Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Body Undone Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6605c6b41bd3323c • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain by Christina Crosby. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #c961e830-cec8-11eb-994c-3d6ed1e259e0 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Wed, 16 Jun 2021 17:32:13 GMT. CHRISTINA CROSBY: “A BODY, UNDONE” Christina Crosby is a feminist, a lesbian, and a scholar of gender and sexuality, but the concept of embodiment—what it means to be in and of one’s body—was not just something she thought about, but something she lived . As a child in rural Pennsylvania, she played, strong and coordinated, alongside her brother and competed fiercely with him—she even sometimes imagined herself his twin. In high school and college, she played field hockey and basketball, and began running after she graduated in 1974. At age 40, she turned to biking, and the year she turned 50 was hoping to reach over 1,000 miles, riding spring through fall. She reveled in the muscular body created through a lifetime of sport, and took pleasure in choosing tight leather pants and a silky sleeveless top when stepping out of an evening. “Embodied life was then an affirmation of fully realized pleasures integrated with a rich intellectual life,” she writes. Mobility is just one issued faced by those with damage to the central nervous system, says Professor of English Christina Crosby. Photo by John Van Vlack. All that came crashing to a halt on October 1, 2003. As the Wesleyan English professor rode her bicycle in the dimming light that evening, a fallen branch caught in the spokes of her wheel just as she crested a hill, flinging the bike sideways. Crosby’s chin hit the pavement, which both smashed her face and broke her neck, leaving her with “quadri-plegia”—the medical definition for paralysis below the shoulders that involves all four limbs. Because her spinal cord was scraped, not severed (making the injury “incomplete”), she has recovered weak but functional arm strength and limited use of her hands. Suddenly hers was—as the title of her newly released memoir says— A Body, Undone . An accomplished writer and a lover of prose, who urges her students to use language precisely, Crosby found herself struggling for words to explain her body and her life. She writes: “How was I to describe this pain, lost in a body so foreign to me I would translate it into speech in only the most primitive way?” But over the years since Crosby’s accident, the words have come and gathered into a memoir. The book is a series of direct and revealing essays that tell a story of pain and grief, but also of passionate love, the support of a vibrant community, and her driving desire to live. Crosby brings all of her gifts to bear—a brilliant mind, an unflinching ability to analyze and report on her physical life, including even the “bowel program” necessitated by compromised bowels, her love of sex both before and after the accident, and the frustration of trying to connect with her much-loved dog when she came home in a wheelchair that scared poor Babe. Crosby’s story starts in rural Penn-sylvania, where her father was a professor at Juniata College, a small liberal arts school run by the Church of the Brethren. She went on to undergraduate work at Swarthmore College before earning a PhD in English at Brown University. Crosby landed at Wesleyan in 1982. By the time of her crash, she was the chair of the faculty, preparing for a meeting with the trustees. She had published a book on Victorian society and “the woman question,” and had won a major teaching award. In her office one of the only wall hangings is the certificate from that honor. In the six years before the accident, Crosby had been in a relationship with Janet Jakobsen, a Barnard College professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and the director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Their love remains a defining force in Crosby’s life today and continues to sustain her. When Crosby awoke from sedation after the accident to find herself paralyzed, a cruel fate decreed that she knew better than most what that meant. Her beloved only sibling Jeff had been living with multiple sclerosis for decades at the time of her accident. Crosby had watched his erect, handsome body change over time. First he used a cane, and then a convenient, light, folding wheelchair. Then, as he lost arm function, he needed a power chair. First he sat up straight, but gradually slumped forward as muscles in his midsection wasted away. By the time she broke her neck, Jeff was already quadriplegic. “In an instant,” Crosby writes, “at the symbolic age of 50 . . . my childhood fantasy of being his twin seemed malevolently realized.” But, no. Jeff’s body continued to fail. He lived long enough for the siblings to sit side-by-side in their wheelchairs, and to exchange emails about bodily functions—a conversation Crosby never imagined she would have with her brother. He died in 2010. Crosby, like her brother before her, found joy and connection in the support of a loving community. In a culture where we like to see ourselves as independent, self-sufficient, Crosby insists on interdependence. The necessity of the support of people from Wesleyan, both in the immediate aftermath of her accident and in the years since, is clearly detailed in the book. At the time of the crash, Jakobsen was in New York. On the train ride north she worried that her love lay suffering alone. But when she arrived at Hartford Hospital she found Wesleyan’s then-president Doug Bennet and his wife, Midge, in the waiting room. Crosby writes, quoting Midge, “We’ve been able to see her. They asked, ‘Are you her parents?’ and I just lied.” At that, Jakobsen burst into tears. The couple would be sustained by the love of the whole Wesleyan community—so importantly represented by Doug and Midge at the moment of crisis—through meals, rides to therapy, and good wishes through the two full years of rehabilitation required before Crosby could return to work half-time. Even so many years since her accident, help continues to be crucial. Simple chores—going to the departmental office in the building next door to collect your mail—take on a different level of challenge when one must negotiate multiple floors, elevators, and tight turns in a wheelchair. Margaret Neale adds three hours a week to her full-time job in the Office of Financial Aid to help Crosby prepare for classes and manage the details of a complex life. Liz Tinker, administrative assistant in the English Department, will bring Crosby her mail rather than having her go from one building to another. If the ramp on the specially modified van Crosby drives fails to go up or down, it is often Tinker who goes outside (in the rain, of course) to help Crosby get to where she needs to go. But Tinker is quick to say that Crosby doesn’t complain. “She has so inspired me in how she has dealt with this incredible tragedy that would put anyone else to. . .” Tinker’s voice trails off as she struggles for the right word. “She is so insistent on doing everything possible by herself. She hates to ask for help, but also relies on us when she needs to. There is nothing that I or anyone else in the department wouldn’t do for her.” During a recent interview in her office, both Crosby’s continuing challenges and the progress she has made since the initial injury are obvious. Dressed in all black (“Maybe I am in permanent mourning,” she writes.), but for a bright scarf and geometric earrings, she has mobility in her arms such that she can gesture as she speaks. But her hands are slightly gnarled in on themselves and she writes by using voice recognition software. One might wonder why Crosby has chosen to tell the story. Why dig deeply into intimate bodily functions and excruciating pain? In a way the book reads almost as therapy, exploring impossible-to-solve dilemmas and outright contradictions. Immediately after the accident, for example, Crosby tells us that Jakobsen reported to their friends that she had “suffered no loss of [her] ‘personhood,’’’ but Crosby nonetheless feels alien, even unrecognizable, because, she says, “My sense of a coherent self has been so deeply affronted.” Her 50 years of life before the accident and her desire to remember the bodymind she so long had mean that “forgetting is impossible,” yet she also recognizes that “forgetting is also imperiously necessary. In order to live on I must actively forget the person I once was, and be committed to forgetting more mindfully than you probably are as you go about your daily life.” “It’s a real contradiction. It’s not a paradox. It’s a flat-out contradiction. I need to do two things imperatively and they conflict,” she says. But perhaps the main motivation for sharing her story, in all its raw details, is to open others’ eyes to what life with a disability is like, to make space for the accommodations that make a life like Crosby’s not just possible, but valuable. “One of the things about the disability experience is that it is highly privatized,” Jakobsen says. “People don’t know much about disabled lives. You are not supposed to be in the public sphere.” Making a world that works better for people with disabilities would also be good for the able-bodied, Jakobsen says. She and Crosby see this simple fact as they navigate the streets around Jakobsen’s New York apartment: curb cuts exist, but pedestrians with carts and parents pushing strollers flow around Crosby’s wheelchair as everybody tries to make it through the same tiny slice of sidewalk before the light changes. In New Haven, where the whole corner of the sidewalk slopes to the street, anything with wheels can roll off the sidewalk at any spot—a simple design improvement with dividends for everyone. Jakobsen pointedly notes that such structural modifications are called “universal design” because they are useful to all. Other details impact Crosby alone. Crowded rooms are impossible to navigate, because the wheelchair is so large. Crosby writes about attending a party a few years ago at a house she had not been to since the accident. She arranged for a friend to help her set up an extendable ramp she carries in her van that would allow her to surmount the concrete stoop and get into the vestibule. The party was a great success and the rooms were packed. Although friends made their way by to say hello, the food and fun remained mostly inaccessible. “I left after about an hour and went home, sober and sad,” Crosby writes. As Crosby is quick to point out, both in her book and in person, she is nonetheless very, very fortunate. She and Jakobsen can afford to employ a dedicated home health aide (the same woman, Donna, has been helping Crosby ever since she returned home). They could afford modifications to make their home accessible. She returned to teaching and writing halftime and is able to work because her livelihood involves language, work that can be done with limited mobility. But mobility is not where the challenges end. “Paralysis is often thought to be an issue of mobility—‘Will he walk? Will she walk?’ Mobility is where paralysis meets the public eye,” Crosby says. “Paralysis entails so much more and that’s why I wrote the book, because I feel that otherwise I would be fundamentally misrecognized—unless people understand what it takes to live with damage to the central nervous system. Central nervous systems can be damaged in a whole host of ways, but however it is done, you are going to have troublesome bowels. You are not going to be able to control your urine. Your sex life will be radically different. You may or may not be plagued with neuropathic pain. If you are a quadriplegic, as my brother and I both were, you are not going to be able to grasp things and have fine motor control. You are no longer going to be able to pick things up. You are no longer going to be able to sign your name. You lose so much of yourself. That means you need to reinvent yourself. You need to become something else and yet retain who you were.” Often when one suffers a life-changing injury like Crosby’s, people focus on how that person has triumphed over tragic events and gained a new appreciation of the really important things in life. But what Crosby’s book—and indeed her life—show instead is a person who was already thoughtful and intentional, and very, very real. “The most defining thing about Christina is her generosity toward people,” says Sally Bachner, an English professor whose office is immediately next to Crosby’s. “When Christina is part of a meeting you know it will be a meeting with open, generous, intelligent debate.” “To me the most important thing is Christina’s spirit, her will to live, her joy in life, her recognition that joy is only accessible if you recognize the grief, too,” Jakobsen says. “She has a tremendous dedication to the project of making her life anew.” That may be Crosby’s defining accomplishment—in her book, in her teaching, in her presence in the world. In, as she writes, “diving into the wreck of my body” she has illuminated what comes from the messy, painful, beautiful truth: Grace, embodied. From A Body, Undone. I needed to enter language and engage my learning in an active, creative way. To my surprise, I began writing in the first person. I wrote to refine my memories of the body I had been and the life I had lived, all of which made up the bodymind I was that day I set off on my last bike ride. And I also wrote to articulate the life that has come to me since, linking my irrevocably sundered past to the present so that I might face the future. I rejoiced in the way sentences pushed forward from subject to predicate, and tropes turned my thinking in creative directions I had no notion I’d go. Finally, writing brought me in the end to the beginning: the moment in the rehab hospital when I was able to imagine a future of independent activity directed to ends I desired. When I was rehabilitating at the Hospital for Special Care, paralysis had so weakened my hands that I couldn’t turn a page of the Penguin paperbacks that line the bookshelf in my study. As you know, I was unable even to grasp a Kleenex and move it from right to left on my tray table when Patty instructed me to do so. I cried tears of despair and rage, bitter tears. Day after day in therapy, I very slowly strengthened my grip as I followed her instructions. Several months after she had tried the tissue, Patty returned with a pencil and a book. She opened the book flat before me, and holding the pencil with the eraser facing outward, used it to grab the edge of a page. She turned it over. Then she handed the pencil to me. I grasped it with all my strength, and as Janet and my nurse, Winnie, watched, I turned a page. “I have my life back,” I said with tears overflowing. I said again, “I have my life back,” and we all four cried together. A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain. As one approach to the question, “What’s Left of Queer Studies Now," Christina Crosby and Janet Jakobsen explore the relation between queer studies and disability studies. In contrast to the liberal individual who is the bearer of rights, queer theory offers ways of conceptualizing the world as relationally complex, which, as Jakobsen has argued, demands a radical rethinking of ethical life. Christina Crosby's memoir of living with spinal cord injury, A Body Undone: Living on After Great Pain , brings to this understanding an embodied immediacy, and “asks readers to recognize how messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a body can be” ( TheNewYorker.com ). In an open conversation, Crosby and Jakobsen will ask: How are lives sustained under conditions of fragility and dependency? What type of labor, including caring labor, is required for living on and how is it shared or divided – whether within a household or across the global division of labor? How are grief and loss entwined with possibility and desire? In A Body, Undone , Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. Starting from this place, Crosby and Jakobsen will address both loss and living on. Christina Crosby is a professor of English, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is the author of The Ends of History: Victorians and the 'Woman Question' (1991) and has published essays and reviews in Victorian Studies, PMLA, College English, and elsewhere. In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation. Janet R. Jakobsen will be joining APC the week of January 22nd, as our second annual Diversity Scholar. Dr. Jakobsen is Chair and Claire Tow Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served fifteen years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. As Director of BCRW, Professor Jakobsen founded the webjournal, Scholar & Feminist Online, along with the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Queers for Economic Justice, the New York Women’s Foundation, and A Better Balance: Work and Family Legal Center. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1998). With Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York University Press, 2003) and co-edited Secularisms (Duke University Press, 2008), and with Elizabeth Castelli she co- edited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence (Palgrave Press, 2004). She has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. She has taught as a Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University and Harvard University. A Hard Life, Well Lived. Professor Christina Crosby’s life as a cyclist, faculty chair, and able-bodied person was brought to a devastating halt following a harrowing 2003 crash. In rebuilding her life and momentum, she produced some of her finest scholarship and helped found an entirely new field of study. But she would have been the first to admit that hers is not a traditional redemption story. By Christine Foster. As Christina Crosby lay severely injured in a hospital bed after a catastrophic bicycling injury, one of the first things the Wesleyan professor requested was for her partner, Janet Jakobsen, to read aloud from a favorite book, George Eliot’s Middlemarch . Crosby was not one to run from the tough stuff—she wrote unabashedly about both sexual pleasure and about managing bowel movements. In her memoir, A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain , Crosby explained that what she needed in that moment in 2003 was “no heavy handed forecasting, or ‘if only’ regrets.” Crosby’s story, which seems almost cut short following her unexpected death of pancreatic cancer on January 5, was a remarkable one, both before and after the accident that left her paralyzed. Yet her friends and colleagues say she would have balked at the simplistic narrative that so often is pasted onto stories like hers—where the heroine suffers a tragedy, then rises, making headway that wouldn’t have been possible without the tragedy. “I think progress is a fraught concept and one that Christina would have pushed back on a lot, and in solidarity and agreement I will also push back on it,” says Sally Bachner, an associate professor of English, a longtime friend whose office was across the hall from Crosby’s. “She was a Victorianist, and was deeply critical of [Victorian] structures of thought. I think she would have talked about her own progress in terms of the resources that were at her disposal. She was aware of the outpouring of support that she received from [the Wesleyan community], and even more so of her tireless partner, who worked on her behalf. That meant that she had access to resources that supported her in being able to make progress. She worked hard, but always with an awareness that she did so within a particular structure of access to health care, to caregivers, to material support, to communal support.” Before the Crash. Crosby with Babe the Dog, 1999. From early in her life, Christina Crosby’s story defied traditional narratives. Raised in a conservative small town in Pennsylvania, she made headway as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in the 1970s, where she helped found Swarthmore Gay Liberation. At Brown University, where she earned a PhD in 1982, Crosby served as a leader in a feminist caucus that took on domestic violence, helping found a women’s shelter called Sojourner House. (One of the first in the United States, it has served more than 50,000 since 1976.) In 1982 Crosby headed to Wesleyan, where she eventually become a professor of English and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies (FGSS), and spent the rest of her career. When she first arrived, women’s studies, as it was then known, was a nascent collection of course offerings, not yet recognized as a major program. For the next four decades, Crosby was an anchor for the program, serving as coordinator and chair of the program in its early years, and as an advocate for the transition to the name FGSS. Crosby helped the program to secure its first autonomous faculty line. In the late 1980s through 1999, Crosby routinely taught half of the program’s core classes. Over the last 21 years—including the two years she was away from teaching after her accident—she taught about a third of the core courses. The department now cross-lists classes across all three divisions and offers a full-fledged interdisciplinary major. “Christina’s dedication to FGSS carved out a space for critical thinking about sex and gender at Wesleyan—for faculty, students, and staff,” says Jennifer Tucker, the chair of the program. Crosby and her senior seminar students in front of the former women’s studies/FGSS house, 2000. Photo courtesy Jennifer Tucker. It was at Wesleyan in 1997 that Crosby met another brilliant feminist, Janet Jakobsen, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard, who was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Humanities. The women became partners (Crosby would always write “lovers”), and for the first six years they enjoyed a beautiful life split between New York and Middletown, including a favorite memory Crosby shared in her book of a joyous night out in bootcut red leather pants. Jakobsen would remain steadfastly at Crosby’s side throughout the rest of her life—for better or worse, in health and in sickness. Pivotal Moment. On October 1, 2003, Crosby was at a high point in her life—just past her 50th birthday, she had been elected by her colleagues to serve as chair of the faculty, and was preparing for meetings with Wesleyan trustees the next day. Her personal life was also at a climax. “In the years just before I broke my neck, I was deeply happy,” Crosby wrote. “I was joyfully engaged with my lover, delighting in her body and in my own.” Additional passions included “riding my gorgeous Triumph motorcycle,” “making a peach pie in August,” reveling in her “well-defined muscles.” Crosby and Janet Jakobsen, 2000. As she crested a hill on her bicycle, three miles into her usual 17-mile route in the crisp, mid-fall air, her life changed in an instant. A branch lodged itself between her spokes, throwing Crosby headlong over her handlebars and slamming chin first into the pavement. The impact was so strong, the pavement so hard, it broke two vertebrae and left her unable to use her arms or legs. In time, Crosby regained limited mobility in her hands and arms, allowing her to continue her trademark enthusiastic gesturing when she spoke and taught. But the damage was done. In a single moment, she became trapped in a body that no longer did her bidding. The road back to even part-time teaching, two years after her accident, was long and excruciatingly painful. Her perspective, always thoughtful and nuanced, had expanded, taken on a new lens. Given her own unique background, as well as her investment in scholarship that often sought to question the status quo and expected narratives, Crosby was in a unique position to assess her disability from all angles. This included pushing back against reclamation or redemption narratives, as well as against cultural structures and norms that favor those with able bodies. Three years after her accident, Crosby introduced a new FGSS course called “Ethics of Embodiment,” applying feminist and queer theory to perspectives on how bodies matter. In 2016, Crosby’s work in this arena expanded beyond Wesleyan when A Body, Undone was published. Raw and honest, it weaves together Crosby’s profound gift for understanding and using language with her insistence on authenticity. It has become a new classic in the young field of disability studies. In 2018 the book was unanimously selected as Wesleyan University’s First Year Matters Program common reading choice. A review in The New Yorker describes her contribution to the field this way: “Crosby resists both self-pity and the too-easy narrative of hardship overcome. Instead, she asks readers to recognize how messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a body can be.” “I think Christina was more interested in who is left out of those narratives of progress and how do we understand their successes or achievements,” says Natasha Korda, the director of the Center for the Humanities, a professor of English, and a member of the FGSS faculty. “One thing that our culture might tell us is you just have to have a back​up plan or something, or ‘man up.’ . . . After giving a reading of an early draft of the book, somebody in the audience (who I believe was also in a wheelchair) was basically suggesting to her that she just needed to man up. I think that the courage manifested by her book is not that of simply enacting or performing a kind of inspirational theater: ‘This happened to me, but I overcame it.’ It maybe has more to do with talking about the experience in a very frank and straightforward and courageous way that would make a life that is not ordinarily visible to other people, visible to them.” Crosby with Maggie Nelson ’94 at BCRW Salon for “A Body, Undone,” 2015. Photo courtesy Jennifer Liseo. One way Crosby embodied this visibility was by simply living. In returning to teach again after the accident, her presence itself forced changes, both physical and philosophical. In the Center for the Humanities, the University expanded doorways and created an accessible bathroom so Crosby and others who use wheelchairs could have basic access to the space. She also became an advocate for those, like her friend Bachner, whose disabilities (chronic migraines, an inflammatory autoimmune disease, and advanced spinal degeneration) are less outwardly visible. A Teacher First. While Crosby’s book contributed to the new field of disability studies, perhaps the biggest impact of her work is to be found in the generations of students she taught. Abigail Boggs ’02 and Laura Grappo ’01, for example, went on to teach alongside her at Wesleyan. Another, Maggie Nelson ’94, is a renowned author who has written often about Crosby (and Crosby about her). “I think that A Body, Undone is in part beloved and important as a book because it very actively doesn’t treat disability as something to be overcome and to come out the other side of a stronger, better, more spiritually enlightened person per se,” says Nelson. “One of Christina’s many, many great virtues, and why she was such a good friend and why we will all miss her so much, is she was more able to stay present in an ambivalent moment than anybody I’ve ever met, and more able to bear witness to the many complexities moving through any given moment. There would be no simple idea of progress for her. She was intensely alive to pleasure and positivity and rigor and change and optimism and political radicalism in all kinds of things, as well as justice and empathy. She just was committed to the complex.” One of Crosby’s last students, Zuzu Tadeushuk ’21, came to Wesleyan specifically seeking Crosby’s mentorship. Tadeushuk, a former model, was drawn by Crosby’s work on the idea of embodiment. “She always came to meetings with so much to say and having deep thoughts about what I was working on, which felt surprising and really generous to me,” Tadeushuk said. “My thesis is a memoir of my years working in the fashion industry. Sometimes when Christina would summarize my experience back to me, I would see new things in it that I hadn’t seen for myself. That was the main gift that she gave to me—just her attention and her attentiveness helped me learn for myself, helped me to learn from her.” A Life Undone. This spring was to have been Crosby’s final semester teaching before retiring. But even then, she wasn’t content to maintain the status quo. Jakobsen recalls Crosby entirely rewriting the syllabus for her feminist theory class over the summer to bring the Black Lives Matter movement to the fore. “It was about addressing the most pressing issues,” Jakobsen said. “She rewrote it, made it very fresh. It actually felt like a class that was very of- the-moment and that was pushing the field forward, pushing Christina’s teaching forward, and hopefully pushing the students forward, too.” Crosby on the Connecticut River in 2020. That rewritten course would be her coda. In late December 2020, heading into that final semester of teaching, Crosby went to the hospital with a bladder infection and was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. She would only live days more. Some in Crosby’s position would have focused on those “if only” regrets. If only she missed that branch. If only she lived to see Tadeushuk’s thesis finished. If only she had the chance to maneuver her wheelchair through a widened doorway into the Center for the Humanities just one more time to hear those final tributes at the end of her last semester of teaching. Yet, in the midst of her deepest pain earlier in life, Crosby chose Middlemarch . She embraced complexity and nuance. She never lost her unbridled enthusiasm for a party and good conversation and still remembered what it was like to revel in those sexy tight red leather pants. She listened intently and pushed students and colleagues into a deeper understanding. May Wesleyan go forth to do likewise. Photos courtesy Janet Jakobsen unless otherwise noted. Sidebar: Professor Christina Crosby’s Lasting Legacy. “Instead of treating me as someone who was less disabled than she was, she was super aware of so called ‘invisible disabilities’ that nobody can see, in part because she experienced so much invisible pain. She used to say, ‘you have pain, like I do.’” — Sally Bachner, Associate Professor of English. “Christina was serious about scholarship and serious about fun. She had a great sense of humor and was so much fun to work with on student events. I remember a year when FGSS students came to the annual senior presentations dressed as their senior thesis projects and other students had to guess what they worked on. She was witty, and she made us laugh. Whether it was organizing events or discussing a student’s research project, I feel so grateful to have worked alongside her.” —Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program Chair. “I find myself most trying to emulate Christina in how I deal with my own students—just try to treat people with decency, with kindness. When you’re a grad student and you’re a younger professor, I think a lot of folks think that to be taken seriously, especially as a woman, you have to be so strict and cold and that sort of thing, but I think what I really learned from Christina is that that’s not necessary. If you walk the walk, then you can be open and kind and helpful and not have to do that. For me, that was a good thing to see. I’m really trying as I go forward, and especially right now when people’s lives are just so chaotic and crazy, to rely on my better nature.” —Laura Grappo ’01, Assistant Professor of American Studies.