I shared this on Instagram last night, and since then I’ve been flooded with messages from people who are also feeling soaked, marinated, drowning? swimming in death. So here it is, in case you don’t follow me there and/or don’t like to spend your time in that particular bottomless pit.
Lucille Ann Mann (January 13, 1926–July 17, 2022) had an illegal abortion in 1958.
In the summer of 2022, at the age of 96 and knowing that her death was near, she asked her daughter Terry to record her abortion study in order to share it with the world. When she had passed on, her daughter sent a video of Lucille telling her abortion story, along with one of her paintings, to the Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights abortion storytelling archive.
(If you’ve never explored the GRR! archive of elders’ stories, it is so so rich and lovely and complex. I highly recommend reading, and getting familiar with the org’s uniquely intergenerational work).
I’ve been thinking about death a lot—a lot—this spring. Steeped in footage and images of it, a constant ticker of lives not lost but stolen—thousands and thousands of them, en masse, and with a sick and proud and gleeful cruelty. Meanwhile, lives keep ending on their own, as they always will, and the rest of us have to keep learning, over and over again, about what that ending means. About how it feels to keep living.
As I read the pre-Roe abortion stories of our elders, I’m reminded often of Dr. Robert Spencer, a general practitioner who is believed to have provided abortion care secretly and illegally to some 40,000 people in his decades of practice—right up until his death. He reportedly performed his first abortion in the 1920s, to the wife of a coal miner, and word spread through whisper networks all over the country. He never charged more than $100, and sometimes no more than $5. He was arrested three times but never convicted, and died awaiting a trial that would never happen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the risks I don’t take and the laws I don’t break, because I have a child I am afraid to fail or neglect or leave behind. Because I am afraid to die.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to fight right up until the moment of your death, for your own survival or for the living beings you know you are leaving behind.
Yesterday I watched my three-year-old child learn about death for the first time.
In a book, a little boy sat by his dead dog’s now-empty bed, holding an empty collar. Will Juno die, my baby asked, his eyes huge. Yes, we told him. But she’ll come back? No, we said quietly, and I opened my arms for his collapse into this first taste of grief and mortality. I’ll feel so sad, he wept, when Juno dies. Yes, we agreed, you will. We will all feel so sad.
But, we said: Juno is alive now. She is healthy and here with us. So what can we do?
My baby said: We can love her. We can keep her safe.