I was going to title this Identity, Work, Motherhood and Death, but that seemed a touch too ambitious.  Nonetheless, all apply.

On August 31, at the turn from midnight to midnight-01, and for the first time since I was 15 years old, I became unemployed.  Sheesh.

Actually, I’m self-employed now and giving a good go at establishing this new career.  Still, there’s the tenacious pull of my 30-year academic career.  And it’s being impressive – even a little surprising to me how that particular turn of the clock registered as such a huge slam to my identity – to the story I tell myself of who I am.

Admitting this is weirdly embarrassing.  After all, I’ve understood for a long time that true identity is way more enduring than any role.  The problem, however, seems to be in the word “understood.”  Turns out enduring identity can’t ever be fully defined.

Believe me, I’ve tried to wrestle all this identity stuff to the ground with my thinking – heck, I’ve spent 30 years as an academic – but thinking identity into submission, well,  it’s never worked.  And so, being inescapably human, I’ve caught myself in a near-death grip with one identity after another.

Before the other night, I got to know the transition into empty nestdom.  The enormity of its impact on my sense of who I am was similarly surprising – albeit a bit more gradual.  I remember the cross-country road-trip with my college-bound daughter.  I also remember putting her on a plane after her visit back home over winter holiday break.  How cold and empty the house felt. How it felt that way pretty much without exception until, ten years later and a few months ago, when I finally sold it.

All those years, and I’d never consciously experienced how essential the role mother was – and is – to knowing who I know myself to be.

Somewhere mid-Sara’s-childhood I had first heard an age-old Hindu question. 4000 years, plus.

Who are you?
Often repeated this way.
Who are you, really?

I know of few other things as old as these words.  Off that short list, Sandhill Cranes may be the coolest – weighing in at 2.5 million years.  Among birds, they’re the ones ornithologists recognize as going back the farthest.  Or, said another way, the Sandhill Cranes in our skies today have a string of ancestors that have survived extinction the very longest.

Sandhill Cranes mate for life.  They do remarkable dances to get themselves to that status.  And over the time human beings have been around, they’ve inspired great art.   Without knowing and without caring.

Who are Sandhill Cranes, really?

In the agonizing run-up to this moment of formal disengagement from the academy – for now – I’ve come to take stock of one of my unconscious answer to the ancient Hindu question.  I’m seeing this, because it’s no longer the easy response it once was. “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m a professor.” “What do you teach?” “Well, I help prepare people to be educators, therapists and public leaders.”

It was good work and it’s ended too early.  But it has ended.  And here I am with the limits of identifying hanging out everywhere.  The embarrassment I mentioned already is, of course, the petty egoic kind.  The depth of my socialization into equating personal value with profession has been revealed as bone deep to my everyday sense of what this body, its thoughts and actions, its breath are for.

All these year of thinking.  To the limits of my rigor, I’ve taken the question to mind and to heart. Who are you really?  It hasn’t been for nothing.

There’s another old saying – from the Sufi tradition – as old as those Hindu words, if not old as the birds.

You are lucky if you die before you die.

Cranes, of course, don’t know much about dying.  Their bodies are born, they fly on long and achingly precise curves of wing, and one day their bodies drop.  But who they are is who they are. Relevant and irrelevant at the same time in the way of any identity.

My active identity as a mother has died.  Yet, still and always, until my body drops, I’ll be a mother.  Now, active identity as an employed academic is done.  Dead.  It remains to be seen if that will revive as an anchor to the roles I play.  Who knows.

Seems to me the pain I’m feeling now is likely liberation in disguise.  Dying before death seems a mighty liberated state.  Like a crane on the wing.  A way of being – without any identity at all.