April's CR Diary

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May 29, 2005

Give Me Forever

Or: the blog entry in which our heroine admits that she owns a John Tesh CD.

I bought my John Tesh CD with the line from which today's headline is taken back in 1997, when I was working on an organizing campaign at Mercer Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. I was a 23 year old organizer, about to turn 24, and I had just lost the first campaign I ever ran by myself by 6 votes. It was brutal, the worst anti-union campaign anyone around had seen in years and years, and I was pretty badly beaten up. I remember working out on the treadmill, reading Suzanne Gordon's writings on nursing, and trying to bring myself back to life. It wasn't until we got the call from Mercer and I met Dale that I started to be myself again.

Dale had been a registered nurse for about 25 years. She was a nice girl from Levittown, PA, one of those nurses you would trust your life with. I still imagine that if anything ever happened to me or someone I love, I would want Dale to take care of me or my loved one.

She came to her first union meeting with that attitude that a lot of long term, excellent nurses start with: What's the union going to do for me? Who are you, and what do you get out of this? What's the catch?

I was so young then, but already pretty battle hardened, and tougher than any 23 year old you're likely to meet. I knew how to move the conversation. "It's not about what the union is going to do for you: the union is nothing but the nurses in the union. It's about what you and your co-workers are going to do for yourselves, by claiming the rights you have but can only exercise as a collective group." Cutting through class prejudices and ideas about what it means to be a "union person"... so many things I've learned in the intervening years. Dale was a tough cookie, and it took awhile to earn her trust.

But like all good nurses, once she was on board, she was 100%. Hours and hours we spent talking to other nurses, going to meetings, figuring out how to move those who were too scared to even show up to a meeting on their own time. We spent an almost unbearable amount of time at a Friendly's in Morristown, PA, and an IHOP in Trenton, NJ, meeting with nurses. One thing that comes with my dearly beloved great work is a lot of hours logged in bad restaurants.

I remember driving home from a late night meeting one night and hearing this song on the radio, thinking that the words of the song described how I felt about my nurses.

Won't you give me forever
To show all of the love
I have here for you...

It is such a great gift from the god or goddess or chaos or random chance or whomever to be present at the moment when another human being realizes for the first time that she has power over her own work life, and when all the anger and despair and frustration and hopelessness that she's felt for maybe fifty years finally turns into powerful, collective action. It is a blessing to be the catalyst for this action. "I can give you the tools, and I can push you to do what you know you should do anyway," I say to my nurses now. "But in the end, it is your decision."

MR gave me the tools, and pushed me to do what I knew I should do anyway. But in the end, it was my decision.

And I promise that I'll never let you down.

The decision to live our lives as though they are own is hard.

For years and years I put my work above everything else, and to be honest with you, my dear bloggiefriends, I don't regret it for a minute. I lived entirely to help nurses push past the ingrained fear and sense of futility and take control of their worklives, and through that, of their entire lives. I would not trade the beautiful moments of victory and even the moments of defeat for anything.

But now at thirty, now that I've finally fallen in love with someone who is worth taking a few days off from work for, someone who can support my work and who I am as a whole person, I am glad that I can have my great work and still have love. It's a tough call for organizers... may marriages have broken up due to the stress of the job, and lots of girl organizers give up the organizing once they meet a guy and decide to marry, have kids, etc.

Luckily, MR has no more interest than I do in such silliness. Long before we met, we had both accepted that the yellow brick road of marriage, children, and consumer debt, and all the trappings of middle class life would not be for us. How nice that we figured that out separately, and don't have to spend time negotiating it! Leaves more time to fight over the thermostat... I swear, the man is doing slow motion cryonics! He's going to be frozen long before he's dead!!!

Okay, gratuitous dig at MR freezing himself to death aside, when I think about what I have learned from practicing CR and allowing myself to be totally transformed and empowered by the writings of a brilliant if slightly orange man from Canada, I can't help but think about the process that my nurses go through when they first realize that they have power. Even now, nearly ten years in, I am still brought to tears by the beauty of my every day experience of living with these women (and a few guys!) as they stand up for their patients and their profession. They have so much to lose... not only economically, though that certainly is a concern when your job is putting food on the table and health insurance cards in your husband and children's wallets. But when they step out on that limb and risk not just economic loss but the loss of class status, the sense of being the perfect little middle class girl... I can't describe to those of you who have not been there how hard this is.

So no matter what, I'll be there for my nurses. They have saved me so many times, in so many ways they will never understand. They gave me my reason for living, and through them I came to believe in the power of good to triumph over evil. It's not easy, it's not clean, it's certainly not glamourous... most of my job is making hundreds of phone calls and meeting with nurses in smoke filled diners! But it works.

Billy Joel pipes in from "All About Soul:"

It's all about soul
The power of love and the power of healing.

It's going to take so long to see my dream of a world where the workers share equally in the profits they make come to fruition. Just the other day, my colleague and close friend said to me:

"I don't expect to see radical change in my lifetime anymore. I just hope that what I do every day makes it possible for that change to happen someday, even if I'm not here to see it."

My first reaction is to call Aubrey and say, "Make those scientists do the rodent studies and find the cure for aging!" To call MR and say, "Write faster, my angel! I'll do the cooking, you just write!" To raise more money for the Mprize, so that we can break the logjam of hopelessness and pessimism and actually put the SENS ideas into practice. This is life and death to me: give my friend a chance to see the world he has spent his entire life fighting for! I can't convert him to CR, it's way too late. I thank God every day that I have MR to journey with me into the unknown future, someone beautiful whom I love to hold my hand as we stand defiantly against the advancing armies of biological aging. I can not stand the thought that some of my non-CR'd friends may not make it. Fight harder! Thank you, new Three Hundred members, for bringing us closer! Thank you Matt for joining the Three Hundred and starting CR yourself... you're doing everything you can, and MR and I consider you a brother! Thanks to all of you scientists out there actually handle mice (John S!) in search of the cure. I believe in you... and if you come to Philly, I'll make you a really nice dinner!

The next few days will be draining... we are in negotiations tomorrow, and we may settle the contract, but we may not. I'm packing a cooler bag full of calcium and protein and hazelnuts, and I'm packing a bag with anything I might need if I have to stay over at the contract negotiations hotel, cause we often at the very end negotiations we don't get out till 3 am, and then we have to be doing meetings at 7 the following morning. Luckily, lack of sleep has never bothered me much. Sure, I like to sleep if I can but I'm more than willing to sacrifice sleep to the cause.

I am very lucky to have a job that is more of a calling than a career, and more of a passion than a grind. Doesn't mean that it's not stressful and boring and irksome at times (Groundhog Day, anyone?) but it's always had a way of making me certain that I'm alive.

To (very loosely) paraphrase MR: I plan to take on aging, disease and dying -- and the political economy of this country -- and the unfortunate habit that so many Northerners have of wearing white shoes before Memorial Day -- as a literal life and death struggle, entailing self-discipline, commitment and sacrifice.

BTW, it's Memorial Day now. You can wear white shoes.

Posted by april at May 29, 2005 8:45 PM

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Posted by: Matt at May 30, 2005 12:34 PM

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