Natalie and I were quite proud of the fact that an early chart read, "immaculately groomed." Even when it was clear that she was in major trouble last week, we kept hearing that she was otherwise quite healthy, including her heart, which turned out to be alright. The morning of her surgery, she was angry at us for not feeding her - fasting for the procedure - but you wouldn't have been able to tell she was sick unless you watched carefully and marked her rate of respiration.
Cat personalities are cat personalities, so it doesn't seem right to draw a character sketch of Evvie. But this cat, who ran under the nearest piece of furniture when anyone but Natalie or I walked through the door (there are a few exceptions, those who kindly fed her when we were away, for instance), would hop in my lap, spent every night curled up with us in bed, chased feet moving under the covers, wouldn't eat unless one of us hung out with her or even petted her, was fascinated with whatever was on the other side of the door (this could include her own paw, reaching around or under), and maintained the softest belly ever.
She followed us from room to room, but never in an obsequious way. We'd move from office to kitchen and, two minutes later, realize she was there.
The day of the surgery, things were intially fine. The surgeon called to say the procedure, a thoracotomy, went well and that they had gotten a good sample of lung tissue for analysis. This was a diagnostic procedure, something about which we were torn - do we continue treating symptoms without knowing what's behind them, understanding that this disease will someday be her end, or do we put her through surgery and get a better shot at diagnosis? Previous procedures offered no answers. Her recovery was at first very good, but an hour or so later, the surgeon called back to say there had been trouble. She called again to say that things were better only because Evvie was again under general anasthesia. It took us a minute to realize how bad things were, but we didn't understand until we saw her.
There seem to be greater reasons not to write about what followed than there are reasons to tell it. I'll leave it be. But those hopeless minutes shattered me.
We called her Everest McLean Eubaileybanks. She was four. I hope I was as good a friend to her as she was to me.