depending on each other

a conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant

Welcome back readers, and welcome, new readers –

In this post we dialogue with Leah Libresco Sargeant about her new book The Dignity of Dependence. The theme of this book is the importance of recognizing that human dignity comes from the intrinsic value of every human being, and the necessity of acknowledging our dependence on each other because at some point in our lives every one of us will be vulnerable and in need of help. The book challenges modern ideals of radical autonomy and self-sufficiency and calls instead for a new vision of society where the realities of disability, caregiving, or illness are understood as being essential to humanity. These are themes that are closely connected to life in community and to the idea that each of us has seasons in our life – sometimes we are the one being cared for, and sometimes we are the caregiver. We exchanged ideas on Leah’s book over email; our conversation is below.

Marianne: The subject of this book seems very timely – I’m thinking of the many ways that society indicates to people with disabilities or disease that they are expendable, from the increasing availability of “embryo selection” technologies to the rise of medically assisted dying which has the effect of putting pressure on sick or disabled people to avoid “being a burden” on their family, as well as the many examples you give in the book. Were there specific circumstances or anecdotes that made you think that a book on this topic needed to be written?

Leah: It’s funny, because I think the book is both timely/untimely. The way we are made porous by our need, the impulse to find a way of buffering or containing our sprawling embodiment is a tension that has always existed for people. The question of whose need unpersons them so that they can be un-chosen, by violent means if necessary, is a constant. The variation is just who is on the chopping block.

Part of what made me want to write a book, rather than a series of essays or articles, is the desire to bring all these vulnerabilities (and temptation to fear them) together. So you might be repelled by Orchid, but disagree with me on abortion. You might dislike women being treated as defective men, but sympathize with expansions of euthanasia. I want to create a work that looks at the root of these issues: the suspicion that we are least human when we need each other. Then I want to walk out of the cave.

Norann: Thank you, Leah. Your comment that “we are least human when we need each other” has given me pause….why do you think that is? Is it fear of appearing weak and vulnerable and being “made porous by our need”?

Leah: Unfortunately, I think our culture sees need as a misfortune you are occasionally subject to, not a constant throughout life. Sickness can exile you from the land of the well, poverty can push you away from the comfortable, the beginning and end of life are treated as exceptional times. But look around and check how many people are actually autonomous. From a Christian point of view, it’s no one! We all are radically dependent on God.

Even from a secular perspective, we know no man is an island. We rely on the industry of others for our daily bread. But the bonds of mutual need and giving are often hidden from us because we pay for what we need. We interact with systems, not persons, and when we are purchasers, it feels like we are patrons, not supplicants.

The more that we imagine our default state is independence, the more frightening or personally shameful it can feel to fall short of it. I sometimes ask people to tell me about the last time they asked for help. For some people, it’s been a long while! It’s easy to order delivery; it’s hard to ask a friend to invite you over dinner. But both are rooted in need.

Marianne: I had a conversation with one of my teenage sons over the weekend about the fact that needing and asking for help is a normal part of the human experience. This is hard to compute if you are a fourteen-year-old boy who towers over his mother and enjoys spending hours on the soccer field every day. But practicing asking for help (that you actually need!) when you’re healthy makes it easier to ask when you really need it.

As you point out in your book, the world we live in is (for the most part) not designed to make life easier for people with vulnerabilities. Hopefully this will improve over time, but in the meantime, I think that community – in whatever form that takes – provides a place where people can help each other. On a very basic level, just knowing the people in your community means you know who might need the offer of childcare, or someone’s arm to hold on an icy road, or help with household chores. I love what you wrote in the chapter “The Blessing of Burdens” about our calling to “knit dependence deeply into our understanding of what it means to be a human being.”

Leah: Just this morning I was talking to a friend whose washing machine had broken... the same day her child had a massive blowout in his car seat. She said she could handwash it while she’s waiting for a new machine, but I think (and I told her) it’s a great example of the kind of ordinary need we should try to bring to a neighbor. I run a load once or twice a week, and the rest of the time my laundry machine just takes up space. I’d feel great knowing I saved another mom handwashing poo from a car seat cover.

It’s by asking for help in the small things that we could manage alone that we build up the relationships that can support the needs we cannot handle by ourselves.

Trudi: Hello, this is Trudi chiming in from PA. I love this conversation. The idea of starting to ask for help with small things in order to build relationship before needing big help….That has me thinking.

Interestingly, I’m currently babysitting three kids while mom and dad are in the hospital to welcome their fourth child. It’s the third time this year I’ve been a caregiver for a family at a time like this (it’s one of many ways we joyfully rally round new babies in community), eagerly waiting for news of a new baby brother or sister. Parents are always so apologetic, repeatedly expressing their gratitude, but I tell them it’s my pleasure! I love responding to their need for extra support, especially in such a special moment. There are harder moments, like a few weeks ago when my sister lost her baby at 18 weeks. I can’t take away the pain but I can cook a meal, sit and talk and listen, and then go clean the bathroom. . . .

I wonder what kind of mom I would be. Would I ask for help or would I strive to manage on my own? (Probably the latter if it weren’t for the wisdom in your book, Leah, and these shared thoughts!)

I work with kids and they ask for help if they need it. When did I start not wanting to ask for help? Maybe growing into adulthood has become synonymous with achieving (seemingly) complete independence.

Leah: Learning how to be present when you can’t help is such a hard but necessary thing. Grieving is one of the places we’re all called to do this. We can help through our prayers, but we can’t fix things in the way we long to. I talk about this a bit in my chapter on men’s response to dependence. Part of what a husband does is take on more work when his wife is pregnant/nursing, but another big challenge is being present for suffering he can’t relieve, as much as he’d like to. During nausea, labor, etc. a man cannot lift this burden from his wife’s shoulders, but has to figure out how to be faithful in love amid the suffering.

Norann: It’s exactly what I’m wrestling with now, being away from many friends that I used to be physically present for (in Australia) and now can’t show up for because of my new job in the USA. (I had definitely experienced this before in supporting people who were grieving, in exactly the way that Leah describes it – we can only go so far to help in grief, there is so much that the griever has to do alone.) So I really am learning a new kind of presence through prayer, through reaching out with a message or phone call or handwritten letter.

I loved Trudi’s question about when do we stop asking for help, and why? Asking for help is something I have struggled with a lot, but when a series of health dramas hit me a few years ago, I had to learn it the hard way. I had gladly accepted help when I had my babies in my twenties, but somehow this random health crisis in my early forties didn’t seem to have a noble ring to it. When I looked at why I didn’t want to ask for help, it was because I didn’t want to inconvenience people, come across as weak, or let them into a private space of messiness (my house) or fragility (my health and emotions). Then one of my closest and very honest girlfriends told me, “By not letting us help you, you’re denying us a gift.”

That changed my perspective: helping and being helped is a beautiful, bonding, and reciprocal act. (What Leah writes about men’s response to dependence is so true – first during the pregnancy and baby years, then later if (as in our case) the wife goes through health challenges that require lots of practical support.)

Marianne: Leah, back to your chapter “The Blessings of Burdens”. You write about concentric circles of care where people can, as you write “step into the breach” for each other at times of heightened need, whether with the arrival of a new baby or other sickness, where an “intense need…is supported and spread out over layers of helpers until it becomes manageable.” As Norann says, it’s really important to be able to ask for help and – as I think Leah points out somewhere in the book – it’s good to practice asking at less intense times, and to do this uncalculatingly, not in a spirit of give and take but because we love our neighbors, something we’re called to do as Christians. I love the insight by the theologian Gerhard Lohfink, that “Jesus was not just concerned with souls. He wanted a changed society. That is precisely why he begins the new thing within a community of disciples.” I hope the important message of your book inspires many people to find more ways of loving and caring for the people around them – I certainly come away from it with some very specific ideas of things I can do better at!

Leah: Thank you, Marianne. A big hope I have for readers is that they’ll deliberately ask for help with something (including something you could technically handle alone) within a week of reading the book. Those networks of care are built up through small, repeated asks. Think about building a suspension bridge—the first cables you pass across a gap are small and light. But each cable gives you the power to pull a thicker cord, until you have massive steel cords that are wider than I am tall!

Norann: The discussion of this book has prompted me to ask for help for all kinds of things including hand-mending a sport uniform (I’m a terrible seamstress anyways but there’s a talented sister here at the community who can mend anything to look like new), dish washing (it gives me more time for writing), and dog owners letting me dog-sit their pooches (I miss my pupper, Bear).

But the biggest thing I’ve asked for is for a friend to insist that once a week I go on a walk with her. I haven’t seen this friend for decades and so much life has been lived in between our last meeting. Suddenly we’ve found ourselves back in nearby company with each other, and it’s becoming a weekly gift to spend regular time together in God’s beautiful creation. It’s not a long walk, but it’s an important hour of movement, conversation, and connection that I didn’t know how much I needed. After our second walk I realized that over the last decades in Australia I’ve built up a network of women friends who would regularly walk with me. That abruptly stopped in August when I moved to New York and I hadn’t replaced it.

I’m going to be on the lookout for other cables as our new job unfolds.

Trudi: Thank you, Leah, for bringing a truth to me that I’d never paid attention to: I’m not autonomous and independent, nor is anyone else, and that’s a beautiful part of our humanity. Hearing from the other three of you wonderful women has been so enriching!

Like Norann, I’ve also been trying to ask for help more since we started exploring this theme. I’ve never liked to inconvenience others by asking for assistance. However, recognizing that it’s natural and okay, has encouraged me to humbly ask my friends to share a work load.

What is more difficult for me is to accept hospitality and other gestures of love that I don’t feel able to reciprocate mainly because I’m single. Even though complete independence is a false ideal, it's hard to admit that I need others in order to be fully “okay”. I often find myself trying to repay everyone because I am embarrassed to be someone who receives more hospitality than I give. But of course I’m not a happy person with that mentality, and as you mentioned, Leah, striving for autonomy deprives others of a wonderful opportunity to love and care.

So this week I’m determined to welcome the gestures of kindness I receive and to recognize and celebrate human limitations and bonds of mutual dependency in all my friendships.

If these topics interest you, please get a copy of Leah’s book, catch her on her book tour, and in the meantime, think of ways that you can ask someone to help you!

Leah with her son

What we’re enjoying

Trudi

I’m just back from an overnighter at “Dolly Sods”, a breathtakingly beautiful spot in West Virginia made prettier by October glory. We (meaning a group of seven adventurous ladies from the Spring Valley Bruderhof community) were blessed with good weather—at least until 3 a.m.: a sunset, a starry sky, delicious food, and the wonderful company of each other. This morning (Sunday) we cooked and ate breakfast and packed up camp in mist and rain. Thankfully, fall foliage has a way of looking lovely even in dreary conditions, and we couldn’t help noticing the red and yellow leaves bravely glowing through the rain.

…and a panoramic view.

Marianne

I’m reading Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains about physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti and Peru. This is a book I’m embarrassed not to have read earlier: Haiti is a place that I’ve had an interest in ever since two of my siblings spent a gap year after high school volunteering at hospitals there, and I knew from their accounts as well as pretty much any news story about Haiti that it’s a harsh and difficult place to live. So I’ve been surprised me by how hopeful this book is, an amazing reminder of human resource and resilience and how important it is to give help to one person at a time, even in the face of overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. Dr. Farmer (who died in 2002) once said that, “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world,” an idea that is very resonant with Leah’s book. (Also, I was not expecting a major character of the book to be a daughter of Roald Dahl: Ophelia Dahl met Paul Farmer early in his time in Haiti and has dedicated her life to advocating for the poor.)

Norann

Much to everyone’s amusement, I’ve been enjoying Autumn things with total abandon.

Here are five recent moments:

1. Picking and processing walnuts with my husband, Chris:

2. The autumnal displays everywhere:

3. Hudson River sunrises with diffused light (they remind me of my artist mother, Roswith, who taught all her students about Thomas Cole and his Hudson River School of art which captured the beauty of this region):

4. Finding a Fox and Cubs flower for the first time in many years:

5. And the surprise – when we took a wrong turn on a new walk – upon discovering a commercial dahlia patch in the middle of the woods with bundles of picked flowers prepared for sale:

That’s all for now folks. Enjoy the season you’re in!