Composing a Life

helpful, liberating him from stereotypes of masculine imperturbability, but I no longer remember when he passed it on to me. Was it after the death of my first child very soon after his birth in Manila in 1968, or ten years later after my mother died, or was it after some other loss or interruption? I’ve heard the same recovery period applied to a disastrous fire in which a home is destroyed, the traumatic loss of a job, an amputation.
    For an adult with an independent adult life, the loss of a parent carries all the weight of childhood attachment, but at least the texture of everyday life is unbroken. For a man or woman with an independent work life, the loss of a spouse still permits continuity in half the day. Often we lose a part of life because of what we choose to retain, leaving either a home or a career to retain the other.
    When Jack died suddenly, he had just emerged from the shadow of a series of losses. He had lost the company he had spent the previous twenty years building, had left a home and ended a marriage; his death came only a few days after he became reassured that the new company he had started with Alice and the house he had bought would not slip away. Because everything was still so much in flux, he had not formalized his divorce or written a new will. Alice found herself living in a house to which she had no claim, trying to hold together the company she and Jack had built, in which she had only the token holdings needed to make her a legal director, but not enough to give her control.
    Jean and Alice stood together in the immediate aftermath of Jack’s death, but as the weeks passed and both of them encountered different advice and pressures, Alice acted to retain her role as de facto leader of Demonics, as the only way to maintain the company’s tenuous momentum so that the effort already invested would result in a viable product. Jean brought lawsuits against Alice and the company—as if the equity Jean now owned would have any value without some maintenance of continuity. Alice moved to her North End condo and traveled back and forth between Japan and her research program, lifting her spirits by studying written and spoken Japanese, enduring the horrors of endless legal sessions. We kept hoping that if the two women could deal with each other directly, they would understand that unless they worked together they would both lose, but the pressures toward adversarial solutions were too great. Ultimately, Jean settled for a portion of what she had wanted, and Alice became a major stockholder and remained chief executive. Unfortunately, she had been forced to squander half of her time and vitality for a full year that could have been used to make the company more viable. The two women had planned Jack’s funeral together, but when a stone was erected on Jack’s grave a year later, there were two different ceremonies an hour apart, although many of us stolidly stayed for both.
    Alice changed the name of Demonics to Rise Technology and took it public in 1987. A year later, after major internal conflicts about marketing, she had moved back to directing research, a new CEO was in place, and she was preparing to move on. But in the course of that year, she had discovered whole new dimensions of herself, a willingness to take responsibility and exercise leadership and a fascination with Japanese culture. Suddenly her concern for aesthetics, which had seemed to pull against her work as an engineer, began to make a valuable contribution to her work.
    Why is it that losses so often cluster? My mother died in 1978; within two months, I had lost a job and a home to the Iranian revolution. It took a year to deal with the complexities of closing my mother’s office; then, in 1980, just before I began a new job, my father died. I tried to meet the resulting obligations with my left hand and set aside the emotions of transition while I tried to administer Amherst with my right. When Julian Gibbs died in January 1983 and my job fell apart, it felt like more of the same.
    Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity. In the aftermath of Julian’s death and the betrayal that followed, I wrote a memoir of my parents that at least completed my grieving for them, working through their deaths and through much that was incomplete or unspoken between us. Reviewers remarked that the book had an elegiac tone, without knowing how much I struggled to