In Memoriam: Dr. George Tiller (1941 - 2009)

He was asked to conclude his talk with a vision of the future that he wished to see and was working towards.

‘I personally see a society that respects the integrity of its citizens to struggle with complex health issues and make decisions that are appropriate for them and their personal lives. I see a society that respects the religious differences of its citizens. I see a society that rejects hate, rejects judgmental condemnation, and rejects prejudice and racism. I see a government that honors the privacy of its citizens without unwarranted surveillance. I see a society where war is not an option.’

His striped shirt did not match his patterned tie.  His Utopia sounded saccharine, slightly naïve and simple.  Nearly cliché.  We have all appealed to these ideals, but what good does it do?  These are just words.  Still.  So much could be hung on that word ‘complex’.  He continued with a series of platitudes and a touch of irony that got a small laugh from his audience.

‘We have given war, pestilence, hate, greed, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try. And it failed. We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect in all our relationships.’ 

Then a pause.  A moment to collect himself.  A shift in tone.  He left his paper for a moment. Speaking from somewhere unscripted inside of himself, his right hand caught in his left.  There seems now, in retrospect, a slight urgency to his words.  A pleading to keep going, an insistence on perseverance:

‘Work hard. Be a leader. Your way of life depends on it. And just look at the rest of the world. That’s the way the anti-abortion segment of our population wants the USA to be. And how do we do that? We do it the way we have always done things. We feel our way forward. We consider defeat a temporary inconvenience. And we never, ever, ever take no for an answer. Never take no for an answer. Work hard. Be a leader. The rest of your life depends on it, and the life of your sisters and brothers throughout the world depend on it.’

These were the words of Dr. George Tiller from March 2008.  On May 31st, 2009, Tiller became the eighth abortion provider (the fourth doctor) to be murdered in the United States since 1977.  On March 10th, 1993, Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida, was fatally shot during a protest.  On June 29th, 1994, Dr. John Britton and his clinic escort, James Barrett, were both shot to death outside a Pensacola facility.  On December 30th, 1994, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, two receptionists, were killed in two clinic attacks in Brookline, Massachusetts.   In 1998, Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer, and Dr. Barnett Slepian were killed.  Tiller was sixty-seven years old and was shot outside of the Wichita Reformation Lutheran Church in Kansas where he was an usher. 

Tiller’s was one of 3 clinics in the United States performing late-term abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy.  His clinic was bombed in 1985.  In 1991, during the so-called ‘Summer of Mercy’, anti-abortion protestors tried to block access to his clinic.  Protestors also insisted the District Attorney investigate Tiller on a variety of criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.  Dr. Tiller survived a 1993 shooting sustaining gunshot wounds to both arms.  It was after this last attack that Tiller’s trauma started affecting him.  To compensate, he hired a Brink’s armored car to take him to and from the clinic.  He joked that those days were the only times he ever left the clinic on time.  In 1994, he was assigned federal marshals to protect him.   Anti-abortion activists stalked his wife and harassed his business vendors.  When speaking of these experiences and sharing slides of his bombed clinic he repeated his attitude plainly, but with gusto: ‘Hell, no, we won’t go!’  He believed in the American legal system and the rights the government gave his clinic to use the full implementation of the Roe v. Wade decision to conduct post-viability terminations of pregnancy.

Tiller first worked as a surgeon in the Navy.  With the death of his father in a plane crash, he returned to Wichita with the aim of closing down his father’s medical practice and pursuing his own aspirations of becoming a dermatologist.  Dr. Susan Robinson recounted that after returning he just couldn’t leave: the patients kept him in Wichita.  One day, she recalled, a woman asked him for an abortion and he said ‘Well, I don’t do abortions.’  The patient made it clear: ‘You have to do abortions.  Women need abortions, and you have to do them.  Your dad did them, and you have to do them.’ 

It was from these patients, Tiller would explain, that he became a woman-educated physician. (What he meant by being woman-centered could be summed up in a list of his rules, which themselves owe a debt to midwifery: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.  Time, Patience, and the baby will come.  Respect the woman’s rhythm.  And if you forget the second and third rule, remember the first: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.) He learned quickly about the abuse and devastation that occurs in families as a result of alcoholism and drug addiction.  

His pivotal moment came when a mother and her nine and half year-old daughter travelled from California to his clinic to terminate the girl’s pregnancy.   The girl was too far along and he explained that he could not help.  Stories leaked to the press that Dr. Tiller was ready to kill babies for a nine-year old.   In trying to explain the situation to his own nine and ten year-old daughters, he came to realize what he had to do.  Thirty seconds into him trying to explain the situation, Tiller’s daughter Jennifer said ‘Daddy, a nine year old girl shouldn’t be pregnant, and simply not by her father or her grandfather or her uncle.’  Tiller, who would joke that he was going to allow his daughters to car-date when they were 35, had to face the reality that at nine and ten, his daughters already knew a great deal about sex and babies and right and wrong.

‘What one of the things that my father taught me was that to be credible in medicine, you must require for your patients the same care that you would require for your family.  I made a decision that if my nine and ten year old daughter at that time were in that situation, I would do the procedure.  I did it for this girl.  It turned out marvelously.  There were no problems, no complications.  And I made that decision at that time that I was going to help as many people as I possibly could.  And age was—if a woman or a girl was able to get pregnant, we should be able to do a termination of pregnancy.’

His clinic walls were lined with thank you letters from patients from all over the world.  There was a letter from the woman from New Zealand who found out thirty weeks into their pregnancy that her baby didn’t have a brain.  There was one from the woman from New York whose baby had a life threatening tumor on the fetus.  Post-viability abortions save women’s lives.  Dr. Tiller saved people’s lives.  But how might we explain such a simple fact to his murderer or to those such as Randal Terry from Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion activist group:

‘Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer.  I grieve for him that he did not have an opportunity to properly prepare his soul to face his Maker.  Unless some miracle happened, he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered.  Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done.’

Tiller always believed that these people were simply misguided by their religion, that they didn’t understand the lives or biological realities of different women’s lives.  But domestic baby killers spill ink, so to speak, and people who help women don’t.  Bill O’Reilly mentioned Dr. Tiller on twenty-nine episodes of his The O’Reilly Factor on Fox:

‘Let’s be more blunt: Tiller is executing fetuses in his Wichita clinic for $5,000.  And records show he’ll do it for vague medical reasons.  That is, he’ll kill the fetus, viable outside the womb, if the mother wants it dead.  No danger to the mother’s life, no catastrophic damage if the woman delivers… There are Americans who believe that babies that are about to be born are not human beings—how they form that conclusion is interesting—and only a handful of doctors in the USA who will perform late-term abortions for any reason, because doctors know a viable life when they see it.’

I find myself sometimes repeating platitudes like they are koans or prayers to help me keep a grip on what is happening around me.  We seek peace.  We would like housing and medicine and education to receive greater funding than bailing out banks or supporting the military industries.  People should not be terrorized or occupied by foreign powers.  When I am fumbling, I reach my way forward to hold onto such simple truths, like a baby at grip with its pacifier.  But simple wishes are not enough.  These are just words.  Sometimes, however, when the words turn a little differently, they take the shape of thought and help nourish and protect us.  Language in the guise of thought can sometimes hold open enough space to inhabit the worlds our imagination offer us and that we must take the responsibility to help create.  All of a sudden and in an instant such was the space offered to me when I overheard Dr. Tiller’s words, repeated by someone else, wherein he noted that ‘Women are spiritually, morally and intellectually capable of struggling with complex, ethical decisions and arriving at the correct decision for themselves and their family.’ As his voice fades beneath the din of denunciations or simply as he is forgotten under a thin layer of earth, may we speak with him again and imagine better worlds.

Jacques Derrida (July 15 1930 – October 8 2004)
Mahmoud Darwish (March 13 1941 – August 9 2008)

… no, I have never learned-to-live. Not at all! To learn to live means to learn to die… That’s been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to philosophise is to learn to die. I believe in this truth without being able to resign myself to it. And less and less so. I have never learned to accept it, to accept death, that is. We are all survivors on reprieve […]

I remain uneducable when it comes to learning how-to-die, or, if you prefer, knowing-how-to-live. I still have not learned or picked up anything on this subject.

Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, ed. Jean Birnbaum, trans. by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault (Hoboken, NJ: Melville, 2007) pp. 24-25.

In his last interview with the French daily Le Monde in 2004, just months before his death to cancer, the philosopher Jacques Derrida movingly conceded the terminal condition of his illness. By turns, pensive and joyous, resigned and yet still curious, in this interview, at the last, Derrida presses forward his counter-injunction to Plato: an exhortation to a philosophy that could neither be reduced to any nihilistic knowledge of death, nor ever be capable of fully claiming to have learnt of life (which would be, itself, tantamount to knowing how to die). He exalts instead a philosophy that has yet to learn to live: ‘I still have not learned or picked up anything on this subject’. His accession here acknowledges the difficulty of the life to which he refers - the kind of life whose foundational principles are yet unsecured and so which continually calls for thought, and whose demands continue to be urgent, compelling us to continue to learn to live. This is the kind of life that might commit you to dedicate your own life to writing (tirelessly, urgently, compellingly) about love and grief, forgiveness and justice, asylum and nationhood, literature and art, touch and sight. For Derrida, this kind of life calls not simply for living, but for living on, or the proper sense of survival [sur-vie] - it calls for commitment to continuance, ongoing engagement, an intellectual and emotional tenacity to see the task of thinking through as far as it might extend.

But this conception of life is also, by necessity, as Derrida knows, ghostly. The ghost is something that I cannot understand - I fear it, even - but it is something that I cannot understand and it haunts me, exercising its insistent demand, signalling to me what is yet left for me to understand. The ghost survives as the remainder of what is yet left to be known and it signals the triumph of a life which, even as I face death, continues to be compelling though its secrets are perpetually withheld from me.

Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, who died early in August this year, would tell you in slow, unfurling lines that this life is no secret, but is constantly disclosed, expressed in the substance of a world that solicits the senses and provokes recollection:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living; April’s hesitation, the aroma of bread
at dawn, a woman’s point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning of
love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute’s sigh and the invaders’ fear of memories.

Mahmoud Darwish, ‘On This Earth’, from Unfortunately, it was Paradise, trans. and ed. by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein, (London: University of California Press, 2003) p. 6.

And yet what remains secret, or at least difficult to know, is how this life works upon us and the ways in which it binds us to other people and places. Poetry discloses, but it discloses only how unspoken our unseen lives are, barely intimating the fullness of an interiority without end. For Darwish, the April that hesitates is simultaneously subject and world. When he writes of April, he writes of what it means to have consciousness in a world in which subjects are variously dissolved, expressed or resisted by the landscape in which they dwell and the seasons in which they live. Darwish knows that he walks upon an earth capable both of elevating and diminishing that very consciousness. If, at times, this earth seems strange and beyond the possession of a human language, at other times, it seems to exist solely to wait upon that very language; April hesitates for Darwish, waiting upon his articulation. He does not ask how long April will demur, but in an era of catastrophic climate change he might wonder how much longer we can expect our seasons to have patience.

The ‘aroma of bread at dawn’ evokes the way of life of a people who rise early to pray with the sunrise and bake bread in cool Middle Eastern mornings. What and how we eat, the substance of our subsistence matters since food is also the expression of freedom. Lingering behind the warmth of bread, Darwish knows the story of the Gazan olive groves cut off from the Palestinian families that tended their soils for generations. He knows, too, how men and women ask both to be one and not one with each other: the women who speak of men, as they pin their veils and set themselves to work, ask how to come to equality with difference. How do we love with neither the violence of consuming union, nor the separation of singularities? Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter and is killed by his wife, could not tell us since he knows only the pride of kings, the abduction of women, and nothing of love. But Aeschylus knows to wonder whether Iphigeneia (who walked to her death with courage and bitterness, silently weeping the loss of generations of her own progeny) glanced backwards to pity the father who could believe that life was sacrificable. Was life sacrificable then? To which gods now is life still sacrificable?

Derrida tells us that life is not sacrificable and that it is love that renders it so. The beginning of love is gaze - the muted expression of a seeking touch that is not yet permitted and yet still sought. But the end of love is the unwillingness to let go. In love, we seek to be loved - but to love first, to love before I am loved, and to love without limit or end, is love’s best expression. In the beginning, love is my willingness to reach for you when I cannot be sure of you, though, in the end, love is only my courage to let you go first. In loving one seeks, at once, not-to-live without the beloved alone and to outlive the beloved, so that the beloved might not be alone in suffering or surviving loss: sur - vival, living on. If I love you properly, then I cannot seek to die for you, but choose, if I must, to have you die first so that you may never suffer what I will suffer on your behalf alone. Love renders my life unsacrificeable. In love, I commit to living on, out-living the beloved, acceding to grief with the willingness to accept it on their behalf and in their stead. The grammar of love requires one to live on even after the end of the world, it requires that you cede to the possibility of suffering loss and still promise to outlive it, despite its difficulty - and this renders your own life unsacrificeable.

What can the long grasses splayed across a stone know of love? On a still and airless Palestinian evening, they tell Darwish that life asks acceptance of the vulnerability of all that we love. The stone would keep the grasses, its sure weight pressing to secure what would not be kept, but it cannot do so without crushing their fragile life. The stone tells Darwish to let go of what will not be kept, and sit, instead, as steady as the weight of existence, only holding up to the sky and its winds all that he treasures but cannot keep. The mothers who feed children on the flute’s sigh do so with the knowledge that life is to be cultivated, though the world into which their children come cannot promise anything more than the love with which they are fed. Such mothers know that love is the commitment to outlive their children - if that must be so - although that itself may be the end of the world. Those who live in the shadow of ‘the invaders’ fear of memories’ know that the history of a people’s violence and suffering does not disperse with grief, or with exodus, or with denial; it only transfers from parent to child, across generations, an open wound searing through a land that can be neither shared nor divided.

Darwish’s world contains ‘life worth living’ in every expression. If, at times, it is full and fragrant and vivid, then it is also frail and fraught with difficulty. It is, in any case, the kind of world that could not be easily relinquished - the only kind of world that could inspire its inhabitants to commit to living on.

Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and night.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.

Kahlil Gibran

How to Live begins from an impulse to speak simply of the terms of living. It is an attempt to articulate those things which we have always known, but is guided too by a readiness to uncover things not yet revealed.   It originates from an idea that the work of thinking, (whether it be undertaken by artists, academics or anyone inclined to acts of patient reflection), may be a task that calls upon a collective effort.

This task is one to be pursued with neither velleity nor violence, but with solicitude, and in the spirit of a collective care for the idea of life itself.  The varied and vivid terms of this life (which must include love and grief, justice and freedom amongst its number) are, at once, vast and simple.   If at times these terms seem opaque or oblique, elusive or enigmatic, then at other times, they shine brightly, promising, like touchstones, to fortify the commitment necessary to live out a life whose conditions are not always easy to bear.

How to Live is, at least, an attempt to acknowledge the complexity of the terms of even our daily lives and it is an exhortation to challenge the certainty of our claims to knowledge.  Here then is a place where the philosophical precepts we deduce, the religious beliefs we espouse, the political ideals we cling to, even the simple practices of our daily existence remain subject to our continued learning about a life that continues to exceed our ability to understand it.

At its most ambitious, How to Live seeks to speak of things that are important and immense, but it is a home too for the curious, the quotidian, and the incomplete.  If we elect here to think hard of difficult things, if we strive to seek out our foundational principles, then it is only because we know that we must be prepared to cede those foundations, and that our critical engagement must remain seeking, hungry and desirous.  Our last understanding is always that the things that we live for, the things that give to life its contour, colour and timbre (friendship, love, democracy, justice …), such things will survive us.  How to Live only signals that the task of thinking entrusts these ideals to our continued, collective care.