on impending retirements, BG, and changing or unchanging voices

Giselle Harrington, counselor extraordinaire at Barnard College's student health services, will be retiring at the end of this semester. I've been thinking about Giselle recently, even before I learned of her upcoming departure from Barnard, as I've been working towards the end of my own therapy. It was thanks to her, back in the summer of 2002, that I first found my way to Sarah.

Giselle has been facilitating Barnard's bereavement group, also known affectionately as BG, since time immemorial. I attended BG pretty consistantly throughout my four years at Barnard.

My last year in school saw this little group of women, hurt and damaged to varying degrees, grow especially close. The seven of us gathered on Friday mornings around the table in Beau Parlor and threw our anger, our desperate sadness, our small triumphs, even (every once in awhile) a funny story or a morbid joke, at each other, and at Giselle, who somehow caught everything we had to throw. Then we'd head off to McIntosh Student Center, cigarettes in hand, bottle of wine craftily hidden away in a bag, for a good nosh to appease what we oh so cleverly termed PB&J, or the post-bereavement jitters.

I went digging under my bed, rooting around in boxes late one night a couple weeks ago, looking for the little scrapbook that Giselle put together for us at the end of that particular year. We each had brought something in -- a poem, a handful of pictures, a letter scrawled out by hand the night before the day that she collected our offerings. We had gone out into the Quad and found someone to take a picture of us, and there we still are, frozen on the lawn, arms around each other, smiling or half-smiling or looking concerned in the dappled spring light.

I found it eventually, this little scrapbook entitled simply "Beau Parlor, Fri. 11a.m.," and sat on my bedroom floor in the middle of the night, reading through it and crying a little bit, but also laughing out loud. And the fact that we seven college girls, in the midst of all our college drama, created this thing that can make me laugh out loud ten years later made me inexplicably happy.

Later that week I brought the scrapbook to Sarah. We sat side by side on the couch in her office for the first time in all the years I've been seeing her, and flipped through it together. I, slightly embarrassed at my own melodramatic contribution, looked away while she read it. She chuckled at first, said some things never change (my piece opened with me sneaking a cigarette out of the window of my 13th-floor smoke-free dorm room in the middle of the night), but finally she turned to me and said, "You were younger then, but I hear your voice in it."

A few days later Nick and I got caught up in a conversation about voices; the multitudinous voices each one of us harbors from all the years that we've had language, but mostly the differences between our spoken voices and our written voices.

The conversation started off being about Clarion, a writing workshop that Nick attended a couple years back, and how the people from Clarion were surprised to read Nick's blog. The voice he uses there, on his blog, wasn't the same voice that they knew, or imagined they knew, from being in this workshop together. It is rather, as he says, a smart alecky, overly intellectual, kind of voice, and very different from the studied, self-deprecating voice that he often presents in person.

Nick has been rewriting an old novel of his. I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned that Nick is a writer. Not a published novelist yet (fingers crossed and all that), but a prolific writer none the less. Short stories (one or two published in magazines), epic poems, novels, novellas. The piece he's been working on is, as he put it, the novel that he would have loved to have written at the tender age of 14, when it would have been cool, but instead is the novel that he wrote a few years ago and that reads like a novel written by a 14 year old boy.

This, too, made me laugh. Not only because of its cleverness, but because it is so very much my Nick, the Nick I have been having long conversations with for almost a decade now. It also made me realize that I haven't read very much of his writing, and made me wonder if it isn't in part because I have a hard time putting these two pieces of him, these two voices, together.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this.

I guess I'm feeling a little bit sad at the thought of Giselle's retirement, not because I need her in the way that I once did, but just because she won't be there anymore, tucked safely away in the Barnard Quad, providing a safe and quiet haven for sad and distraught and broken college girls.

But I'm also feeling a strange and satisfying continuity. That girl who wrote the melodramatic, slightly embarrassing contribution for the BG scrapbook is this person, the woman I am right now, and my voice is her voice, just maybe a little bit more grown up, and a lot more grounded (and also, perhaps most importantly, capable of capitalizing her first-person pronouns).

And I guess Nick was right when he posited that my written voice tends towards a certain sentimentality (some might say a certain oversentimentality) that my spoken voice tends to eschew in favor of a certain sardonic (or so I like to think) humor.