Anxiety Is About the Future

By Amy E. Robillard

My dog Hattie has anxiety. She is afraid of most things in a typical neighborhood: garage doors opening, people working in their garages, pick-up trucks, vans, school buses. She is afraid of landscapers and their trucks with all their equipment. Loud sounds scare her, so on garbage days when the wind blows hard and the trash cans blow over, she jumps. She is afraid of sudden movements, so children are especially frightening to her, especially when they are playing basketball in their driveways. But more than anything in this suburban world we live in, Hattie is afraid of roofers.

She can hear them from blocks away. The rhythmic pounding of the nail guns. Their ladders scraping against the driveway. Tail between her legs, ears pasted back on her head, she immediately begins pulling me, hard, toward the fastest route home. She enters a full-blown panic state and nothing I have tried—treats, kind words, pets and hugs—has ever gotten her out of it. She is gone to me. She is panicking.

Physiologists studying predator-prey interactions observe that the critical need to escape may explain why so much of our stress response is “built around the rapid mobilization of energy to the muscles.” Hattie is strong and she pulls me with all her might when she panics. The energy flowing to her muscles is intense, and it is evident that she is deeply afraid. My shoulders hurt for hours afterward.

On walks, I have trained myself to notice the things Hattie is afraid of, and I do so relatively quickly. We turn around and take a different route as soon as I see a landscaping truck parked in front of a house. If I notice a roofing sign or roofing materials in a yard, I avoid that street for at least four days. But I cannot anticipate it all. There are so many times when I can’t know what will frighten her. There are so many times when I’m caught off guard and her panic sets in and I’m struggling with a panicking dog who just wants to get home where it’s safe and it is all I can do to resist the tears that want to come. She pulls me so hard and the other two dogs don’t understand why we’re in such a hurry. The walk is no longer enjoyable because all we’re trying to do is escape fear.

•••

As a child and an adolescent, I was abused by my older sister. She would wander throughout the house seeking me out so she could punch me in the shoulder or hit me in the stomach. She would wait until our mother left the house and she would beat me in my bed while I tried to read a book. She would pick up the living room chair and chase me through the house, threatening to pummel me with it. She would punch me in the face until blood ran out of my nose and down my chin and onto my chest. She would call me a fat fuck and a cunt and a lesbian and a fucker and tell me that the minute Ma left the house I was dead. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

To get to her bedroom, Margie had to walk a few steps through mine. Thinking about it now, I wonder at the builders’ thought process. Who builds a house with a bedroom that is accessible only by entering another bedroom? Aren’t bedrooms supposed to be spaces of privacy? Whenever she took those few steps from my room into hers, she spewed insults at me, and I wonder now whether she did so even when I was not there, if doing so became so habitual to her as to become nearly meaningless. Many nights I was woken by her telling me I was a fucker or a goddamn lesbian or that she was going to kill me the next chance she got. From a deep sleep, I awake to hear, “You’re dead.”

Where could I go? How could I escape? I was in my home, in my bedroom, and I was not safe. I was being hunted.

•••

I teach writing to undergraduates. My favorite genre to teach is the personal essay, so I learn a lot about their interior lives. What I have learned during the pandemic is that we are living through a mental health crisis the likes of which I do not think we have seen before. The students I’m teaching right now have never lived in an everyday not punctuated by the catastrophic. They have never known what it is to just go from year to year to year with nothing particularly interesting happening except maybe a sleepover or a birthday party on the weekend. They were born post-9/11 into a world of school shootings and lockdown drills and mass shootings and the sense that wherever they went they could be at risk of being killed by a gun. I have sometimes thought, after a mass shooting, that no place is safe, that I risk my life when I walk onto campus or into Target or the grocery store, but there’s a part of me that is still buffered from that fear. That is the part of me who grew up in a time before school shootings, the part of me who went to school and felt safe, safer than I ever felt at home. There is a foundation of years in me that the new anxiety of gun culture cannot rattle. But for the students I see every day, there is no foundation of school as safety. School is a place away from the safety of home, a place where they must practice lockdown drills, hiding with their teacher in the corner after taking a spelling test.

For me, school was my safe place away from the vigilance I felt at home. At school I could relax. At school my teachers praised me for my reading, for my math, for my speed in just about everything I did. I could turn a corner in the hallway and not worry that my sister was going to jump out and punch me. Five years older than me, she was already at a different school. I could sit in my classroom and answer questions and be told that I was right, that I was smart. I could walk to the bathroom and sit down on the toilet in peace even if there were kids all around me. I could talk and laugh with my friends and nobody was going to mock me. My sister wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to punch me, she wasn’t going to call me a fucker, she wasn’t going to jump me.

The students I teach writing to tell me they won’t be able to come to class because they can’t control their panic attacks or because they are too anxious to leave their apartments. When they write personal essays, they write about suicidal ideation and spending time in locked psych wards. They write about the truths they have learned from their therapists. They write about being bullied in elementary school. They write about the terrifying loneliness of experiencing their first years of college on Zoom, about their fears that they will never go back to being the same people they were before the pandemic, about their imposter syndrome and borderline personality disorder. They wonder what it would be like to just not be here anymore.

Or. They don’t come to class and they don’t tell me why. They just disappear for weeks at a time.

•••

We adopted Hattie when she was just under a year old. Nobody knows her actual history, but she was transported up to Illinois from Texas, where she was found with another dog. Our best guess about what her early life was like: she was born on a farm somewhere and was tossed food here and there and barely survived. We know for sure that she was not socialized. When we first met her, she would not come to either me or my husband Steve, and I have since said that I’ll never again adopt another dog who doesn’t come to me when I meet them. But we have Hattie and we love her to pieces and we thought we could work with her anxieties.

She had heartworm when we adopted her, and treating that took a lot of time, patience, and money. The foster agency had been treating her using what’s called the “slow kill” method, but that takes more than two years to complete, and during that time, the dog is supposed to be kept calm. We opted for the “fast kill” method, which was more expensive and involved injections but required less time for Hattie to be out of commission. Four months. One hundred twenty days of no walks and no playtime with Marshall, our three-year-old Beagle mix. At times it was excruciating to watch her do nothing all day long. But in October of that first year, she finally got a negative heartworm test and we were so grateful. She had made it.

Lately Hattie has refused to go on walks altogether. For more than a year after she’d been cleared of heartworm, she’d come on walks with us and, while there would be panic moments here and there and, at times, an especially bad walk where I really wondered if walks were the right thing for her, for the most part, she did just fine. But then in October, something shifted. Her panic seemed to envelop her. She became unable to control her panic even on short walks around the block. She approached each corner with trepidation, looking up to me for reassurance. Steve and I aren’t sure what broke in her, what happened to make her suddenly more afraid than she had been, but we both agreed that she suddenly got worse. She became more insecure. She became more clingy toward me. When I would get the leashes out, she would run upstairs to her crate in our bedroom. She no longer wanted to go for walks.

So I would leave her home alone and take Essay and Marshall for walks while Steve was at work. I hated leaving her alone, but I hated even more the thought of forcing her to come with us. And while on these walks with the two older dogs, I would still scan the environment for Hattie triggers. People working in their garages, making banging noises. Landscapers cleaning up for the fall. Trucks and vans with ladders on top parked in people’s driveways. I was now triggered by these things, even if just for a split second, knowing how scared Hattie would be. I’d look down at Essay and Marshall, relieved they felt no such fear.

In mid-November, we started Hattie on Prozac. She had been on a different anti-anxiety medication, but it clearly wasn’t doing its job, and we needed something stronger. I’d heard so many success stories from friends about their dogs on Prozac, and I wanted that for Hattie. I wanted calm for her. I wanted the real Hattie to come through. I wanted her to feel safe in her surroundings, to live a happy life.

About a week into her taking Prozac, I was taking a walk with Essay and Marshall when we ran into our friends Bob and Joy and their dog, Honey. Honey and Hattie are best buds and love to play together. They run around the yard chasing one another, hopping over each other, mouthing and barking at each other in ways that never fail to make us laugh. The Prozac hadn’t yet taken effect, and Hattie was not doing well, which is why she wasn’t on the walk, and she hadn’t been out in days. I asked Bob and Joy if they wanted to bring Honey around to the yard to play with Hattie. I thought Honey and Hattie could play together like they always did.

The outdoor furniture had been put away weeks earlier, but it was relatively mild out, so all four of us adults—Bob, Joy, Steve, and I—stood out on our patio and watched and waited for the dogs to play. Marshall played with Honey a little bit, but Hattie just sort of sat on the patio sunken in on herself. Ears back, shoulders hunched, she looked like she wanted to be anywhere but here. She looked like an abused animal. She went back inside while we all stood there not knowing what to say. I am hoping that was her lowest point. I had never seen her look so sad.

•••

I write now, as Hattie is between anxiety medications and my students are still living through a pandemic that so many people have grown tired of, in order to understand the ways I am ill-equipped to help either Hattie or my students. How can I, a person who grew up feeling like she was hunted in her own home, help Hattie feel more secure or help my students feel able to face the world? I have come to realize in the last year or so that my sister’s constant seeking me out in order to attack me has led to what I once thought were just quirks of character but I now understand to be direct results of feeling constantly hunted. For instance, I am triggered by too many people wanting too many things from me at one time. I do not like to begin projects with other people that do not have foreseeable ends, that threaten to drag on interminably. I tend to check things off my to-do list diligently. I get students’ work back to them pretty quickly. I like, in short, to know that things will end, and I do my best to facilitate that end. Semesters are a good fit for me, then, as each January and each August I get to start again, knowing that, however chaotic the semester may get, it will be over in May or December. And then I get to start again.

I knew that as long as I was home, my sister would never stop hunting me. There was no end. Now all I want is an end to things.

I want things to end so I can be left alone.

Leave me alone.

That is the story of my life: leave me alone. I want to read and I want to write and I want to do my own thing away from the feeling of being constantly hunted. That feeling has followed me everywhere I’ve gone my entire life. I don’t know how to shake it.

•••

In the fall of 2020, I taught an advanced writing course focused on the theme of “witnessing the suffering of others.” We read a number of personal essays and longform journalism pieces about, well, the suffering of others and what it meant to witness it as part of simply watching the news. This was following the summer during which none of us could look away from the suffering of others; it was the summer of George Floyd. It was the summer following Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. It was the summer of Black Lives Matter protests all over the world. And it was the first summer of the pandemic. The teaching and learning we did together happened on Zoom rather than in a classroom. Together we considered what it means to look, what it means to look away, who is required to look, and who has the privilege to look away. We read essays about suffering and witnessing that suffering, and we analyzed those essays and students wrote about their own witnessing and we talked about that writing. We talked and wrote a lot about suffering—others’ and our own—and we considered the relationship between seeing and knowing. It was, to put it mildly, intense. Many of us were tired after each class session. John Scott Price, a psychiatrist, advises his patients to avoid the news and he advises his patients’ families to protect the patient from the “horrors of contemporary life.” His patients with anxiety, he writes, only become more anxious with the arrival of endless bad news from daily reports of tragedies, so his advice is to avoid the news and watch sports and nature programming instead. I tend to do the very opposite with my students, many of whom I know suffer from anxiety. I tend instead to bring the real world into the classroom, as I did in fall 2020, insisting that we look together at the world we’re living in. Though I suspect I am making things worse for them, I don’t know how to teach any other way.

•••

Anxiety is the feeling that the bad things will never end. It’s the feeling of danger around every corner. Anxiety is future oriented, but it forestalls our ability to imagine a present for ourselves. When Hattie is in a panic, she is not living in the present; she is, instead, aiming to get as far ahead as she can, trying to get out of the moment she’s in, wishing for the fear to end.

She just wants the fear to end.

I want to know when Hattie’s anxiety will end. I want to know how long until the Prozac kicks in, until we can see some improvement.

Little things: after being on Prozac for exactly two weeks, Hattie took a long afternoon walk for the first time in a month. Later that evening, she snuggled up to Steve on the couch. She had never done that before, not once in the entire eighteen months since we’d adopted her. She would come up to him and kiss his face or kiss his hands but never had she snuggled up to him for a nap.

Students in this semester’s personal essay class suggested that maybe—just maybe—I think about including a few more essays that aren’t directly about death or dying. And so I will. I am. One student pointed directly to Seth Sawyers’ essay, “That There, That’s Not Me,” as the kind of thing she’d like to read more of. “Nobody dies. It’s an essay about a guy who doesn’t love his job.” Students seem to agree that the most emotionally difficult essay we read together was Sam Pickering’s “George.” That slayed me, they say. I had to call home and FaceTime with my dog, they tell me. In “George,” Pickering writes about and against his emotional reactions to the impending death of his fourteen-year-old dog, George. “But it’s so good,” I tell them. “The entire essay is one big psychic defense against feeling anything for his dog. I have to include that one.” They sigh.

I think bringing stories of bad news into school comforts me somehow, as though my taking them out of their original contexts and sharing them with students in ways that make them into objects of analysis dilutes their impact. Maybe it’s because school is a safe space for me and I grew up learning that intellectualizing was one way to tamp down the panic. If we can cut it up into its parts, maybe the news will be less terrifying.

•••

As I’m working on this essay, news of yet another school shooting reaches me, this time in Oxford, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Four students are dead, six students and one teacher are wounded, and a fifteen-year-old student is in custody. We know, immediately, what kind of gun he used, but we don’t know where he got it. All of the news stories search for a motive. Was he bullied? Does it matter?

A student posts a video to Tik Tok from inside a classroom in Oxford High. The room is dark and students are all huddled together. A muffled voice comes to them from the locked door, asking them to open up, to come outside; they are safe. He identifies himself as a sheriff. “We’re not willing to take that risk right now,” one of the students in the classroom responds. The person outside the door says something else and punctuates it with “bro.” “He said, ‘Bro.’ Red flag,” says a student from the huddle. And then we see them all escape the classroom through a window.

The video makes me heartsick. I see these students climb through the window to safety, and I think of my own students. I think of the terror these students must have been feeling and of the wherewithal it took to record it for us all to see. I am unable to intellectualize what I am seeing. I instead fall deeper and deeper into despair, wondering how any parent can bear to send their child to school, wondering how teachers come to terms with the fact that the student whose work they were just reading is now dead or even worse, was the shooter. How do you make sense of the senseless?

Watching that video, too, makes me realize that it’s not just that students have lived in a world with catastrophe after catastrophe their whole lives. They, too, have lived in a world in which they feel hunted even when they are in school. If this is true, of course they want school to end. Of course they want to know how to get out of it. Of course they want their futures to begin now. Of course. Of course.

They just want the anxiety to end.

•••

On the last day of the personal essay course this semester, I asked students how they felt about reading and discussing essays such as Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and Jasminne Mendez’s “Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill,” both of which foreground school shootings. I wanted to know if I was adding to their existing anxiety. What they told me surprised me. The anxiety is already there, they said. The essays aren’t creating more anxiety. What they’re doing instead is giving us a chance to talk about it. In all their years of schooling and all their years of practicing lockdown drills, nobody has ever asked them how they feel about them. About it. About the prospect of dying at school. They’ve never had a chance to talk about it. The essays give them a chance to talk about it.

They also tell me about how, in each classroom they enter, they mentally make an escape plan.

They want to know how to get out safely. They want the fastest route home.

•••

AMY E. ROBILLARD is a writer and a professor of English at Illinois State University. Read more of her FGP essays.

The COVID Swamp

By Michele Coppola

My mother and I have shared a hospital room on my birthday twice in our lives. The first time we were joined by an umbilical cord. The second time, fifty-seven years later, by the coronavirus.

I left my cool green bubble of Portland, Oregon, on the morning of June 30, 2020. [Note: the Before Vaccine era. —ed.] I was coronavirus negative. I arrived in steamy Orlando, Florida, that night, and within four days was feverish, nauseous, and had a vicious cough that punched out my solar plexus like a prize fighter.

There’s no way I would have traveled during this pandemic unless someone was dying. That someone was my eighty-one-year-old father, who was deteriorating quickly in the nursing home where he’d been convalescing since a bad fall a couple of weeks earlier.

Nine days after my arrival, the man who gave me his eyes and smart mouth was rushed to the emergency room when he was found unresponsive. I raced my mother to the hospital, where they attempted to keep us out due to the spike in coronavirus infections in the area.

“My father is NOT going to die alone!” I yelled at the hospital administrator. I saw the security guards pass a look between them. I had the virus; I was sure of it. I knew they suspected it, as the sweat dripped down the side of my flushed, masked face. “My parents…they’ve been married sixty years. Please.”

In the end, the administrator relented. My mother, brother, sister-in-law, and I got to stroke my dad’s pale, waxy cheek, tell him we loved him, and that it was okay for him to go.

Three days after my father died, my mother and I were both on oxygen, bunkmates in a hospital room trading Jell-o.

•••

I finally landed in that hospital room after calling 911 when I nearly passed out trying to lift myself up from the couch. The cough had not relented, and I hadn’t eaten in two days. The paramedics who came to get me at my mother’s house had been there the night before to transport my mom, and they recognized me.

“Your turn, huh?” One of them asked jovially. I shook my head and tried to choke out some words. They had me loaded with tubes up my nose within minutes.

“Oxygen sat 84. Temp 103.3,” I heard one of them call out.

I was in the ER hallway for about an hour before they wheeled me into a curtained cubicle. One of the ambulance paramedics came inside, asked me if I was ok, then sat down beside me.

“Are you a person of faith?” he asked.

“No,” I said, with as much force as my oxygen-starved voice could muster.

His eyes widened and he sat back. That obviously wasn’t an answer he heard much. “Well. Would you mind if I prayed with you anyway?”

I had just enough strength for an eye roll. “If you feel like you gotta, go ahead,” I gasped out.

The paramedic took my hand and sincerely prayed for God to watch over me so I could one day “find my faith and be a witness for his grace.”

He should have asked God for an open hospital bed. The likelihood of finding one in Florida at that moment was as non-existent as me becoming a sister-wife.

I spent sixteen sleepless hours on that painful ER gurney while I waited, dragging an oxygen canister with me when I had to pee while trying to hold a breezy hospital toga closed. The clothes I’d arrived in were wadded in a plastic bag, rank with fever sweat.

At some point during those endless hours, I got a call on my cell from a hospital social worker who didn’t realize I was just downstairs. She informed me that my mother—who was still on oxygen, disoriented, and using a bedpan—was, nevertheless, well enough to go home.

I told her that there was no one available to care for my mother because my brother lives four hours north and I was now hospitalized, downstairs in her hospital, with COVID-19.

“Oh, how awful,” she said with practiced sympathy. “But you’ve got to figure something out because we need the bed. Maybe you could hire full-time care? I’ll send down some information for companies who do that.”

“And how much do you estimate home care would cost?” I asked.

“My guess would be in the neighborhood of $1700 a week,” she said, as if it were anywhere close to a reasonable number.

I wanted to cry, but the truth is I hadn’t shed a tear since my father died. The shock of his death, the need to stay upright to care for my collapsed mother, and the sudden reality of my own illness—it was all packed tight, damming up the river of grief behind my eyes. And now while struggling to breathe myself, I had to figure out what to do with a barely functional parent.

It was my brother, normally the chill King of Confrontation Avoidance, who came to the rescue.

“We’re not gonna pay $1700 to have someone do what y’all should be doing,” he thundered at the social worker when he got her on the phone. “Why can’t you put my mom and my sister together in a room? They’ve got the same thing!”

Something else of note that happened that night: After spending the better part of the last thirty years resenting my younger sibling for never visiting me in Oregon, I forgave him.

•••

My mother has only awakened twice since I joined her in the room: once to acknowledge my arrival and once to be taken to the bathroom. Months later she will tell me she remembers very little about being in the hospital at all, and it is no surprise.

Other than the muffled chaos on the other side of the closed hospital room door, everything is hushed. Except my brain, which is an out-of-control Tilt-A-Whirl.

I have COVID.

I might die.

No, I am not going to die. Stop being stupid.

My dad is dead. I will never see him again.

Oh God, am I going to end up on a ventilator?

When will I be able to take a shower?

I have COVID.

Do my dogs think I am never coming home?

I am a statistic.

Am I going to die?

I have COVID.

The IV fluid machine beeps when my oxygen level dips, which is often. It is not comforting. I turn on the TV and see Florida’s beefy, blue-blazered governor bloviating that his state—which has some of the highest rates of infection in the nation—is handling the pandemic just fine.

“We’ve got a health system that’s working,” he says. “Anyone who needs a bed can get one.”

The nurse assistant who came in to empty our trash cans looks up at the TV and shakes her head.

“We just need to turn this whole thing over to Jesus,” she sighs.

•••

Three times a day I must remind the ever-changing aides to cut up my mom’s food and help her eat. Her hands are frozen with stress-induced arthritis, and she sleeps twenty-two hours a day. This is the woman they wanted to send home because they needed the bed for sicker people. I am furious all over again.

But it is not the fault of the hands-on hospital staff. They are, to a one, helpful and kind—zipped head-to-toe in PPE jumpsuits, industrial blue Oompa Loompas with exhausted eyes behind shiny plastic face guards.

My guess is that the doctors are equally fatigued, but I wouldn’t know for sure because you rarely see one. I’ve requested an audience with a physician every day since I was admitted so I can get some clarity on my mother’s condition as well as my own.

Finally on Day 3, a harried doctor arrives and informs me that in addition to COVID-19, we both have pneumonia. My mother is also on pain medication for her acute arthritis and is being treated for a severe bladder infection, which in elderly people often causes confusion and disorientation.

“But actually,” says the doctor, “you’re sicker with COVID than she is. When you came in your fever was higher and the scans showed more lung inflammation.” He says I will probably be there for several days and not to be surprised if it gets worse before it gets better.

My husband is back in Oregon, and we have agreed for his safety and my peace of mind he will stay there. My cell is dead, so he passed along my hospital room phone number to my best friend, who is frantic with worry.

Her voice breaks and wavers at the end of our conversation, and as is her way, she cuts right to the chase. “Please don’t die, okay?”

•••

Day 4 in the hospital is my birthday. Since COVID-19 wasn’t able to take down my hedonistic sense of taste and smell, I order pasta for dinner—and for the first time since I arrived here, a dessert.

I am informed by an apologetic kitchen staffer that I can have pasta or dessert, but not both, as the attending physician has put me on a modified diabetic eating plan. I opt for the pasta. Then I order a meal for my mother, who is barely eating. She is getting chocolate cake for dessert.

Like much of the rest of the western world, COVID-19 hates fat people. The TV news spouts statistics showing that in addition to people over sixty-five, the patients most likely to develop serious complications from the virus are those with obesity and its BFFs high blood pressure and diabetes.

That would be me. Both my blood pressure and blood sugar are well controlled with medication and exercise, but I’m under no illusions about what carrying around so much extra weight at my age means for my health. Unlike many self-designated social media health experts and internet trolls, however, I don’t believe I deserve to die from COVID-19 because I’m fat.

But my weight is likely part of the reason I’m lying in a hospital room next to my faded southern beauty of a mother, who sleeps open-mouthed and corpse-like, in the mechanical bed next to mine.

She looks like a week-old cut rose, the petals and leaves all browning at the edges. I love her so much.

•••

Why is it that so many health crises seem to happen on the toilet? That’s where my mom collapsed at two a.m. the night she was brought here, and it’s now where I am starting to panic because I am unable to stand up.

My head has been a helium balloon all day, my oxygen levels rarely above 95. A respiratory therapist came in to consult earlier and after he turned up the levels on the O₂ concentrator, I started to feel a little better.

Or at least I did until right now, when I tried to get up from the commode. I’m swimmy and damp with sweat. My lungs will barely inflate.

By the time I make it back to the bed ten steps away, clinging to the wall, I’m gasping and almost in tears. The sweat has cooled and I’m shivering but too exhausted to pull the sheet up. Panic is frantically knocking, knocking and I grip the mattress with both hands. My mother has slept through all of this.

I try to force my lungs to take a deep breath and I choke. The edges of my vision darken, my heart flutters. I am terrified that if I call a nurse, they will put me on a ventilator. I am equally terrified that if I don’t call, my brain will start to die from lack of oxygen.

I am fat, middle-aged, not rich, and not beautiful. My only worth and value to the world is, and has been, my sharp, creative brain. If I lose that I am a useless blob.

My insecurities are pathetic and not rational. But they make me hit the call button and save my own life.

•••

Two days after I thought I was going to die, I am discharged from the hospital at ten p.m. with portable oxygen. My mother will stay in the hospital for another few days until a bed opens up in a COVID-19 rehab facility, because she is going to need more care than I can give her right now.

I end up spending three extra hours at the hospital after the doctor officially releases me because I must arrange a ride back to my mother’s house fifteen minutes away. As a COVID-19 patient, rideshares and taxis are out, and an ambulance would charge $300 a mile.

Eventually it is Heidi, one of my mom’s dearest neighborhood friends, who dons a mask and gloves and comes to get me. Heidi has also been braving my mom’s virus-drenched house to feed the cat and bring in the mail. She is an angel in cropped pants and my hero.

When I get back to the house I collapse on the couch and remain there, hooked to an oxygen tank—and in the same dank clothes I was wearing when I was taken to the hospital a week prior—for the next three days. My hair is greasy, my skin slimy, my nostrils raw from the oxygen tubes. I stare at the decaying flowers with still-jaunty bows sitting all around the house, sent after my father passed.

Oh, right. My dad is dead. My gut lurches.

The next morning it takes me a half hour to get up and go to the bathroom. Any movement leaves me breathless and swaying. Days slide into nights. The house landline phone rings and rings and rings. I know people are worried but talking leaves me dizzy and exhausted.

After a few days I start picking up the phone. “No, there’s nothing you can do. Thanks,” I repeat, over and over and over to people who wouldn’t come near me even if they were close by.

One of my North Carolina cousins from my mom’s side of the family calls. Her mouth-full-of-marbles voice is thick with concern and for once, I am truly thankful she is the type who prefers talking to listening. Towards the end of our conversation, she asks if she can play me a hymn on the piano over the phone. A sweet gesture from a pure heart.

“No thanks. I just need a nap right now,” I rasp.

“Well, we’ll be prayin’ for ya,” she says.

•••

On the fourth day I finally disconnect from the oxygen tank (I have named it O2D2) to take a shower. Afterwards, I stand in the stall in a daze, dripping. With only a towel covering me, I make it to the couch and sit there, tubes in nose, bare butt on microfiber, for several hours.

It occurs to me how alone I am. Had I passed out trying to scrub my pits, when would someone have found me? I refuse to let my healthy brother and sister-in-law near me, and only a few of the Necco-wafer-colored houses nearby are occupied because the snowbirds vacate this swamp in summer. So if a COVID survivor falls in the shower and there’s no one to hear, does she make the news?

Flipping through TV channels, I see a report that the coronavirus death toll is over 150,000. Trump says that the U.S. is handling things very well, much better than most other places, whatever that means.

The house phone rings. It is a medical assistant from a local clinic twenty-five miles away where nearly three weeks ago, after calling around for hours, I had finally managed to get my mother and me tested for COVID-19. At that time there were no rapid tests and results were taking a minimum of ten days.

The medical assistant is apologetic. “I’m calling to let you know that both you and Shelby Coppola’s tests came back positive,” she says.

“Well, that would explain why my mom’s in the hospital and there’s oxygen up my nose,” I say.

•••

A six-legged, cicada-type insect takes up residence on the front door about two weeks after I am released from the hospital. It is the size of a toddler and looks like some sort of plague-house marker from the underworld.

I say hello to it when I finally leave the house to get my mom’s mail at the box across the street.

It is late July now, and the central Florida morning air has all the breathability of moist, day-old underwear. I make it to the mailbox and back but require a half-hour session with O2D2 to recover.

I soon learn that the plague cicada has indeed come to warn of an impending condition nearly as distressing as the coronavirus itself: the antibiotic-resistant, I-eat-Monistat-For-Breakfast Yeast Infection.

Like most COVID-19 patients, my treatment included large doses of steroids. This can spike blood sugar, which then makes you susceptible to severe yeast infections. I am unable to walk upright and peeing makes me scream. The infection then spreads to my backside and all elimination becomes torture.

When it’s obvious that the first course of yeast infection antibiotics prescribed via teledoc isn’t going to work, I drive to an urgent care clinic to see a doctor in person. The small waiting room is packed full of masked, coughing patients sitting just a few feet apart and I am informed that even though I have an appointment, there is a three-hour wait.

So I sit in the car for those hours, reading news on my phone and, when the thick stickiness of the late morning becomes too much for my weakened lungs, I run the air conditioner. Two hundred fifty-three more people died from the virus yesterday in Florida, the highest one-day death total so far in the pandemic. Governor Blue Blazer is annoyed that the media is focused on deaths rather than falling infection rates.

I am focused on breathing while I wait, and on the chronic queasiness I know is the result of worrying about my mother. I cannot stop thinking about her, desperately lonely and grieving in a spartan rehab center. By the time she comes home she will have been locked in—wearing nothing but a hospital gown and socks—for 22 days. She has no one for company except the attendants who bring her meals and whomever she can reach on her cell phone.

I feel incredibly guilty that I was not well enough to care for her and spare her that.

The second course of antibiotics from the urgent clinic doctor finally works, and a few days later I am no longer petrified when I feel the need to urinate. Most of all, I can now breathe, deep and full. Deep and full.

The plague cicada disappeared a few days later.

•••

I’m not sure what day it is, but I observe that all the houses in my mom’s subdivision have their garbage bins out, so I go around and pick up all the dead flowers, collect the other household trash, and take it to the curb. The next-door neighbor sees me, waves, and walks up the driveway. But only so far.

“How’s your mom doing?” she asks.

“She’s as well as she can be, considering,” I say, shading my eyes from the relentless sun. “We hope she can come home in the next few days, once she gets a second negative COVID test.”

“We were all sorry to hear about your dad,” she says kindly. “I know he’d been sick for a long time. What happened?”

“Heart failure and sepsis.”

The neighbor nods. “Yeah, but I bet they listed COVID on his death certificate. They’re doing that now to make the hospitals more money.”

I look at her and shake my head. “Sorry, but I don’t believe that,” I say. “And no—his death certificate had heart failure and sepsis on it. That’s all.”

She pauses a moment. “Well. I know it’s going on other places. You let your mom know we’re thinking of her and lifting you all up to the Lord.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

•••

My husband Facetimes me, eager to show me how his worry and stress have manifested into a garage so clean and well-organized we can now fit my car inside. He also mentions that the hospital bills have started to roll in at home.

“Over five thousand bucks for your day-and-a-half in the emergency room—that’s before you even got to a real bed,” he tells me. “Let’s hear it for good insurance.”

Remembering the miasma of panic, near-suffocation and back pain I felt during that endless day and night in the ER puts my privilege into stark relief. Until now, I had the luxury of suffering through that without even giving a thought as to how we would pay for all this.

That realization almost makes me cry. Almost. But the truth is that except for the night my dad passed away, I still haven’t shed tears about anything. I think maybe my overwhelmed brain is using denial to cope, and that scares me a bit.

What also scares me is that my mom is coming home soon and I have no idea what kind of shape she’ll be in. I know she is still not walking well and her emotional state has deteriorated. She’s also not eating much but it’s mostly because she hates the food at the rehab center.

“Yesterday they brought me something that looked like diarrhea on a tortilla,” she complains.

“Well, tell them to bring you something else,” I suggest.

“I did. I had a couple of bites of a sandwich. It wasn’t good either. But the girl who brought it was sweet and it was so nice to have someone to talk to,” she says, and starts to cry.

•••

A month later, my family boards a small fishing boat to take my father’s ashes out to sea, per his wishes. My mother has been out of rehab for a few weeks and she’s shaky, but steady enough.

I seem to have bounced back pretty well. I don’t know it yet, but soon I’m going to start losing my hair—which infectious disease expert Alyssa Milano has already informed the world is an after-effect of COVID. Right now, though, it’s getting tangled in the late afternoon breeze as we speed out into Tampa Bay.

Once we are the required three miles from shore, the captain cuts the motor. We all share some memories about my dad, and my mom reads a poem she wrote for him on their forty-fifth anniversary. We play Sinatra’s “My Way”, and my brother chokes up as he pours my dad’s cremains into the choppy, jade-green water.

The rest of us throw flowers in the stream of ashes, which sparkle a little as they sink, then disappear. I didn’t realize ashes would sparkle. On another day I might roll my eyes at the thought, but today I let myself believe that those sparkles are my dad saying goodbye.

I also realize that I am finally crying, a salty stream down my cheeks and neck.

My mom sees me wiping away the tears and rubs my back, the way only mothers know how to do. “I can’t believe he’s gone, either,” she says. “I just can’t believe it.”

I shake my head. “You know mom, I’m devastated about dad. But I think I’m really crying ’cause I’m just so relieved we got to do this for him. I mean, we’re breathing. We made it.”

“Don’t ever tell me prayer doesn’t work,” she says, squeezing my hand.

The captain starts the motor and turns the boat for shore. We all look up and squint into the dissolving sun.

•••

MICHELE COPPOLA is a former radio personality who now works as a professional copywriter and freelancer. Her work has appeared previously in Full Grown People, The Oregonian, Spot Magazine, and various literary journals. She lives in Portland, OR with three senior rescue dogs and a stray she married named Bryon.

In the Room of Mental Health First Aid™

By Heather Lanier

In the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we joke about bad therapists and the body parts we lost to cancer. We describe with lyrical precision the places where our panic attacks begin and whether they travel up or down. We compare notes on the panic attacks like we’re comparing notes on dining experiences at a new restaurant. Or we stay silent and listen, grateful to those willing to describe their panic attacks because we’ve never had one, or don’t remember a time when we did … although, now that someone describes them that way, maybe we have. We recant our understandings of manic depression, tell stories about doctors’ mental health misdiagnoses, and collectively laugh at the rawness of what it means to be human.

In fact, in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we’re invited to talk about so many things the world beyond these walls does not want us to talk about that I start to lose touch with my usual filters. At the beginning of this day-long training, our facilitator Mandi said that if we ever need to leave the room for any standard reason—bathroom, phone call—we should give her a thumbs-up, so she knows we’re okay. “Otherwise, I’ll think you’re in crisis,” she explains. A few hours into training, I feel nature’s call, walk towards the door, make eye contact with Mandi, and lift my thumb toward the ceiling. She gives me a knowing nod. As I yank on the door handle, I have the uncanny urge to call out to the entire group of twenty-seven in a jolly, assuring voice, “Just need to change my tampon!”

I do not do this. But in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, I imagine the group warmly nodding and/or chuckling in a way no group of near-strangers ever has in response to the words, need and tampon.

Maybe we laugh so much here because there is nothing funny about why we are here. We are twenty-seven college professors at a south Jersey university that will, in four weeks, make national headlines for suicide. Three in two months. But we haven’t hit the New York Times or CNN just yet. It’s November 2019, and right now the University of Southern California is in the news. Two months before, it was the University of Pennsylvania. Last month, while south Jersey’s October languished in summer-like heat, the CDC released its report: Between 2007 and 2017, the rate of suicide among people age 10 to 24 increased a whopping 54%.[*] A 2018 CDC report found that suicide rates in half the states increased among all age groups by 30%. News outlets clambered onto the stats but couldn’t position them into a landscape of meaning. Like a Brancusian sketch, the numbers offered a clear if bare-bones portrait: We are a nation in crisis.

I’ve been standing in front of a college classroom for fifteen years. I’ve never had so many students write about suicide before—their thoughts of it, their friends’ acts of it.

In the second week of this semester, a young man I hadn’t seen before walked thirty minutes into my creative writing class and sat in the back. It was my first semester at this university. I was still learning where the bathrooms were. I found his name on my roster and marked him present. At the next class, he arrived on time but left halfway through. I never saw him again.

Nine weeks later, a voicemail from the Wellness Center sat on my cell phone. It was about an unnamed student, and would I please call back? Before I could, I read the official email from the university: the student I barely knew had died. The university was not legally permitted to disclose the cause. An online forum would later name it suicide. Before the student’s death, I’d considered myself too swamped for this all-day Mental Health First Aid™ workshop. Ten minutes after reading my student’s name in that email, I asked if there was an extra spot in this room.

Four weeks from now, when we lose our third student, the conversations in the media will center around our university’s wellness center, about whether there’s a waitlist for counselors, about how well our school is supporting students in crisis. We are not counselors, and we are not in charge of hiring counselors, nor are we in charge of determining the nationally recommended counselor-to-student ratio. We’re a department of writing professors, peeking out from mounds of essays and stories and projects in this, the busiest month of the semester. We are setting aside eight hours on a Friday so we can learn how to save lives.

“You’re earning a certificate, not a superhero cape,” Mandi reminds us frequently. We nod from our seats.

The Room of Mental Health First Aid™ is, in its usual operating hours, a sterile classroom filled with six long rows of tables. This is the same room in which many of us meet monthly to discuss the unsexy specifics of curriculum changes and policy requirements. It’s the room I stood in six months ago and convinced a committee to give me the assistant professor position I now hold. I wore a black suit, clicked through PowerPoint slides, gave confident answers. I wore the very persona of infallible competence that this room has, at least for today, invited us to disarm.

Not quite public, not quite private, the room of Mental Health First Aid™ invites professionals to disclose, with promised confidentiality, all the ways it has been hard for us to be human. “We use Vegas rules here,” Mandi says, clicking to a slide that features the city’s iconic neon welcome sign. “What happens here stays here.” We can disclose adolescent-onset anxiety. We can explain how trauma might link across our years like beads on a string. We can say what we would otherwise never say in this room: “Nope, the textbook descriptions of panic attacks are incomplete. Mine begin in my arms, or my belly, or my dizzied head.”

It strikes me that if more spaces followed the norms of the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we might actually need less mental health first aid.

Mandi is a thirty-something woman with alto-voiced cheer. “How many of you have experienced depression?”

Hands go up.

“Anxiety?”

More hands. Nearly all the hands, including my own.

This is one of Mandi’s strategies: accessing our personal experiences. She has given us softcover textbooks, and she scrolls through infographic slides from the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. But she also invites us to use ourselves as references, as wildly imperfect maps that might touch or even lay over and align with the maps of others, and which might, along with the textbook and slides, help us cobble together a fuller topography of what it means to be human.

We learn the official statistics: Twenty percent of young adults, ages 18 to 24, experience a mental health disorder.^[†] Two-thirds of students who need mental health support do not seek it. The average number of years between when a person needs help and when they receive it is eight. The age of a third grader, the time it takes for a typical human to go from drooling baby to sassy calculator of math problems. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adults age 18 to 24.

“Why?” Mandi asks us to speculate.

“Social media?” someone calls from the front row.

“Climate change fears?” another person guesses from the side.

Mandi nods. “Sure. Those are all factors.”

But why, she says, is a question even experts haven’t answered. In our eight hours together, we will attempt to answer another: What can we do?

•••

It turns out that what we can do is remarkably simple.

She splits the twenty-seven of us into two groups. One group is labeled “Listening.” Another is labeled “Not Listening.” The groups must race each other to come up with as many outward signs of their designated label as possible. I am in Not Listening.

“Looking at your cell phone!” one of my group members calls out.

“Looking away!” another shouts.

“Not making eye contact!”

I’m not making eye contact. I’m looking at my notepad, frantically recording their ideas. A colleague grabs my list and runs to the whiteboard to scribble our answers. With equal urgency, members of Listening do the same.

“Time,” Mandi calls.

She tallies our lists. We of Not Listening have generated twenty-one outward signs. Listening only has nineteen. Not Listening wins!

But the whole point of the activity, of course, is that listening wins. It’s the “L” in our five-step Mental Health First Aid™ plan, which goes by the acronym ALGEE. We’ve skipped over the letter A for now. Mandi says it’s the hardest—we’ll get to it at the end.

Why ALGEE? “Because this program came from Australia,” our facilitator says to laughter. Maybe the others imagine what I do: surfers along the Gold Coast, aerial views of the Great Barrier Reef. Algae, the photosynthetic organisms that made the planet hospitable for life. Maybe it can help do so again.

•••

Sidenote: It is strangely freezing in the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I say this with zero metaphoric intention. I circle my hands around a mug of hot water. I wonder if I should slide my wool ski cap off my head, so I look more professional among my new colleagues. Then I remember: We’ll be talking about suicide here. It’s fine to strive for cozy.

“You are Anxiety,” Mandi calls out to three people clustered in the front row.

Their faces look up, stunned.

“And you right here,” she circles her hand around a group beside them, “are Depression.”

Nervous laughter erupts.

Another group is ADHD. A fourth is Schizophrenia. The laughter spreads, morphing from nervous to raucous. In a culture of person-first language, where we imply that people live with diagnoses rather than become them, her wording is jarring, but also hysterical.

So I am Eating Disorders, along with two men flanking me.

“Do you want to be Psychosis?” Mandi calls to a lone woman in the back. “Or you can join another group?”

The woman laughs. She’s fine with Psychosis.

Mandi has written age-ranges around the room’s whiteboards. “Go stand where you think your assigned mental health disorder, on average, begins.”

Substance Abuse stands beneath “13-17.” We of Eating Disorders sally up beside them. ADHD idles to our right at “8-12,” as does Anxiety.

Mandi asks Anxiety why they guessed eight to twelve.

“Personal experience?” a female colleague peeps with upturned uncertainty, then bursts into a low-bellied laugh.

She’s correct. So is ADHD, Substance Abuse, and we of Eating Disorders. Depression has planted themselves below “18-24,” but they’re off by a decade.

We return to our desks, and Mandi clicks to another slide. “Remember,” she says. “A mental illness is a physical illness. The brain looks physically different.”

I write these two sentences in my notebook. I box them and surround them with stars. Mandi’s quote gives new meaning to the dismissive phrase It’s all in your head. People hear this sentence in response to everything from depression to sexual harassment to autoimmune disorders. It means: What you’re describing, you’ve invented. It also means: Quit being inconvenient. But Mandi’s quote reminds us that the head is a powerful and real place in which to experience something.

The single greatest factor that contributes to mental health disorders, Mandi says, is trauma. Capital T trauma comes to my mind. The neglect of a parent. The fist of a spouse. A box for a bed. But she says no one can define trauma for a person.

“If anyone tells you that what you’ve experienced isn’t trauma, that’s bad counseling. In fact,” she adds, “everyone probably has trauma of some kind. Because everyone is alive.”

It’s the simplest mathematical proof:

Being alive causes trauma.

Everyone you have ever known has been, or is still, alive.

Ergo ….

I’m the stepdaughter of a chiropractor. If you fill out a form at a chiropractor’s office, it will likely ask you about your birth. Was it medicated? Were forceps used? A vacuum? The concern is for your neck and spine as it moved through the birth canal. But the implication is this: the very act of entering this world is traumatic.

•••

We break for pizza. We talk about our dogs, our cats, our Netflix binges, our children. We stretch cheese-covered triangles from our teeth and describe the things we love in this world. “I like your hat,” the man to my left, of Eating Disorders, says. I thank him.

•••

In 1990, I sat in a room with a judge and explained to him an ongoing experience of trauma. I was twelve. The judge dismissed my experience as not trauma. On my lap sat a composition notebook in which I’d written about my trauma. The judge wouldn’t read it. So mine was not, could never be trauma.

The details don’t matter—I’ve written about them elsewhere. (Thumbs up, reader. I’m okay.) What matters: Twenty-first century living sometimes affirms experiences that twentieth-century living denied. Not across the board, but in pockets of places, like in an op-ed that worries for the safety of transwomen needing to pee, like on a bestseller list where sits a memoir about a brown-skinned woman’s daily experiences with racism, like in a large discussion classroom on a patch of New Jersey that was once deciduous forest inhabited by the Lenni Lenape. We name at the onset of gatherings the tribes that inhabited the land we stand on. It’s a microscopic way of acknowledging Native people and the violence of white supremacy. It also ends up saying: Trauma brought us here. Trauma is embedded in the very birth of what we’re standing on.

Six months ago, when I stood at the front of this room wearing the black pantsuit, I described how I would structure my creative writing courses. I showcased my students’ work. Projected on the screen was a student’s poem about living in a female body in a country where the president bragged about grabbing female bodies. I talked about how I diversify my reading lists, distributed grading rubrics of varying complexity, and watched committee members nod.

Here’s what I didn’t say: When I ask my students to write, I sometimes invite them to excavate the ineffable little monsters in their guts. Just like I held a little monster in my lap in the form of a composition notebook when I faced that judge. I invite my students, however gently, to gather the courage to hold these little monsters up to their ears and listen to them. And what my students end up writing in response are often beautiful and strange and powerful songs about how they have managed to survive in this world.

But it is not always easy, handling these monsters. They can and do bite. If the student who died last month had been in my classroom, what would he have unearthed? Would my lessons have helped? Hindered?

During that interview six months ago, I was required to read my own work. I read a piece of nonfiction that excavated a little monster of my own. But the prose was polished, the structure artfully arranged, pressed into shape as neatly as my dry-cleaned suit. And when I was done, my future colleagues asked about professional things: how to craft a sentence, how an essay becomes a book. This is the professionalism of my field. This is also the gift I give my students: I take seriously the craft of their writing. Which means I also assume they, as people, are okay.

But Mandi’s ALGEE requires more. She’s still reserving the hardest letter, A, for the end. And we covered L, for listening. The G stands for Give reassurance and information. The two E’s stand, respectively, for Encourage appropriate professional help and Encourage self-help and other support strategies. As a writing professor, I not only need to help my students with syntax and diction and structure and voice and revision. I also need to help them stay whole.

It’s a daunting new job responsibility in the role of twenty-first century professor: to worry about how an absence of eye-contract might trigger isolation; to keep dibs on a student’s possible need for professional counseling; to make note of any mentions of suicidal ideation (so far this semester, three) and have the follow-up conversations: Are you okay? Are you getting the help you need? I feel the weight of my students’ well-being on my shoulders.

•••

What are signs of an eating disorder? What is the difference between substance abuse and addiction? How do PTSD triggers work? Much of Mental Health First-Aid™ training requires us to understand the range of mental health disorders, so we can identify signs of them and guide people toward appropriate help. We’ve become, in eight hours, like mobile triage rooms.

We tackle letter A, as promised, at the very end. And I too will get to it at the very end. For now, know that the light from the classroom windows eventually turns pink. The sun eventually falls below the horizon. And all twenty-seven of us eventually complete our training. Mandi reminds us to do something kind for ourselves tonight: a glass of wine, a bubble bath. Every flight attendants’ emergency instructions are both clichéd and true, and Mandi reiterates them: “Put the oxygen mask on your own face first. You can’t help anyone unless you also help yourself.”

The next morning, I am ensconced in a scene the Internet might call self-care: cocooned in bed beneath a weighted blanket, supine and turning pages in a book. My children are miraculously at their grandmother’s. I am burritoed in bed past ten. I have nowhere to go for two hours.

It will make every bit of sense if I want to stay in this place forever. It will make absolutely zero sense if I start to long, ever-so-slightly, and then very much so, to return to the room of Mental Health First Aid™.

It’s the book’s fault. A memoir about being gay and Black in the south, it’s one I planned on assigning next semester. But as I turn the pages, the author’s mother is unexpectedly diagnosed with a terminal illness, and it’s the very same illness that a student’s mother has recently been diagnosed with. This student has already registered for next semester’s class.

I want to go back to the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I want to raise my hand and ask the question I haven’t figured out how to answer. Not the first question perched on top of my head (Should I assign this book?). The question buried underneath it: How responsible are we for each other? Exactly how much are we in each other’s care?

The boundaries in the room of Mental Health First Aid ™ were clear. The doors were closed. The personal stories were confidential. People gave thumbs-up. We were okay, we were okay. The only signs of the outside world showed through the windows. By training’s end, the sky was nearly indigo, and we drove home in the dark. There are only so many questions you can answer in eight hours. How responsible are we for each other? It’s a question I’ll keep carrying.

•••

The answer I left with, though, is this: At least a little bit. We are all, every one of us, at least a little bit in each other’s care.

Over the next days, I catch up on grading, read a few dozen short stories, return them to my students with comments. Ten minutes into a lesson, a student is openly weeping. She can’t be upset about my comments—she didn’t turn in any work. I assign the class a short writing activity and whisper to her: “Do you want to talk?” She shakes her head no. I say okay. Five minutes later, she’s still wiping her face with her sleeve.

“Come on outside,” I say. She follows me into the hall. It’s a night class, and the hall is lined with bluish-black windows.

She chokes on a sentence. It cracks past her vocal cords. She’s in a domestic violence situation. It’s bad. What follows is another Vegas moment. The details of her story stay with her. But the all-day Mental Health First Aid™ shifts me into gear. I listen closely. I ask questions. I hug her for as long as she wants, which is much longer than I expect, and she weeps into the crook between my neck and shoulder. She holds tight, until she lets go.

I ask about her safety. I ask whom else she has told. We return to class, and I finish teaching, and then we sit together on a bench in the hall as she calls campus safety. She speaks to the counselor on call. The counselor gives her good advice. There are next steps. A way to feel safe tonight. An expert to talk to tomorrow.

I walk her to her car, which is right in front of the building—a spot she tells me she waits for each night that we have class. This is why she’s been late, she says. I watch her close her car door and hear the click of the lock, and she drives away. It’s raining, almost seven p.m.

Reader, I’ll tell you this: She won’t pass the class. But she’ll get counseling and a safe place to live.

On my way to the parking garage, someone behind me shouts with all their might: “FUCK!” During my ascent up the garage’s concrete stairwell, two men pass me. They are very tall, and loud, and seem amiable and they could also crush me against the wall, and they could be carrying something that crushes them from the insides, and they could be perfectly fine.

We’re all a little in danger, we’re all a little in each other’s care.

When I get inside my own car, I lock the doors, relieved to create a room of just myself.

•••

It is only at the tail end of the daylong training, when my blood sugar is low and the sun is threatening to set and I have the uncanny urge to scroll mindlessly through social media, that we tackle the hardest letter: A.

Assess for risk of suicide or harm.

In other words, ask a person if they’re planning to kill themselves. If we ever suspect someone is thinking of it, we need to ask.

We practice as a group, repeating the questions in unison:

Are you thinking of killing yourself?

Are you having thoughts of suicide?

We get the words right. We commit them to memory. Mandi tells us that it can be scary to ask, which is why we’ll practice in pairs.

“And if they say yes,” Mandi asks, “then what do you do next?”

A voice pipes up in front: “Ask if they have a plan.”

She nods. “And if they do?” she asks.

“Stay with them,” another voice says.

“Do not leave them,” Mandi adds. “Call campus safety. Call 911.”

Then it’s time. I turn to the male colleague next to me. I met him two months ago.

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

He knows it’s coming, and still he winces. His eyebrows relax, and he assumes the role. “Yes,” he says calmly.

“Do you have a plan?” I ask.

He pauses. “Yes,” he says.

The end of the role play is remarkably stark, like a cliff-edge. We switch roles.

“Are you considering suicide?” he asks.

I’m a terrible role-player. I give him the true answer. I give him the only answer I hope people will always give me, the answer I hope every person on this planet can give every day of their lives. It’s a hopeless hope for the world’s eight billion people, all of whom have been born and have lived years and are still alive. I say “No.”

[*] From Sally C. Curtin, M.A., and Melonie Heron, Ph.D., “Death Rates Due to Suicide and Homicide Among Persons Aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2017,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 352, October 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h

^[†] All statistics in this paragraph come from the presentation literature from the Youth Mental Health First Aid ™ USA training.

•••

HEATHER LANIER is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Longreads, The Sun, and elsewhere. She writes about parenting, disability, spirituality, and what a kindergarten teacher would call “big feelings.” Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.

We Were Never Alone

Photo by Gina Easley

By Antonia Malchik

About two years ago, my sister and her family reached the edge of a financial cliff, one far too familiar to far too many Americans. My husband and I talked about the choices they had, the importance of being there for family during hard times, and our deep desire for privacy. And then we invited them to move in with us because in an America where the average person’s wages have stagnated for forty years and counting, what choices do any of us have?

Before we started sharing a house, I’d spent years working towards a zero-waste home. Paper towels were replaced with cut-up cloths from worn-out bath and tea towels. All food scraps were composted—even chicken bones after they’d been stripped of meat and drained of protein in a stock pot. Every plastic grocery bag at supermarkets and pharmacies and farm stands was politely refused. I bought raw milk straight from the farm in half-gallon Mason jars once a week and packed my kids’ snacks and lunches in cloth snack bags or little stainless steel containers.

I bought a lot of cloth snack bags and stainless steel containers and reusable grocery bags, all of which arrived in oversized cardboard boxes padded with puffed-up plastic bubbles. I used untold gallons of oil driving to farm stands and milk producers and butchers and flour mills to avoid buying food wrapped in plastic packaging. So much oil to save a certain amount of plastic, but to me it felt important, a contribution to shifting society away from dependence on disposables.

My niece was three when we started living together. She had an individually-wrapped organic fruit leather almost every night after dinner. She’d run over to the snack cupboard, where we kept the shared organic crackers and the big batch of granola I made for the household every week, and bring the package back to my sister or her husband. They ripped it open from the tiny slit at the top, placed there for the smooth convenience expected in a consumer culture where every scant resource of the planet is bent to the will of our ease, or our pleasure.

The fruit leathers are delicious. Sometimes I’d let my daughter have one. Not often because foods like fruit leather and raisins are nearly as bad for children’s teeth as candy, I’ve been told by pediatric dentists. They snuggle into the grooves of molars and the sticky residue is hard to brush out.

Sometimes I ate one, too. After a childhood of daily Pepsis and powdered milk and an almost complete absence of dental care, my teeth are shot anyway. I have more fillings than teeth, and three poorly-shaped crowns. I’ve lost track of my root canals.

The fruit leather’s wrapper went in the trash. There was always a lot of plastic in there. Soft, pliable wrappings and baggies. Crinkly plastic bags. Diapers and overnight pull-ups. The firm-flexible lids of yogurt containers.

The trash was full of food, too. It pained me to throw carrot ends and coffee grounds and the strings from beans into the garbage, but that started before my sister’s family moved in, when we’d relocated to a neighborhood where compost bins attracted deer and neighborhood dogs, as well as bears and mountain lions.

The fruit leather wrappers and food and thin plastic grocery bags headed to the landfill every Tuesday. They were dumped and buried with all our other trash, closed in the womb of land that surrounds and nurtures us. From there, they compressed on top of the aquifer that a local farmer had recently gotten the rights to tap for the water bottling plant he wants to build. Siphoning water from hundreds of feet under clay and sand and rock to pipe into molded plastic bottles that will be shipped to the hands of consumers reaching out for a convenient guzzle of cool mountain water. A picture of our valley, with its snow-capped peaks, will probably grace the bottle. And maybe the water will contain microscopic particles from the fruit leather wrappers that departed our house in plastic bags, nestled next to the chicken carcasses and diapers.

The living situation was difficult. We were squeezed together in a small house where my two school-aged kids and my sister’s preschooler bounced around on their blow-up Rody donkeys and played dress-up and shared a wide variety of cold viruses and stomach bugs. We adults managed meals and tried unsuccessfully to give one another the privacy we all craved. We thought constantly about the day when we could live in our home spaces as we wished without having to adapt to one another.

We all tried so hard, tried to get along, tried to meet one another’s needs, tried to step quietly around the house when others were sleeping and one of us needed to go to work early. It’s a testament to how much we care about one another that we were able to do this with minimal (though not nonexistent) friction. But every day I looked at the fruit leather wrappers and plastic grocery bags and thought about endocrine disruptors and the floating Pacific garbage patch and the damaged health of humans and ecological zones near the chemical plants that make these objects and wondered: what is the point of learning to live well together if we change our ecosystem beyond our species’ ability to adapt? And yet, what was the point of all my plastic-saving angst if we can’t learn to live well together?

•••

In August 1941, as Hitler’s Army Group North blew up roads and train lines in ever-closer encroachment on Leningrad in the Soviet Union, my father’s mother and her two older children, my aunt and uncle, took the last train out of the city. They spent a month living on kasha—hot buckwheat cereal—in the train car with other families, winding through the country to avoid bombed rail lines before landing in the Ural Mountains. Government mandates assigned the war refugees to local residents’ homes, and the family my relatives were housed with hated them. They hated sharing their space, hated having Leningraders in their home, hated being forced to split their resources with refugees.

Once there, my grandmother, a metallurgical engineer, worked as a manager at the metallurgical factory, and nights she worked on the factory line. When she was home she chopped wood to keep her children, and the other family, warm, since the grown sons who lived in the house refused to do so on principle. She grew potatoes to feed her kids and gathered mushrooms in the woods, while in Leningrad my grandfather, a nuclear engineer, continued his factory work and every month watched thousands around him starve to death during the first winter of the Siege of Leningrad. During a stealth mission to carry messages out of the city across enemy lines, he was nearly hit by a German bomb and fell into frozen Lake Ladoga along the doroga zhizni, the Road of Life that provided the only way out of the besieged city. Two nurses dragged him out of the icy water, and my grandmother finally found him in a hospital 1942, so skeletal in the near-final stages of dysentery that she said he looked like a monkey, almost unrecognizable.

At its most basic level, immigration is simply a matter of logistics. Physical logistics—how to house and feed people—and social ones—how to help them integrate into a different culture. Tensions in immigration often result from a failure to pay enough attention to and plan for those logistics, leaving everyone vulnerable to misunderstanding and resentment. Refugees, though, are not simple immigrants. Their status is sudden and unwanted and necessary, as my grandmother’s was. It’s a sad, repetitive tale of human history, that one dictator or power- or resource-hungry authoritarian wages war, or environmental devastation hits, and a country’s borders burst open with refugees, people who, until a short time before, had simply been going to work and sending their kids to school and making dinner, who are then welcomed by some but hated by others, those who wish to not have the strain of caring for them.

•••

One day two winters ago I stepped outside, while it was still dark, to look at the stars. I try to do this most mornings before getting my kids up for school. It’s my stand-in for meditation, and it became particularly important after our house folded in three more people than it was designed for—four, after my sister’s second baby was born. I craved space, quiet, privacy. We all craved it.

It was silent out there in our yard at that time of day, even in the summer when the sunlight was already growing pink over the far mountains. I loved it best when it was still dark, and the neighbors’ larches and lodgepole pines shifted in the morning chill.

High cumulus clouds divided the sky into patches of constellations. As I glanced from one star-specked patch to another, I realized that I could only see Orion’s Belt out of the side of my eye. If I looked straight at it, it disappeared; if I looked away I could see the three stars lined up bright in the periphery of my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut. A rectangle of light appeared front and center. I opened them again, and the rectangle popped shadowy and dark up against the stars. I recognized that shape. It was my iPhone.

I’d been scrolling Twitter just before I stepped outside. In recent months I’d become an addict, checking my feed obsessively, opening every article about politics, about protest, about the lessons of history, that appeared in my timeline. I tried to talk friends and colleagues out of doing the same—the world might descend into hellfire, I kept saying, but it would do it just the same whether you were checking your Facebook feed every minute or not—because the obsession with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and its results was affecting everyone’s ability to work and focus and frankly do anything productive with our lives.

I couldn’t listen to my own advice, though. I kept opening Twitter while I made my coffee just past four in the morning. My eyes always felt strained and painful afterwards but I told myself it would pass, and I needed to keep on top of things. The eyestrain didn’t pass, at least not quickly, and the truth was I didn’t need to keep on top of things. Keeping on top of things throughout every hour of every day is about as futile as trying to keep my email inbox empty. And in convincing myself that I was just checking in briefly but necessarily with the day’s news, I was blinding myself to the solace of the night sky.

•••

The morning after the presidential election of Donald Trump, I woke up still unable to believe the results. It was late. I usually get up between four and five in the morning to work and stargaze, but instead had stayed up until three texting with my mother-in-law in England, as we’d done when watching the Brexit votes come in a few months previously. I was exhausted and bewildered, but like millions of other exhausted and bewildered Americans, as well as the millions of exhausted and elated ones, I still had to get my kids up to go to school.

I went upstairs and heard voices from the section of the house we’d curtained off for my sister and her family. On the rare mornings my kids got up before I woke them, they liked to wander in there and play with their younger cousin, so I peeked around the curtain. My sister was on the couch nursing her baby. I’d been wanting to hold myself together for my kids, but that resolve evaporated on seeing my sister’s stunned, disbelieving expression.

Everyone’s eyes perceived the election differently. To mine, it culminated in mass acceptance that the rule of law and democratic ideals could be subsumed under hatred, desperation, and fear of a mythical “other.” I had to remind myself of one of the hard truths of America, one that someone of my skin color is mostly insulated from: that for many people, the rule of law and democratic ideals had never worked in the first place. Pale-skinned, middle-class, and upper-class liberals, or people like me who’d grown up white and poor and Christian and progressive, who’d always believed a better world was within our abilities to create, were just facing it directly for perhaps the first time. After all, the ground I step on when I look at the stars, the mountains and larch trees I love so much, are all part of land that was forcibly taken from Native American nations and handed to homesteaders like my great-great grandparents. The public lands and wilderness areas I now defend with my votes and phone calls have been, for tens of thousands of years, home to people who have now spent centuries facing the traumas of invasion, genocide, and betrayal.

•••

A few weeks later, near Christmastime and less than a month from when my family and I would move out of the shared household, my sister and I were talking in the kitchen about our father’s mother. When the Siege of Leningrad was over, four years after it began, and the family returned to Leningrad from the Ural Mountains, it was to find their apartment taken over by an autocratic Communist Party bureaucrat. My grandparents, my aunt and uncle, my father (who’d been born in the Urals), and our grandfather’s mother were allowed to live and sleep in one small room. The kitchen was shared communally with other families.

“How did she do it?” I asked my sister. Though we loved each other, and our husbands got along, the strain of living together had felt extreme. But we also knew that those strains were based mostly on small and inconsequential differences in how we preferred to exist in the privacy of our home. The forces pressing on our grandmother’s life were exponentially larger. How did she keep sane, keep moral, keep honest and humane, in a situation where little about what she valued, or loved, or honored, had any space?

“I don’t know,” said my sister.

“I keep saying I want my life back,” I said, as she jiggled the now-eight-month-old on her knee and I waggled my fingers to make my newest niece smile. “I’m sure you guys have said the same thing.” To which she answered, “Yup.”

Tangled together physically and psychologically in this small house, we wanted our priorities back, our ability to direct our own schedules, moderate our footfalls to our own families’ sleeping habits, maintain a level of cleanliness or graceful dishabille as we saw fit, not to constantly bend, change, trim ourselves to the lives and needs of others. Don’t we all want that? Like a poorly thought-out immigration policy, we had failed to plan the logistics of living together successfully, although we were learning. I wanted my sister and her family to stop using so much plastic. They wanted me to be less twitchy about toast crumbs crunching on the floor and less lackadaisical about the quality of our shared dinners. We’d hit a point, all of us, when we couldn’t change, couldn’t adapt, any more, without feeling that we were changing who we were.

My father’s parents were deeply ethical people who managed to get along in a profoundly compromised world. My mother’s parents were lifelong progressives, her father a Montana rancher, her mother a live-and-let-live Episcopalian. My sisters and I practically have a genetic blueprint for seeing the world from others’ points of view, for adapting. We have the self-awareness to want to bend further, to be the better humans. And even we found we could only adapt so far. Photographs of my paternal grandmother show deep, anxious lines between her eyebrows, but also kindness in her eyes and years of smiling about the lips. She knew something about living with the worst of others while maintaining faith in the goodness of humanity. She knew things about tolerance and adaptation that I will spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

There is no instruction sheet for how to meet the world when it swiftly becomes a place you don’t recognize. But there is, actually, a qualitative difference between wanting one’s life back and those who want to “take our country back” through violence and expulsion: the desire to live well with others, to understand that all our spaces are shared with people whose lives we might not understand. And that at any moment we, like my grandmother, could become refugees, could transform into the “other.”

•••

I attended an environmental writers conference some years ago, a collection of poets and essayists, geologists, and ethnobotanists, people from many different disciplines brought together in the Vermont woods through shared care for this planet and worry about its future.

A few of us went for a rainy walk one afternoon, in a forest much wetter and leafier and more disorienting than the pine-carpeted paths of my Rocky Mountain homeland. As we walked through and under dripping leaves and paths that kept disappearing on us, a perfect setting for fraught existential questions, I wanted to ask everyone: what worries you most? We’d had frank discussions of environmental devastation and climate change throughout the week, so, I thought, let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s air our fears.

It took that walk and me asking everyone else the question that haunted me to articulate, finally, what I was so scared of: not that it—civilization, humanity, futures and supply chains we can depend on—would all go to shit. For many people who pay attention to actual climate change predictions and our lack of commitment to doing anything about it, that is now assumed. No, I wasn’t worried about everything going to shit, or at least, I was, but it wasn’t my deepest worry. What worried me, what continues to worry me, was that it would all go to shit and we won’t have learned anything. That remaining pockets of the human race would start all over again with wars and greed and resource hoarding and violence toward whatever or whomever they deemed “other,” including the entire non-human world.

If the best hope we have is that enough of us will manage to survive and that we’ll make the same mistakes all over again, what’s the point of us? What is the point of saving this beautiful planet from the worst ravages of our fossil fuel addictions if we don’t learn how mutually interdependent we all are? If we can’t learn to treat one another, and to share our spaces and countries, from a starting point of kindness?

Or, as my brother-in-law who spent too long putting up with my exasperating fixation on crumbs on the kitchen floor might say more bluntly: Could we try not being assholes to each other?

•••

The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, co-written by the Dalai Lama and an American psychiatrist, was the first book I read after the 2016 election. It’s not an easy read. The Buddhist practices and neuroscience research build a path out of the primal human jungle that answers so readily to tribalism, but it has to first walk through some gut-wrenching places. The early-1990s genocide in Rwanda, when neighbors and relatives turned on and slaughtered one another. The mid-1990s Serbian war, when Serbs and Croats who’d lived in the same villages for generations dehumanized and killed each other. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A belief in difference, culminating in beliefs of racial or tribal or cultural superiority, drove these events, exacerbated by intentional radicalism.

The mindfulness methods used to counter those beliefs seem painstakingly slow and impossibly small. Look at pictures of people of different ethnicities, one method suggests, and for each face, ask yourself what kind of vegetable that person might like—a method that has been shown to decrease active racism, to humanize every individual.

While my sister and I and our spouses subconsciously, and frequently consciously, engaged in many of these practices over the year-plus-a-bit that we lived together (focusing most on the benefits to our kids of a shared household—they loved living with extended family), it seems a ludicrous effort when set against the reality of white supremacy normalized in the White House and angry diatribes unleashed against those perceived to be outsiders.

What else can we do, though, besides gather to protest and at the same time make these small steps, these tiny efforts? Progressive values may in the end win over each generation successively; that doesn’t mean the neurological structures that make tribalism and racism easy paths to follow will simply disappear.

The ability and desire to be the better humans are like the stars, though, ever-present no matter how hard they are to see in troubled times. No single day since the election of America’s forty-fifth president has lacked a story of violence, prejudice, bigotry, hatred, misogyny, or racism. The election itself was like a giant eruption on the surface of humanity, gathering together elements of anti-immigrant strife in Europe, sectarian war in the Middle East, growing authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey and the Philippines, and even a backlash of hatred against environmentalists simply seeking clean water, clean air, and less endocrine-disrupting, ocean-choking plastic pollution for all people.

But those news stories also never addressed the increase in small everyday kindnesses. How could they? These extra efforts are going on all around us, a hundred, a thousand times a day, and we’re all part of them, but they are not news in the traditional sense. The doors held open, the chasing after people with dropped gloves, the encouragement to tell one another’s stories and help new acquaintances find their places in unfamiliar worlds, the clearing of a neighbor’s snowy sidewalk, the eyes met and held for a beat longer than usual, acknowledging one another’s equal humanity. The family members we open our homes to, the babysitting of the newborn and the sweeping up of the crumbs, all out of the burning simplicity of love.

•••

ANTONIA MALCHIK’s essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Aeon, High Country News, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, will be published by Da Capo Press in May 2019. She lives in northwest Montana, and her website is www.antoniamalchik.com.

In the Language of My Former People

Photo by M.Peinado/Flickr

By Leah Elliott

One day, my mother’s name appears in my inbox. I open a message announcing that my parents have been called to be missionaries in the Philippines. I cringe, sigh, and think, I’m sorry, as I picture my parents—oh so pious and paternalistic—carrying out the Lord’s holy work of perpetuating colonialism in the Philippines.

I close my eyes. Truly, sincerely, I’m sorry.

•••

I was a Mormon, the earnest, orthodox, devout, faithful, believing kind.

On my father’s side, my ancestors were some of the very first members of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were among those who knew Joseph Smith and those who walked across the plains with Brigham Young to settle Utah. My mother was a convert from Florida. In 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, my mother’s big act of rebellion was to stand up to her pastor and defend her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church to join the Mormon Church. In 1968, she gave up a scholarship at a state university and instead enrolled at Brigham Young University. By the time she was nineteen, she and my dad were married. My oldest sister was born before their first anniversary, and there would be no ebb to the procreating for the next twenty years.

Mormonism made up the fabric of my childhood. It saturated my days with its regimen of six a.m. daily family scripture study; morning and evening family prayer; blessings on meals; individual prayers; individual scripture study; a weekly three-hour church bloc; midweek church activities; monthly fasting and bearing of testimonies; obedience to the Word of Wisdom, meaning abstention from alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine; observance of the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from activities deemed too raucous or worldly; General Conference, Stake Conference, ward conference, youth conference; temple preparation, missionary preparation, celestial-marriage-to-a-returned-missionary-for-time-and-all-eternity preparation; seminary; modesty in dress; Book-of-Mormon distance for dancing partners; avoiding even the appearance of evil; being in the world but not of the world; absolutely no sex ever, of any kind, not ever, not even with yourself, never, not ever until after you’re married, and then only with your opposite-sex spouse, and even then nothing too kinky .

Not one wisp of my life escaped Mormonism’s touch.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, my mounting disillusionment with Church culture and unsatisfactory answers to doctrinal and historical questions led me to leave the Church.

That year was the first time I tasted alcohol.

My experience of Mormonism was more harrowing than not, something I think of having survived and something I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to distance myself from.

Still, the tendrils of it follow me everywhere. It comes up frustratingly early with new acquaintances. When the answers to common getting-to-know-you questions are responses such as “I have ten siblings,” and “My parents live in Utah,” you can’t really plausibly deny ever having had anything to do with Mormonism.

I’m not especially proud of having been a Mormon. It was an unchosen identity, assigned to me at birth like gender, one that I earnestly tried to fill but ultimately found ill-fitting and had to drop. I get tired of being defined in terms of what I’ve chosen not to be, and my most painful life experiences aren’t really what I want to talk about with people I’ve just met. I’ve settled on a response for the inevitable, “Are you Mormon?” question: “I was raised that way, and my parents are, but I’m not anymore.” All of which is true, and none of which conveys any of the actual truth of the experience.

I usually ignore Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but if all my ex-Mormon friends show up as our friends in common, I accept the request. I know what it means to have been Mormon, and to go through the never-ending process of becoming not-Mormon. I know there’s a story of loss, grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and abuse. I know they’ve lost friends, and not uncommonly, have become estranged from at least some of their family. I know that, regardless of where they fall on the gender and sexuality spectrums, they’ve dealt with intense shame over their sexuality. I know they’ve had to learn how to reorient themselves to a world they were taught to remain aloof and unspotted from. Those within the Church regard you as fallen, deceived, succumbed to the influence of Satan, but life in The World is foreign.

Every former Mormon who sincerely believed the One True Church narrative, who had a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel, as they say, has come to a point of realization that this Thing that they have based every aspect of their lives on is not what they thought it was. The sheer terror of being thrust into freefall when your entire worldview collapses, the enormity of the gaping maw of the “So now what?” that you are left with, is impossible to explain to someone who has never been through it, and needs no explanation for someone who has.

•••

There are lots of names for people who leave the Church: ex-Mormon, Jack Mormon, former Mormon, recovering Mormon, anti-Mormon, or (my personal favorite) Mormon Alumni.

But still “Mormon,” all of them.

I had a Sunday School lesson when I was about four years old. It was an object lesson, a Mormon favorite. Our teacher gave us each a fresh sheet of clean, white paper and told us to crumple it up as small as we could. We were excited at being instructed to do something we’d normally be scolded for, and the room erupted with the noise of crackling paper. After a minute or so, our teacher reversed her instructions: Try to make the paper as it was before you crumpled it. Of course we couldn’t. And that was the point of the lesson, which was on consequences: Some things just can’t be undone.

I can be not-Mormon, but not never-has-been-Mormon.

In 2009, four years into my journey out of Mormonism, I arrived at a brief period of atheism and started a blog, which I titled “The Whore of All the Earth.” The Bible mentions the whore of Babylon, but “the whore of all the earth” is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, unique to Mormonism. I chose the title, in part, because I knew it would serve as a homing signal to other ex-Mormons. It was me trying to snap my fingers and catch their eye across a crowded room: “Yo! Yo! Over here! I’m one of you!”

And it worked. I blogged my way into an online community of others who had left the Church, people who got it in a way that never-were-Mormons can’t. But after a couple of years, I got burnt out on hearing “this was my awful experience of Mormonism” stories, weary of talking about Mormonism in general. There were reasons why I left, after all. So I withdrew from the ex-Mormon blogosphere.

•••

I constantly jot down random thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes these scribbles become the building blocks of poems. Sometimes lines of scripture come to my mind, and then I have to Google to see whether it’s from the Bible or from one of the books exclusive to the Mormon canon. In my upbringing, “scripture” was an umbrella category. There wasn’t much need to pay attention to whether a passage being quoted was from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, or the Bible, because all carried equal authoritative weight.

If a line I’ve jotted turns out to be from the Bible, I’ll go ahead and use it in a poem, but not if it’s from one of the Mormon scriptures. For one reason, relatively few people would recognize the allusion. For another, most of the time I wish I could just excise this past of mine.

One night, I was scribbling away, when this mash-up of the Mormon children’s song “I Am a Child of God” and the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” started working its way through my head. I noticed how similar the melodic and formal structures are, and even some of the words, and the delicious chromaticism that happens if you start the chorus of “I am a Child of God,” then swap out the line “Help me find the way” with the melody and words of the line “Help me find my proper place” from “Jesus.”

Aw, man, this is genius! I thought. Who could I share this with who would possibly appreciate how genius this is? There are approximately nine million Mormons in North America, or about 1.5% of the total population. I don’t have statistics for the number of Velvet Underground fans in that same area, but let’s assume that they’re a similarly narrow segment of the population. We can deduce that there probably isn’t a lot of overlap between these two groups. I felt a wistful twitch at the corners of my mouth as I realized that I might be the only person who would appreciate how cool the mash-up was. For the first time, I wanted to use something from Mormonism to make art. The problem wasn’t needing to hide having been a Mormon; the problem was that no one would get it.

But then I thought of other writers who allude to a non-mainstream heritage. Joy Harjo, for example, has used the names of Native ceremonial dances in her poems. There’s a little asterisk and footnote for those unfamiliar, and it’s not an issue.

I had another thought I’d never had before: Maybe having been a Mormon could be a thing that made me unique in a positive way, instead of just making me a weirdo.

I was in high school the first time I realized, We’re one of those weird religions! It was 1996 and Mike Wallace interviewed Gordon B. Hinckley, who had recently become the president of the Church, for a segment of 60 Minutes. This was long before Mitt Romney and The Book of Mormon on Broadway. At that time, it was a Big Deal for Mormons to see anything about One of Us on “real” TV, and Very Big Deal for our prophet to be talking a real newsman. My whole family gathered around to watch it. What I remember most is the image displayed behind the talking head who introduced the segment: “MORMONS” in huge banner letters.

I didn’t have a name then for what I was seeing, but I recognized it: sensationalism. I witnessed myself being portrayed as Other.

So I knew that being Mormon had made me weird, but might I want to claim this heritage after all, perhaps the way secular Jews claim theirs? Or the way my queer friends now embrace and celebrate identities for which others once mocked and shamed them?

But this wasn’t like that. Although Mormons are a minority in most parts of the United States, and in broader American culture, where I grew up, in a region north of the Grand Canyon known as the Arizona Strip, we were the majority, and often we were real jerks about it. And I’m the one who finds this identity shameful, a thing to be hidden and denied.

Still, it’s been more than a decade since I left. Most of its sting and noxious fumes have dissipated for me. Mormonism has become a thing I can manipulate and examine with a degree of detachment that I didn’t have when I first left. Maybe that heritage could be a source and a perspective that informs my work instead of something I’m always trying to run from. Maybe I could begin to integrate it.

I mentally played the rest of “I Am a Child of God” in my head:

I am a child of God

And He has sent me here,

Has given me an earthly home

With parents kind and dear.

I noticed that that last line always plays in my head as, “With parents kine dandeer.”

Then I realized why this must be, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if you suddenly sensed that there was someone hiding in the closet behind you, watching you.

I knew this song before I even really knew language.

•••

During a solo road trip soon after, I was singing through hymns that I hadn’t sung in years, mining them for material, interesting ideas or turns of phrase. I sang the chorus of “Praise to the Man,” a hymn in honor of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith:

Hail to the prophet,

Ascended to heaven!

Traitors and tyrants

now fight him in vain!

Mingling with Gods he can plan for his brethren!

Death cannot conquer the hero again!

I burst out laughing as I spotted the resemblance to the self-aggrandizement of a certain commander-in-chief. I texted the lines to one of my brothers, with the comment, “Joseph Smith started a religion, a fantastic religion, incredible, the best, tremendous, you’re gonna love it, believe me!”

Alluding to Smith’s clandestine marriages to dozens of women, some as young as fourteen, others already married to other men, my brother texted back: “When you’re a prophet, they let you do it.”

Joseph Smith was just a silly old megalomaniac conman. I had a living example of his type to compare him against now, and somehow that took most of the menace, and all of the validity, out of him and this whole enterprise that he’d started.

I wiped tears out of my eyes. Of course I’d known that it wasn’t my fault I was born into generations of Mormons, but that was when I knew, in the way that’s the real beginning of healing for a survivor of abuse: It wasn’t my fault.

The culpability for Mormonism’s ills fell from my shoulders. The weight of the need I constantly feel to say, “I’m sorry,” for having been a Mormon was gone. I need no longer bear the sins of my fathers.

•••

Just as Trump was taking office, I unexpectedly found myself adding Civics to my community college teaching course load. I’d never taught the topic, so I was doing a lot of reading every week to prepare for classes. The daily headlines seemed to me the natural result of the history I was reading: a country founded on corruption, oppression, racism, imperialism, and crony capitalism just as far back as the historical eye could see. And the parallels and connections between the corruption in Washington, D.C., and the corruption in Salt Lake City were about to start popping up all over my consciousness.

I read an article about a Mormon Maori man’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Church from demolishing a Church-owned school near Hamilton, New Zealand. The school had been an important center to the Mormon and non-Mormon community there, but it was near a Mormon temple, around which the Church was now undertaking an expensive real estate development. Like so many imperialists and capitalists before them, the Church dismissed the concerns of the local community to make way for its business venture and to increase the allure of its temple.

Speaking of its developments near its Philadelphia temple, the Church’s senior real estate manager claimed that “the church is sensitive to what can be developed next to its temple” and always wants to have something “very compatible to the sacred nature of it.” I wondered, was he perhaps conflating “sacred” and “lucrative”?

I thought of downtown Salt Lake City, which the Church has groomed to function as its Mormonland theme park. The Church controls the experience by means of varying subtlety, from signs discouraging giving to panhandlers, to paying the retail stores at the recently-built, upscale Church-owned City Creek Center to stay closed on Sundays. Temple Square and its accompanying visitors’ centers and museums are all free, but visitors spend money in Church-owned businesses downtown, and if they convert, they become tithe-payers.

When it was completed in 1972, the Church Office Building was the tallest building in downtown Salt Lake City, almost twice as tall as the adjacent temple in Temple Square. No nefarious outside entity or city ordinance created a building that dwarfs their temple; they chose that themselves. The building that they claim is their most sacred edifice is literally in the shadow of the building devoted to their administrative and financial affairs.

Among other rites, Mormon temples are where sealing ordinances take place; only in the temple can members receive the rites that guarantee that they’ll be with their families for eternity. Members must pay ten percent of their income to the Church for the privilege of being worthy to enter the temple to receive these rites. All of these funds go to Salt Lake City before being disbursed locally. In addition to tithing and other offerings collected from members, the Church has various for-profit business and real estate holdings, many of them near their temples.

The Church has not publicly disclosed its finances since 1959. I have two thoughts about this. First, I don’t trust anyone with a lot of money who isn’t willing to be transparent about where they get it. Second, what would I expect from a church founded by Donald Trump’s early nineteenth-century counterpart?

During the first few years after I left, I’d been able to see the Church as misguided but well-intentioned. I still thought this was true of most individual Mormons, but the Church as an institution was looking to me like just as corrupt a sham as ever there was and entrenched in the larger systems of corruption and oppression in the United States.

One Sunday morning, an article on the backstory of the publication of Silent Spring came up in my news feed. As I sipped my coffee, I read that Ezra Taft Benson, who simultaneously filled the roles of Latter-day Saint Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower, and who would lead the Church as prophet, seer, and revelator from 1985-1994, had written that Rachel Carson was “probably a communist” because he couldn’t conceive of any other reason “why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics.”

I went searching for more context and turned up some other facts. This man whom I had called “prophet” through the bulk of my childhood had authored a pamphlet titled “Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.” Then during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, he had brought us industrial agriculture and factory farms with his insistence that farmers “get big, or get out,” and had attempted to silence the woman who sparked the environmental protection movement, on the grounds that she had a vagina whence no babies had come.

I was indignant. I took it personally, because between the two of them, where I saw myself was in Rachel Carson: a woman intellectual, a writer, a lover and defender of the natural world, and not a Mormon. I wanted to tell the dead man off on our behalf.

You went after Rachel Carson?! You fucking clown! Guess what? Rachel Carson was right. What the hell kind of prophet are you? You’re ridiculous! You’ve got no fucking clothes! Let me just blow away your remaining shreds of credibility there.

I went back to my coffee and Sunday reading.

I’m not afraid of you anymore, so just get out of my closet, and go on now.

•••

Can you ever really divorce the parts of yourself that you don’t want? Can you pick and choose what you’re made of?

I’ve got plains-crossing, polygamy-practicing ancestors. I was born under the covenant, one of eleven children to parents kine dandeer who met at the B-Y-motherfucking-U. Except for the part where I reject all their doctrine and terminate my membership, I’m as legit as it gets. If there’s a minority culture I could definitely claim I’m entitled to appropriate, it’s Mormonism. But did I want to?

I started compiling a list of uniquely Mormon phrases that I found aesthetically or conceptually interesting. I could almost feel my neurons firing with connections, ideas, possibilities of all the things I could craft out of these words. The title of a volume that Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited of writing by Native women came to my mind: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Yes. That’s what I would do. I would not claim Mormon as my identity, but I would take that crumpled paper for my art.

A stupor of thought,

a son of perdition,

the brother of Jared,

the City of Enoch,

a stripling warrior,

an eight-cow wife,

health in the navel,

marrow in the bones,

strength in the loins and in the sinews,

popcorn popping on the apricot tree,

and Saints and angels sing…

Take it! Take it all!

•••

LEAH ELLIOTT is a writer, poet, teacher, and journeyer. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, children, and stepchildren. You can find poetry, social media links, and other good stuff at her website: www.leahielliott.com.

The Stars In The Sky

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jennifer James

I was sitting in the dermatologist’s office, waiting to be seen for what I was convinced was a killer mole. Killer. I couldn’t quite get a full lung full of air, but over the last few months, and several futile visits, my general practitioner had listened to my chest, put me on antibiotics, and assured me I could breathe just fine. After my third visit to her for what was apparently an imaginary ailment, I went on with my life, hoping that she was right, that I could breathe just fine, even though I really, really couldn’t. My oxygen levels were fine, according to the professionals. But those fuckers had missed my malignant mole.

I was determined to live, against all odds, so I bypassed my worthless primary care doctor and took myself straight to the specialist. I waited for forty-five minutes, which was normal for this dermatology practice, I knew. The doctor in this office was notorious for his friendly, long-winded office visits. I’d seen him a time or two before for warts and skin tags—definitely minor issues—and had left the office in in a little under two hours, from check-in to walking out the door. Large medical conglomerates would seizure over the disturbing amount of time this man spent with his patients—often discussing his children’s college plans or the weather, or anything else that crossed his mind. But I knew the guy, and at this point, I just wanted to get what I knew would be the bad news and get on with an aggressive treatment plan.

Dr. Pike bustled into the room like Santa Claus. He was jolly and friendly and happy. He shook my hand and asked why I was here. I took the deepest breath I could manage and showed him the offending, obviously atypical mole on my right wrist. He adjusted his glasses and examined the spot thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully, for my taste. Just say it, I thought. He took off his glasses and looked at me.

“What we’re looking at here is a kind of pigmentation change that comes with age, Mrs. James. It’s normal, nothing wrong with this bit of skin at all.”

“Okay, thank you…” I said shakily. Dr. Pike smiled encouragingly and checked my chart. “So you’re thirty years old, right? Do you have any high risk factors regarding your skin? Because you’re pretty young to be worried about this sort of thing unless you had some specific reason to be concerned.”

I recognized this routine now: it was a kind of variation on the talk my general practitioner had given me about my breathing. The message was essentially, Lady, you’re fine. We’ll check you out because you’re here in front of us, but you might be just a little nuts. This was familiar and increasingly becoming true: I WAS a little nuts.

“No, not really,” I said.

Dr. Pike looked me in the eye and smiled gently. “So … how’s your health otherwise?’

I could feel my mouth turning down and my chest opening up wide. I sobbed and sobbed. I couldn’t make words come out, and all the while, Dr. Pike looked on kindly, passing the tissue box and making reassuring, non-judgmental noises. I loved him for this.

After a while, I blew my nose, and wiped my face. Dr. Pike sat patiently, perched on his little stool with wheels, waiting for me to get my shit together. When I could talk again, I told him, “My mother died. She died almost six months ago. Ever since then, I can’t breathe. And the doctors can’t find anything. But I can’t ever get a big, deep breath and I don’t think I’m ever going to be okay.”

Dr. Pike nodded. “I understand. There’s something inside that breaks when your mom dies. I remember going outside one night not long after I lost my own mother. It was a perfect night, kind of cool, but not cold, and the stars were bright, bright, bright, bright as I’d ever seen them. And I looked up at them and thought: Huh. Just stars. I knew they’d never look the same to me, that I’d lost something so enormous that even the most beautiful starry night meant nothing.” He paused and I don’t remember what I did, but I remember feeling a tremendous lifting, the feeling that finally someone understood how fucked up the world was because my mother had died, that someone spoke my language.

Moving on to actual medicine, he said: “Now, as for your breathing, let’s do this one thing at a time.” He concurred with my general practitioner that it was probably nothing, but also strongly recommended that I find a new doctor. “I believe in the power of negative test results,” he said confidently. “We need to be sure that it’s nothing, and the only way to do that is to test for the things it could be.” He continued talking, lapsing into his signature story-telling mode, telling me all about a friend of his who’d displayed all kinds of horrifying neurological symptoms, had undergone extensive, invasive testing, only to learn that his symptoms were a blip…benign. No underlying, lethal cause. “You need to have some testing,” he said. “Get some answers and then go on.” He didn’t offer any bullshit assurances that everything would be fine, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about—another reason to love the man. I was relieved to be talking to someone who got it: things were fucked and they could get more fucked. Get your shit together as best you can and take a step.

•••

A year earlier, I’d still been nuts but in a much more manageable way. I’d been working at a dead end job as a receptionist. I was looking for a new job and had romanced myself into thinking that if I returned to teaching, I’d finally be happy. I applied and applied and finally found a position in a classroom. The job description was fluid—I’d be an assistant in a classroom, unless a full-time teaching position opened up. I didn’t care; I was excited to be getting out from behind the receptionist’s desk and to be making more than seven dollars an hour.

My husband and I had no children at the time. We’d made some sketchy decisions early in our marriage, beginning with our choice to make his rural hometown our permanent home. It turns out that small hometowns make lovely movie backdrops but don’t provide a robust job market. We started out really poor and managed to become really, really poor. Right before my mom died, we were on the verge of getting our collective shit together. My husband had landed a job with health benefits. I had resumed my education, trying to fashion a career that I didn’t really want from classroom experience and good intentions, and about a month before we found out my mom was sick, I’d started as the director of the infant program at a Montessori school. I was really trying to love it.

My grandmother, Gladys, was an interesting woman. She was cultured and funny and kind. She was also the kind of person who could suck all of the air out of any room she passed through. My parents had divorced about fifteen years earlier and as my grandmother grew older and my mother grew poorer, they combined households. My grandmother moved in. These two women had been the most imminent, consistent presences in my life and even now I have trouble explaining how they got along. Or didn’t. One phrase might be: unconditional love, as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. Another phrase might be: toxic codependency, also as in, no matter what, these women never really let go of one another, regardless of distance, circumstance, or the emotions involved. It was quite a mess. Like most families.

It was a cool, September evening in 1998 when my grandmother called. In her throaty alto, she said, “Well, dear, don’t be alarmed, but your mother was admitted to the hospital this evening. She was having just a little trouble breathing. She’s much better now, though! Everything will be fine. But it would be so lovely for her to see you…” I planned to come up the next day after work, leaving the classroom full of babies behind and spending a long weekend with my mother who was, reportedly, “much better.” I would only miss one day of work at my new job and could go see about my mom. It was manageable.

My classroom full of babies was not so manageable. The babies themselves were fine. But I had some serious doubts about my return to the classroom. The business of caring for babies is sacred to me; they are some of the most precious, vulnerable people on the planet. I went into the classroom with the idea that my mission was to care for the children. I had forgotten about their fucking parents. Parents who drove up in their Mercedes to drop off their twelve-month-old with an ear infection. Parents who demanded that their child nap at school, even though the child sobbed through nap time. Parents who dropped their babies so they could go golf. Not that there weren’t lovely parents there, too, parents who came at lunch to breastfeed their babies, parents who took days off of work, just to spend time with their babies, but I wasn’t seeing those folks as clearly. I committed a cardinal sin in teaching: I judged the parents. Now, twenty some years later, a parent myself, I have a little more compassion for everyone involved. At the time, I thought, Jesus. I fucked up again. I need ANOTHER new job.

So when my grandmother called, there was a part of me that was actually relieved, grateful that I would have the coming Friday off from the babies and their whiny-assed parents. I would see my mom and my grandmother, they would annoy me, and I would go back to my life and try to learn to love it as it was, or at least grow into it gracefully. I didn’t feel particularly sad, even. Rather, I had a kind of dysfunctional anticipation of a crisis. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out,” wrote Chekhov. I wasn’t very good at the day-to-day-living. A crisis sounded a little bit lovely.

My sister and I talked later that evening too. My sister is four years younger than I am, but many years wiser.

“It’s cancer,” my sister muttered. “You know it’s cancer.”

On my end of the line: “Maybe. You don’t know for sure…” I believed myself, too. My mother was…well, my mother. She had survived all kinds of unlikely, life threatening illnesses, and it seemed silly that life would smack her down at this point. My sister, on the other hand, took the view that it was a fucking miracle life hadn’t smacked her down before this point. It seemed too soon to say.

The cold, hard truth was that my mother had been smoking since she was twelve years old. When I got this phone call, she was fifty-five years old and had just celebrated her birthday with a traditional lobster tail dinner that she just couldn’t eat. That should’ve been a sign, my grandmother said later. At five feet, four inches, my mother weighed probably a hundred pounds. She’d looked suspiciously thin for years, seeming to survive mostly on nicotine and pure sugar, with the occasional navel orange (she always peeled them artfully, leaving the entire skin in one, unbroken spiral) or bowl of rice for variety. This was who my mother was, though. Quirky and kind of depressed, relatively happy to go to bed early most nights with a thick novel, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of gooey circus peanut candies on her nightstand, in her odd little nest of a bed. There would be too many cats sleeping on her feet and two big dogs flopped on the floor beside the bed (they were too big to fit on the actual bed) and she drifted in and out of sleep fitfully, smoking a cigarette or two during the night in the dark.

The following day, I went to school and explained the situation to the Head of School. She nodded, her big brown eyes concerned. “Of course, take tomorrow,” she said. “Hope your mom is okay; we’ll see you Monday.”

My mom was not okay. I got to the hospital and could see that. My grandmother was lovely in a kind of lethal way; she couldn’t hear much, didn’t want to hear much, and couldn’t believe that anything could be really wrong with her daughter. On the trip from my mother and grandmother’s house to the hospital, my grandmother chatted serenely, telling me about the fluid they drew off my mother’s chest, how she was breathing so much better, and how it was so nice that I’d been able to come this evening; I could see the doctors in the morning and surely they’d figure something out. I nodded and smiled—this was always the best approach with my grandmother.

My mother was in the ICU. Her private cubicle (the only fabulous thing about being gravely ill—you get much better hospital care than the less gravely ill) was lined with monitors. The ubiquitous bag of fluids was hooked up and she wore that tiny oxygen cannula in her nostrils. I suddenly felt everything. The corners of my mouth turned down and an actual sob came out of my mouth. My mother, truly one of the kindest people I’ve known, snapped: “Oh for heaven’s sake. Stop being so dramatic, Peanut.”

There is a scene in the movie, Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence allows a match to burn all the way to his fingertips without showing a reaction. When his friend attempts the same trick, it hurts! Lawrence says: “Of course it hurts. The trick is…not minding that it hurts.” This was how my mother lived her life. She swallowed pain as a life mission. She didn’t expect people around her to make a big deal about it—that was incredibly poor form. Which is why she got so mad at my boohooing.

My mother was a complicated person. She was exceedingly generous, funny, and kind-hearted. Once she let a diabetic, homeless man live on our front porch (only on nights when he couldn’t get into the shelter because he was too drunk). When our cat brought her a half-dead mouse, she nursed it back to health and we kept it as a rescue/pet (named Templeton) until spring came and she could let him go without worrying about him freezing to death. When she worked teaching English as a second language to students in downtown Washington, D.C., her car was the only one which remained unvandalized in the church parking lot. To be fair, it was a pretty shitty car, but the real reason my mom’s car stayed intact was that she was a smoker.

When she stepped out to the parking lot to smoke between classes, she’d make conversation with whoever was also out there smoking, which seemed most often to be a group of aimless-looking young men. She would chat amiably, smoking along with the boys, sharing her point of view with such a warm smile that those boys let her say ridiculously cheesy things like: “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You shouldn’t have beat that fellow up. Now—why aren’t you in school?” I never witnessed any of these conversations, but I know her smile and her voice, and I’m certain when she smiled at the guy, he felt like she genuinely cared about him, and was letting him in on a little secret: that he shouldn’t have beat that other dude up and that his ass should be in school! When she scuffed out her butt and tucked it into her pocket or a trashcan (nobody likes a litter bug), she’d wink at him and his friends and say: “Now, boys. You try and stay out of trouble, now, okay?” I don’t think they stayed out of trouble because of her. But her car was never fucked up, either.

The diagnosis was, in fact, cancer. Lung cancer. Advanced lung cancer. Today, I know what that diagnosis means. Then, I had no fucking clue. My mother died five weeks later. In five weeks, and two chemo treatments, she dropped another twenty pounds or so, lost all her hair, and had spongy patches of yeast growing inside her mouth. She was conscious until the last three days of her life, when she slipped into that world between the worlds, the one where morphine and cellular failure meet. One of the hospice workers told us we’d need to start using diapers with her; she died twenty minutes later. None of her family believes that timeline is coincidental—my mother would rather die than wear diapers.

•••

It surprised me how weirdly my mother’s dying fucked me up, what strange ideas fluttered through my brain as she died. For example, I felt compelled to take pictures of my mother while she lay in the funky hospital bed in the den. It wasn’t that she looked otherworldly beautiful or anything at all like that. She was bald and haggard and irritated that death had come to sit on the bed beside her. Even so, I wanted a picture, because I knew that was the last I’d see of her in this life: her frail, bony skeleton wrapped in fragile skin, her breath whispering in and out, in and out, the oxygen pumping, the air purifier purifying, the fan blowing a constant, ridiculous breeze on her face. The nurses had advised keeping a fan blowing toward her, to create the illusion of fresh air, the concept that she actually could breathe. Just so you know, I didn’t actually end up taking pictures of her, I didn’t. But I thought about it a lot.

I didn’t want to wash the sheets after she died. How fucked up is that? Understand, we did wash the sheets. They smelled like yeast and bleach and death. But they smelled like my mother’s death and I didn’t want it gone yet. Not just yet.

The end came way more quickly than we’d thought it would. I kept taking time off from the babies, and each time I’d go back to the classroom, the parents of the babies would say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back,” and list everything that had gone wrong while I was away. I tried to quit entirely, and the Head of School said no. If my mother had lived another week, I would have, just never returned. As it was, there was no need. I was free much sooner than I hoped.

When I came back after the funeral, and after I’d written thank you cards to everyone who’d attended, brought casseroles, I was changed, not for better. My first “real” day back in the classroom, I brought in a tasteful (I thought) harvest-themed floral arrangement someone had given me as a condolence offering. The flowers looked authentic and added a nice feel to the room (I thought). The Head of School walked in and lifted her eyebrows. She didn’t say a thing. After she left, one of my co-workers said: she hates fake flowers. I will say that having my mother die helped me with my codependency issues quite a bit. Fuck her, I said. See? What a little thing, right? And at least some of you reading this also hate fake flowers. Which is, under normal circumstances, okay with me. That day, I thought I’d take those fake flowers and fling them right at The Head of School. Fuck her very much.

I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand my life without my mother in it.

By the time I got to Dr. Pike with my imagined lethal mole, I was undone. I couldn’t breathe, I hated my job, and I wasn’t talking to God. Fuck Him. I broke up with Him after a flukey ice storm killed the power in our area on Christmas Eve. I’d made it through my mother dying, cleaning out her house, tolerating my job, and when I finally got a break, everything got cold and dark, every bullshit metaphor brought to life.

Dr. Pike helped me, though. He heard me. I think losing a parent is like becoming one. People can help you, be sympathetic, be kind. But until you experience it yourself, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You can’t. It’s another language altogether. And the stars in the sky, they get sketchy. Breathing: also sketchy business. Dr. Pike spoke the language, and in his way, helped me turn back to the living place, a place where maybe the weather wasn’t out to get me, where some jobs just aren’t right, and where maybe, just maybe, the stars would find a way to shine once more.

Finally I could breathe.

•••

JENNIFER JAMES lives with her family in rural Virginia. She writes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and has been published in Full Grown People as well as Life in 10 Minutes. She has completed a novel and has just begun work on her second one. In her free time, she enjoys reading all kinds of books and discovering new podcasts. Above all, she loves a good story.

Some names have been changed. —ed.

To Punctuate

Photo by Gina Easley

By Magin LaSov Gregg

My body is being weird today. Hands tingling, forearms squishing. I stop typing for a moment and arc my arms in the air, a quick sun-salutation. The movement takes me back to a time I can barely remember, when I could squeeze in one yoga class per week between days of weight lifting and four-mile runs. That person I used to be glimmers like a ghost in my memory. Even when I squint hard, I can barely see her.

I haven’t run or practiced yoga consistently for years because my joints ache. Or the room spins like a Tilt-a-Whirl. Or everything in the distance looks like it’s melting. Today, thank goodness, there’s none of that. Just pins and needles in my hands and weakness in my arms. I can finish grading. I can teach my classes. I can get through the day. A few fingers on my left hand have started shaking. Stress, maybe?

When a friend walks by my office, I call for her to come inside. We’re work sisters, bonded by more synchronicities than I can count, including losing people we loved to the same illness when we were younger.

“Do your hands ever twitch while you’re grading?” I ask. I massage my right forearm. There’s a stabbing pain that started up two weeks after my flu shot. Now it feels like a needle straight to the bicep.

Work Sister slumps in a chair across from me. Every day we discuss my mysterious medical symptoms. Early waking. Anxiety. Insomnia. Vertigo. Nailed-to-the-bed exhaustion. What diseases do I have? Or is it all in my imagination? Symptoms, unattached to firm diagnoses, float like giant question marks over our heads.

“Maybe carpal tunnel?” she says, and I nod. I hope so. Something relatively simple. Something else to ask my new GP about when I see her next week.

Like me, Work Sister is tired this morning. She didn’t sleep well last night and might have a cold. As always, our fatigue comes at the worst time, at the tail end of our semester, when our grading load quadruples. She slinks toward her office and closes the door. If I need her, I can call. I don’t think I’ll need her today, but it’s nice to know she’s there, on the other side of the wall, like my own sister once was.

I go back to grading. My students are trying to make sense of Hillbilly Elegy, a book I find mildly irritating, but assigned because this year I’m trying to stop tuning out people I’ve written off. Like my father, who I was estranged from for eleven years. My father is from rust-belt Ohio, like the book’s author. And he voted for Trump, and I didn’t think I could ever understand this choice. But I’m trying. We’re talking more now. The last time, he did most of the speaking. He told me a story about his cat and then told me I worked too much.

Perhaps he is right. Is my arm-hand-shoulder malfunctioning the equivalent of tennis elbow for writing professors?

( )

My father and I have plans to talk tonight. I take his phone call in bed, even though it’s eight p.m. on a Friday. I worked a twelve-hour day, advising a student publication that almost didn’t make it to press. Now I cannot sit up. Also, my husband left this morning for a weeklong meditation retreat, and I am not feeling very Zen about his absence at the busiest time in my semester. Yet our ten-year marriage works because we hold space for each other and we make space for the other’s individuality. I’m more envious than resentful of his absence. I wish I could check out of real life, too.

Tonight it’s just me and a dog in the bed, and my father on the phone, talking about neutron bombs. He asks me about the basement bomb shelter we inherited from the previous owners. Have I gotten it repaired? How much canned food do I have down there? What about water? What is my plan?

“It will be every man for himself,” he tells me. This sentence comes after he has suggested I install a wooden wishing well over the manhole cover in my backyard, to hide my bomb shelter’s exit from marauding gangs. He will not be coming to save me. What else is new?

For a moment, I think of asking his opinion on Trump’s latest baiting of North Korea on Twitter. But I’m too tired to argue. I focus instead on the fallout in my body. I tell him a doctor has recently diagnosed me with shingles, but the rash and pain have since migrated, so it’s not that.

“I’m going to see a new doctor on Tuesday,” I say, leaving out that she’s a woman recommended by a friend who lives with chronic pain. My father still uses words like “hysterical” to describe my mother, dead now sixteen years from juvenile diabetes. I suspect he distrusts women in authority. I don’t tell him about what happened at the last appointment with my former GP, either.

(I left the former GP because he told me my shingles-ridden body was a threat to pregnant women. He went on and on about this until I stopped him. I didn’t tell him how his comment hurt me because I miscarried my first pregnancy and fell apart afterward. I didn’t tell him how I feared he believed my non-pregnant body was less valuable than a pregnant body. But I called the office the next day.)

“I won’t be needing a follow up appointment,” I told my GP’s receptionist. “I’m leaving this practice.”

Silence. And then, “We’re sorry to hear that.” Then, click. Why didn’t I speak up in the appointment or demand an apology from the doctor? Why was I satisfied with silence, a simple click?

The day I told my father about my miscarriage, he said, “Well, I have to go.”

I shook when I hung up the phone, and then walked fast out my front door, as if I could shake off his inexplicable apathy. But I called back the next day, too.

“I told you I had a miscarriage,” I said. “Why didn’t you respond?”

He claimed he hadn’t heard me, and I wondered if that was true. I wondered if me being real with him was too threatening, or if I was afraid he’d reject me each time I asserted my version of the truth.

Last year, when my husband and I joined the Women’s March on Washington, I told my father I’d be “out of pocket” that day. He never asked what I’d be doing, just like I never asked him if he actually voted for Trump. I simply assumed so because of the giant Trump sticker on the rear window of his car.

Out of pocket. My choice of words does not surprise me.

A thousand pockets line mine and my father’s conversations. Countless unvoiced words cram inside those pockets. They form sentences I’d stuff inside parentheses if I were writing everything out.

Parent, a root of parenthesis, means “to bring forth.”

Ironically, a parenthesis holds back. A parenthesis suggests sub-vocalization or even silence. At best, a parenthesis is the grammatical equivalent of muttering under one’s breath.

From the Greek para “beside” and tithenai “to put, to place,” parenthesis reminds me of another conversation my father and I had, when he was working the ninth step in AA.

He talked then about how he and my mother had separate roles in their marriage. He was the worker, the earner. She was the unpaid domestic. They “wrestled” because they did not agree on those roles. He used his fists, his buck knife, to put her into place. She almost died leaving him. But he still said they “wrestled.” His language made her a complicit partner in the violence he inflicted against her, as if they stood in a ring and shook hands after a coin flip. He towered over her, but he still insisted they had wrestled.

When my mother was dying, she begged me never to tell my father that she was sick. Her hands trembled when she said his name, although they hadn’t lived under the same roof for twenty years. Did she teach me how to hide a secret in the middle of a sentence? Did she write my first parenthesis?

Now, whenever I see the word “parenthesis,” I see the word “parent.” I see myself standing between them, like I did on the night of the buck knife, when as a toddler I pushed against him and said, “Stop.”

“ ”

A rash has erupted on my neck. It looks fungal, like ring worm. But also like acne. It wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. I notice red splotches spreading to my clavicle when I use the Ladies Room before class. I adjust a scarf Work Sister lent me when I texted her about the rash. I fix my lipstick, as if that matters.

The person looking back at me in the mirror is me and not me. Illness distances me from my body. I, or the person I used to think of as “I,” is no longer in charge. And I don’t know who has taken over.

Because I wear bright lipstick and dangly earrings and stylish clothes, I appear “healthy.” No one can see that my legs wobble as I walk. My calves have been tingling since Thanksgiving and are starting to numb. For the first time in my life, I’ve wondered if I might lose my ability to walk, but I tell no one of these suspicions. If I say them out loud, I’ll have to face them. Right now I prefer mystery, a sensibility I inherited from my mother.

When she and I were living into her last days, she liked to say, “It’s in God’s hands.” And she believed that. She believed in a mysterious force pulling the strings, choosing whether she’d live or die. She did not believe her suffering was a result of random chance or bad luck or biological determinism. Her God concept, I think, gave her hope and a sense of purpose. God relieved her of self-blame. I am glad she died hopeful.

A few years ago, when I went to Al-Anon once a week, we used to say, “Let go and let God.” Even though I didn’t believe in God anymore, I’d say these words with everyone else because I liked their rhythm, the way the right quote can ease anxiety, can feel like a prayer.

Back then, I was trying to understand the toll of my father’s addictions and abandonment. I wanted to believe in the possibility of okayness when everything was not okay at the moment. The closest I could come to believing in God was believing in hope, which lit a path toward okayness.

At the end of the Al Anon meeting, when we held hands and said The Lord’s Prayer, I choked on the first few words of the prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” Sometimes a quote can hit like a punch.

The quote that gets me through my days comes from the New York City street artist, James de la Vega: “You are more powerful than you think.”

I have taped these words to my office computer. I say them quietly before class, as if I am trying to make myself remember something important. I try not to think about my father, who I’m fairly certain has never needed a mantra to remind himself of his physical power.

The “you” I am talking to is not the daughter who interrupted his fists years ago.

The “you” of my mantra is the “me” I used to be, the one who could trust her legs, the ghost glimmer of a self I hope to meet again. I wish I could welcome in my new self, this emerging sicker self. I want my words to make room for her in my body. I want to speak her into being, make her worthy, visible.

…

It’s a Sunday night, and I’ve spent the day grading. All I want to do is binge watch Christmas movies. But an unknown number flashes on my iPhone screen. A twitch in my gut tells me to answer the phone.

On the other end of the line, my new GP greets me. I saw her earlier in the week and agreed to more bloodwork. Now the tests have come back, she says.

Oh shit. My belly cramps hard. Doctors do not call on weekends with good news. Beside me, the dog shifts. I rub his belly, soothing him when I cannot soothe myself. My husband’s still away, meditating in the mountains.

“Your autoimmune tests are normal,” the doctor says. “You have Lyme disease.”

A pop releases from my jaw. I never saw a tick on me, never had the bull’s eye rash. Lyme disease? Is she sure?

The doctor assures me that my tests are conclusive and tells me I might be on antibiotics for a long while. I need to get over my fear of them, my assumption that they’re a modern scourge.

When my symptoms started a few years ago, my former GP tested me for Lyme. The tests showed some abnormalities, yet he dismissed them without suggesting follow-ups. I didn’t contest him. I wanted to be healthy, and he told me what I wanted to hear. My doctor was bigger than me, like my father. And a part of me suspects I didn’t challenge him because I still freeze up around large men with loud voices. I still wonder what menace lurks behind bravado. I shrink into silence. I defer.

Now the power of silence, of what is omitted, overwhelms me. Until it received a name, my illness was a silence whose form I could not trace, a deadly omission, an absence intent on destroying me.

My diagnosis punctuates that silence.

To punctuate means “to interrupt,” or “to mark,” or “to divide.” There was a healthy me, now there is a sick me. A before. An after. A self that is marked, not only on medical charts or insurance claims, but psychologically, emotionally. And yet, I am less sick now than before my diagnosis, which put me on the path toward recovery. Another mystery.

For my mother, diagnoses were question marks and exclamation points and, finally, periods, when she learned her transplanted kidney was rejecting seven years after the initial surgery and she would likely not have another organ transplant in time to save her.

My illness was an ellipsis for years, a disease hiding in plain sight, a disease with no words attached to it, no name, an ever-present absence.

For days after my diagnosis, I walk around imagining bacteria swimming through my blood stream. I picture sea monkeys dying, one by one, inside of me. Still on retreat, my husband texts me a photo of the metta prayer.

May I be happy. May I be well. I cannot complete the subsequent verses, the ones addressed to “you” and “sentient beings.” Borrellia bacteria colonized my body for at least two years, possibly longer. I will not bless a stealth infection that hides in my heart, my eyes, my nervous system.

I want my diagnosis to be a different form of punctuation –– a dash that forms a channel between the former and present me, allows me passage back to a healthier self who’s become a shadow, a ghost.

How many selves live inside of me? How many more will come? I used to live more than a thousand miles from my father. I once plotted a PhD in Renaissance literature and read Shakespeare for hours each day. When every doctoral program I applied to rejected me, my father sent me a box full of smaller boxes containing inspirational messages and trinkets. (I did not see the metaphor at the time.)

On one box, he taped an envelope with a poem inside. I’d spent months obsessing over variants of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the questions that form entry points in the play, all the dashes belying paralytic ambivalence. So the silly ABAB rhyme scheme poem by Linda Ellis, made me chuckle. Eight years later, I can’t remember more than the first five lines of Hamlet’s most quoted speech, but I can remember couplets from “The Dash.”

“For it matters not, how much we own, the cars … the house … the cash. / What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.”

The academic in me wants to deride the poem’s platitudes, but I can’t. All those years ago, my father reached out to me. He tried to impart guidance, tried to teach me how love matters. I read this poem as evidence of his potential to be a father, and his longing to connect.

Maybe that’s why it’s so much harder when I stand in his kitchen one night and try to talk about my treatment, my fears of relapse.

He busies himself by spooning leftover Chinese food into Tupperware containers. His back stays turned, like a jammed door. He says nothing to comfort me. Again, it’s as if he hasn’t heard. In this moment, I am reminded of the dash’s double meaning, how a dash can connect –– and separate. On either side of his kitchen, my father and I form two ends of a dash.

He can only connect at a distance, and I cannot mediate all that divides us.

•••

MAGIN LASOV GREGG’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, Literary Mama, Bellingham Review, Under The Gum Tree, Hippocampus Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Thread, and elsewhere. Proximity Magazine named her as a finalist in its inaugural 2016 Personal Essay Prize. She stopped making New Year’s resolutions in 2018, but swears she will soon finish her first memoir about marrying a Baptist minister while staying committed to her Jewish faith. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, in Frederick, Maryland, where he now serves a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Hooked Up

Photo by Gina Easley

By Leanna James Blackwell

Nine p.m., the appointed hour. The person who opens the door is a surprise. I’d pictured someone in her sixties, calm and professional, with a tidy bun and a crisp white uniform, a clipboard in her hand and a name tag that says “Marion” or “Florence.” Someone who knows what she’s doing. Someone with steady hands and a soft voice. But it isn’t Marion who greets me, or anyone remotely like her. I consider backing out, but it’s too late for that.

The fact is, I need comfort. I need answers. I haven’t slept through the night in more than a year. Not since, to be exact, November 8, 2016. I’ve become a tightly packed box of stress, shaken and furious after every White House tweet and new revelation about sexual abusers in Hollywood, in government, in the media. My phone notifications are a constant trigger; my long-ago post-traumatic stress diagnosis, the legacy of a past laced with violence and sexual abuse, is suddenly relevant again after years of relative peace. Before the election, I had a pretty good routine. Morning meditation and writing before work, gym several times a week, anti-depressants and Vitamin D, regular therapy and a wholesome “eating plan”—my life so damn virtuous it would have bored the habit off a cloistered nun.

After the election, my routine wasn’t cutting it. Night after night, sleep evaded me. I laid awake, churning. I could run screaming into the streets—and did, with thousands of others—but you can’t march every day. I’d have to step up my daily plan.

Melatonin. (It works, but only for a few hours. By three a.m., I’m up.)
Chamomile tea. (I have to drink pots of the stuff to get sleepy. Then I’m up all night peeing.)
Warm milk. (One word: revolting.)
No electronics for two hours before bed. (No difference.)
Books about English gardening. (I remain awake but in a state of clawing boredom).
Soothing audio recordings. (“Rain” sounds like a dripping faucet; “waves” induces mild nausea.)

My efforts only resulted in a series of hollow-eyed mornings and a fatigue so deep I spent my days feeling like a sluggish fish, lurking depressed at the bottom of a slow-moving river. Finally, my doctor ordered an overnight test at a “sleep medicine clinic,” which has led me to a nondescript building on a side street next to a real-estate office.

Is this really a clinic? Am I the only patient here? The guy waving me inside is twenty-five if he’s a day, tall and gangly, with unconvincing facial hair, baggy blue scrubs, and a super-casual vibe. I half expect to find a bunch of his friends sitting inside on a saggy couch, passing a bong. His name tag says “Brad.” Where’s the sleep clinician? Maybe Brad is the greeter, like in Walmart, and then the clinician comes in?

“How ya doin’? Everything good?” Brad lopes ahead of me down the hall. We pass a brightly lit room with a bank of computer screens at which another guy in a bulky hoodie appears to be dozing.

“Fine, thank you. And you?” When I’m anxious, my mother’s manners kick in big time. I’d remember to say “please” and “you’re welcome” in a fire.

“You can change in there,” Brad informs me, gesturing toward the open door of a bathroom—sink, toilet, wastebasket, harsh overhead light. “Once you get in the sleep room there’s a camera on you, so you wanna get your pajamas on before.”

A camera? No one told me about a camera! Will it be on all night? On me? Who watches it? Will it be live-streamed? Brad laughs—you’re one funny lady—and explains that he will watch it, along with the other dude. It’s just procedure. Making sure I’m not sleepwalking, tearing out my wires, falling off the bed…trying to escape. He doesn’t actually say “trying to escape” but I suspect that’s the real point. Or something worse. But I can’t think about it. If I think about it, I’ll never go through with this.

In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and change quickly into my sleep clinic outfit: an oversized tee-shirt, pair of old yoga pants, and woolen socks. Brad waits for me down the hall. My hands are damp. My heart is jumping. Summoning my courage, I exit the bathroom and creep boldly into the testing room, which is tricked out Holiday Inn–style. Carpet, curtains, dresser with lamp, framed print on the wall (boats), and queen-sized bed with coverlet in a queasy pattern of peach and blue swirls. The only difference is the absence of a window—I check the instant I walk in—and the infrared camera mounted on the wall in the corner. I turn my back on it, a brief moment of middle-aged rebellion.

“Everything good?” This must be Brad’s signature phrase.

“Okay.”

“Great, great. Just sit here on the bed and we’ll get you hooked up.”

“Hooked up” means just that. An electronic box, about the size of a loaf of banana bread, sits on the bed waiting for a thicket of wires to be attached to it. But first, the wires need to be attached to me. All over my body. My skin seems to tighten in resistance, as though trying to harden, like a protective hide. I would like to be a rhinoceros during this procedure. No one fucks with a lady rhinoceros. The last hope for Marion, the matronly clinician, flickers and dies. Eyes closed, I stiffen as wires are snaked down my pants leg—both sides—and attached with sticky pads to my chest, to my lower and upper back, my neck, my wrists, and all over my head, 72 different-colored wires in all. Are there 72 colors? What are the wires doing? To calm myself, I make conversation during the ordeal, the kind of chat you might have with a fellow guest at your cousin and his wife’s anniversary party. Except there’s no punch bowl or cheese platter.

“So, how do you become a sleep medicine clinician? Is it a branch of nursing or physical therapy or something…?” I hear myself emphasizing medicine, as though by saying it I can make this place feel more like a clinic and less like the weirdest motel in America.

“Nursing! Nah.” Brad chuckles at the idea. “You just do this two-week training and figure out which wires go where. It’s pretty hard at first”—he’s concentrating on the purple wire now, which is snaking around my arm—“but then you kinda get the hang of it.”

Kinda is not reassuring. “What were you doing before?” Brad’s professional history has become extremely important to me.

“Working at Antonio’s. You know it?”

As a matter of fact, I do know Antonio’s. The place is a mile from my house. Many a Friday night we’ve had their pizzas delivered. A month ago, Brad easily could have stood on my front porch, handing over a large sausage and mushroom pie and pocketing my husband’s tip before jogging back to his white delivery truck. “Thanks for the fiver, dude. Have a good one.”

And this is the trained professional who will be watching my movements on camera. This is the clinician who supposedly knows what all these wires do and how to read the information that will be fed to the computer screens as I sleep.

Sleep! Who can sleep like this? I’m now fully encased in a tangle of wires, including a clip-on thing on my index finger and two little clips pinched inside my nose. The camera watches me clamber awkwardly under the covers. Then I’m lying on my back, staring up at Brad. He stares down at me, looking for all the world like a bumbling young dad ready to tuck in his kid. I almost expect a bedtime story. Or a prayer. A prayer might not be a bad idea.

“Brad?” My voice squeaks.

“Yeah?”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Just call me.”

“How? Is there a button?”

“Nah, just yell my name. I’ll hear ya. I’ll be in the other room looking at the computer.”

Just yell his name? I imagine lying immobile, held down by wires, bladder full, shouting “Brad! Brad!” into the darkness.

“Well, g’night!” Brad ambles from the room, shutting the door behind him. I catch a glimpse of the person in the hoodie, still slumped, motionless, in front of the computer screens. Is he even real? Maybe he’s some kind of sleep clinic mannequin. Or robot. A sweatshirted robot that used to toss pizza dough at Antonio’s. Anything is possible. The screens will display my brain activity and my movements—do I thrash around, kick, sleepwalk, try to ride a bicycle in my sleep? Do I lie there like a mummy? Do I fall immediately into REM sleep (as if), do I wake up fifty times a night, do I stop breathing? If the test shows that I stop breathing, I’ll be prescribed an apnea mask to wear over my face at night. It’s called a CPAP and looks like something an astronaut would wear on a discovery mission to Pluto. I resolve to breathe.

Now Brad’s voice comes crackling out of the speakers in the room. “Just a little test before you go to sleep. Okay? Move your eyes to the left.” My eyes obey. “To the right. Up. Down. Around.” Then it’s time to test my voice. The reason for this is not explained. “Say the word milk five times.”

“Milk?”

“Yep, milk.”

“Uh. Okay.” By the end of five “milks,” I’ve dissolved in semi-hysterical laughter. The weirdness keeps increasing. Why “milk”? Why not “leaf” or “stick” or “dog”? Are we supposed to think of being babies? Will I be given a bottle next? I might accept it. Especially if it has brandy in it.

Then I hear another voice, coming from the other side of the hall. Someone else is being instructed to move their eyes and repeat the word “milk” like an imbecile. Someone else, in an identical room across the hall, is wrapped in wires and unable to get up. A mystery sleeper! I wonder who it is. A stressed, pissed-off writer/academic/mom with PTSD like me? Any or none of those things? It doesn’t matter. A sleepless plumber, an anxious accountant, whoever it is, we are united. I imagine communicating telepathically with mystery sleeper. We could talk until we fell asleep, two strangers in pajamas at the oddest sleepover in the world.

“Are you asleep yet?”

“No, are you?”

“No. Wide awake.”

“Do you believe cats have souls?”

We’d talk for hours until one or both of us managed to drop off.

But no answer comes when I signal hello with my mind. Mystery sleeper has his or her or their own thoughts and problems. I’m on my own. And I’ve got to sleep. The test won’t work if I don’t sleep. My body lies rigid, alert to the knob on the sleep room door. What if it turns in the middle of the night and Brad creeps in? Or the other one? How am I supposed to relax? How could any woman relax, alone and tied down in a faux motel room with male strangers right across the hall who have total access to her room?

I lie in the bed, remembering things I don’t want to remember. Times I was touched, grabbed, patted, squeezed, felt up, held down, much more and much worse, by male relatives and boys in the schoolyard and guys on dates and bosses at work and men on the street. Men who believed, for the simple reason of biology, that having unfettered access to my female body was their divine right. Men like my grandfather, who installed a swing in the barn and invented a game for just the two of us when I was four. We had to play the game each time my parents left me there for a visit. Men like the boyfriend of the woman whose son I babysat on Friday nights when I was thirteen. He always drove me home but didn’t like to let me out of the car once we got there. Men like the guy in a business suit who picked me up hitchhiking one day (I know, I know) when I missed the bus. He accelerated past the high school, unzipping his pants. I jumped out of the moving car and landed on the curb, my backpack saving my skull.

And now, men like the ones running, unimaginably, our godforsaken country. Who have dug up the past from the dark soil of history—what I thought was the past—and flung it back into the present.

It’s chilly in the room but I’m sweating bullets. What doctor could possibly think this is a good idea? I’m going to sue him when I get out of here.

It’s not long before the door knob turns. My breath stops. A dark shape is standing over me. My heart thumps out of my chest and vaults through the roof.

“Sorry,” Brad whispers. “Your nose wire fell out. I saw it on the screen. I just need to fix it.” He leans over me, delicately adjusts the wire, and tiptoes out of the room. “Sleep well,” he murmurs as he shuts the door. And he doesn’t come back. He’s in the computer room, watching the screens all night, making sure my test goes well. Hours go by, but the door remains shut. Brad, it seems, is not going to hurt me. He’s just a guy. A guy doing his job.

Gradually, my heart slows. Gradually, the sweat on my body dries. Gradually, I start to feel tired. And then, somehow, miracle of freaking miracles, I fall asleep. And I stay asleep until four in the morning, when the army of garbage trucks come, roaring behind the building as though announcing the apocalypse and sending me rocketing from the bed, pulling out several wires. Now I am yelling Brad’s name. I hear his hurried footsteps immediately. When he opens the door, he is grinning.

“Ready to go?”

“Hell, yes!”

At this, Brad actually giggles. “Hey, no problem. You slept for a few hours. I got the data. And you didn’t stop breathing. That’s good news!” He seems genuinely happy for me. I’m happy, too. It’s over. I’ll never have to do this again.

Brad hums as he helps me remove the wires. A couple of them get stuck in my hair and we laugh. But my sleep medicine clinician—by now, he’s earned the title—is patient and calm, untangling me wire by wire until I’m free. Free! I stand up, feeling as liberated as the moment just after confession, when my childhood sins had been pardoned and I could step out of the dark booth, cleansed and holy, and burst out of church into the forgiving sunshine. I throw on my clothes in the bathroom, slip on my coat, grab my bag, and head down the hall. I feel like skipping. There is no sign of my companion in the other room. I hope mystery sleeper had a good night, too.

“Have a good one!” Brad calls as I open the door.

“You, too, Brad.” I mean it. I drive down the silent streets toward home. A few fading stars are left in the sky. There are patches of paste in my hair, and an itchy sensation on my back where a cluster of wires was attached. But hot coffee waits for me, and my husband and daughter. And cat.

I’m intact. I’m all right. I did it.

A week later, I get the results. They are unremarkable. I don’t sleepwalk or talk. I don’t thrash around. I don’t have sleep apnea, so I won’t have to wear the dreaded mask. My sleep problem is something else. “Maybe it’s stress,” the voice on the phone suggests. “Have you tried melatonin?”

Two days after the phone call from the clinic, a far-right candidate for a Senate seat in Alabama—and accused sexual predator of adolescent girls—rides his horse to the voting station on election day, supremely confident of a win. His confidence is misplaced. The candidate’s opponent is declared the winner, the first time a pro-choice liberal has won in that state in a quarter-century.

That night, millions of women sleep through the night.

That night, I am one of them.

•••

LEANNA JAMES BLACKWELL is a professor of creative writing and director of the Bay Path University MFA in Creative Nonfiction. An essayist, theatre director, and playwright, she is a member of the Northampton Playwrights Lab, former artistic director and playwright-in-residence of TKO Theatre and the Inner Stage in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the co-founder and director of The Place for Writers at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her most recent play, Grimm Women—a radical re-imagining of three fairy tales told from the witches’ point of view—was included in 2016 Play by Play Festival in Northampton, Massachusetts, and funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is currently at work on a collection of essays and a play about race and adoption, New Soul, which will receive a staged reading in September 2018.

Other People’s Clothes

Photo By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Amanda J. Crawford

The dress was stiff and boxy, made from that awful faux-suede fabric my mother wore in the 1970s, rubbery on the inside and velveteen on the outside. It was far too large for me. The pressure of my office chair pushed the collar up toward my chin so that the shoulder pads seemed cantilevered from my neck, and the belt, otherwise too low for my waist, found a niche in my short torso to rest. And while the deep merlot color of the dress would have been acceptable on another day, today I was certain it brought out the shadows under my sleepless eyes and the bruises darkening on my upper arms.

I sat at my desk in the sunny ninth-floor newsroom of Phoenix’s daily newspaper with my legs crisscrossed underneath me and my shoulders hunched, folded into myself as if trying to construct a purple faux-suede wall around my heart. I had spent my entire adult life in newsrooms, where there is no escape behind office doors or cubicle walls, and I usually relished the collective energy—the perpetual chatter, collegial banter, ringing phones and occasional shouting—that sucks you into your role as a cog in the daily grind.

The distraction of a busy newsroom, where I could never wallow in my own thoughts for too long, had kept me going for years as my personal life fell into shambles. On this day, though, I struggled to concentrate as I put together simple items for Sunday’s political column. I wanted to disappear. I practiced not looking up, not catching eyes, staring at the flashing cursor on the white screen of my computer. When that didn’t work, I fled one floor down to the brown tweed couch in the small, austere parlor off the women’s bathroom that was set up for nursing moms, locked the door, and cried.

That morning, my friend Sarah, four inches taller and three sizes bigger, had produced this dress from the back of a closet filled with the work clothes she had worn in a former life as a payday-lending executive. Now expecting her second child, she was planning her exit from the business world for good. Sarah offered me the dress and a ride downtown.

The night before, her husband had reluctantly paid the cab that delivered me to their home in the suburbs. I was hysterical and had run into oncoming traffic on the six-lane road by my house. Sarah made me herbal tea in a large, brightly painted mug and listened as I tried to explain what had happened through tears. She dismissed questions from her husband, who was friends with mine, and set me up to sleep for a few fitful hours on their couch.

With no place else to go, I headed into the newsroom early the next morning, wondering if anyone could tell I was wearing someone else’s clothes.

•••

I’d never been good with clothes. I learned to shop cheap and fast from the blue-light special sales at K-Mart. I’d sip a red Icee until my lips, teeth, and tongue were tinted its unnaturally red cherry color, waiting for the cart with the blue light to illuminate the kids’ section and put everything in our price range.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother made most of my clothes, in cotton prints that matched my mother’s. In middle school, I remember standing at the bus stop with my friends as they bragged about their tee-shirts with prices inflated by the word “Esprit.” My mother was too practical to spend money on brands, so I began supplementing my discount store clothes with items dug out of the back of her closet: a patchwork skirt, a tweed jacket, and a cowl-neck sweater from the 1970s. In high school, as I embraced grunge music and its associated style, I wore my dad’s oversized yellow and gray flannel, smothered under his large Army jacket.

By my young adult years, though, that creative fashion spark was gone, extinguished under the weight of responsibility carried too soon. I married my high school sweetheart at nineteen and began working full-time during college to support us. My clothing, like my life, became almost entirely utilitarian—bland “work clothes” purchased in haste from the clearance racks of department stores or casual items picked up on sale at the outdoor stores he frequented. My wardrobe was as joyless as our marriage, and I spent my twenties trying not to think about either situation too much.

It wasn’t until I was almost thirty that I started to pay attention to my clothes again. I made a good salary at the newspaper and could afford to move beyond the clearance racks. I had a cache of stylish professional women friends who counseled me in my shopping. And I was propelled by an internal stirring, the nature and ramifications of which I was not yet fully aware. I started wearing high heels, tight pencil skirts, and clingy blouses. I was never the type of woman to turn heads, but I felt sexy for the first time in my life. People noticed. One day in the newspaper’s breakroom, the photo editor asked why I was dressed so conservatively. I looked down at my outfit, a short-sleeved red sweater and black dress pants, unsure what he meant.

“Most days you look like someone about to get divorced,” he informed me.

•••

The first time I left my husband I had time to pack a duffel bag. I tossed it in the trunk of my friend Emily’s white Honda Civic coupe and put my miniature schnauzer in the backseat. A few hours later, my husband tried to set our house on fire. I stayed with Emily in her small condo for two weeks, living out of that duffel bag, taking my dog on long walks along the nearby desert canal, and seeking solace in the arms of a married coworker.

The second time I left my husband, I left with nothing but my purse. It was sitting in a room on the other side of the house with my cell phone and keys inside when he held me in a room and told me, “You will never leave this house on your own two legs again.” When he wasn’t paying attention, I sprinted across the house, grabbed my purse, and ran into the street to flag the cab that took me to Sarah’s house. I borrowed clothes from Sarah and another friend, Yvonne, before sneaking back into my house for some of my own clothing a few days later. I lived in a friend’s vacant rental house for six weeks.

The third and final time I left my husband, I had just changed out of my pajamas. As I poured our morning coffee, I sensed it: a tingling in the air foreshadowing violence. I put on a coral tank top, jeans, and a simple necklace I had made out of a circle of marble and hemp twine. If you had told me to pick just one ensemble from my wardrobe that I would get to keep, that would not have been it. But that night, as I sat in that same vacant house I had stayed in a few months before, staring at my disheveled reflection in the mirrored closet doors and trying to decide what to do with my life, my husband packed up almost everything I owned—clothes, shoes, jewelry, photos, keepsakes, and even my writing. Stolen, dumped, sold, set on fire—I don’t know. By the next day, nearly all of it was gone.

•••

I didn’t know how to start putting my life back together again, but I knew I needed things to wear. I remember walking listlessly through Target with Yvonne just before the store closed, dejectedly checking the price tags of items on the clearance racks. Yvonne lingered a few feet behind me, alternating between perky chatter and croons of empathy. I bought underwear, sweat pants, capris, a tee-shirt and a short-sleeved green knit blouse I found on sale. It was all I could afford.

It was the summer before I turned thirty-one. I was homeless, single for the first time since I was fifteen, and broke. A few months earlier, partially in a bid to save my marriage, I had put in notice at the newspaper to teach at the state university and complete my graduate degree. The move would mean less hours at the office but also less than half the pay. I was sure now that my marriage was over, and I made the move anyway with virtually nothing to my name.

After our shopping trip to Target, Yvonne and I returned to the house she shared with her boyfriend in a neighborhood along one of Phoenix’s desert mountain preserves. She had moved in with him a few months earlier, despite being uncertain about their future. She took me upstairs to a spare bedroom, taken over by the things that she had still never put away. There was a metal rack overflowing with clothing, and she began going through it, pulling out things she thought would fit me and throwing them in a pile on the bed.

I was petite, but Yvonne was even smaller, not even five-feet-tall, and her style was flamboyant in comparison to mine. Yvonne was born in Mexico but adopted and raised by Anglos in Idaho. In the Southwest now, she had been reconnecting with her Latin American roots and attending a lot of cocktail parties with her boyfriend, who was in politics. Her clothing reflected both. The rack was filled with brightly colored silk and bejeweled dresses. I sifted through the pile, holding clothing up before me in the mirror and trying on things that didn’t seem too small or ostentatious. I took a plain red blouse and a sleeveless brown dress. Yvonne insisted I also take a strapless silk cocktail dress with ruffles and a bright tropical flower print that she thought was perfect for newly single me.

As the word spread that I needed clothes, other friends culled their closets for things that might work for me, too. For some reason, it seemed we were all going through major transformations in our lives around that time—an epoch in our collective history—and my friends empathized with my predicament. (In the years since, I’ve wondered what it was about that time. Maybe it was hormonal, since we were all, more or less, around the age of thirty—a biological pull to reinvent, rejuvenate, redo or reproduce. Or maybe there was, for some reason at that point in our world, a collective metamorphosis, radiating from one of Arizona’s desert vortexes and sucking all of us in.)

My friend Emily, a cutesy blonde who I stayed with the first time I left my husband a year earlier, had recently left the newspaper to work in politics. Despite all of our grave concerns, she was marrying a religious conservative from far across the aisle. She cleaned out her closet so he could move in and gave me a black A-line skirt.

My friend Megan, a brash cocktail writer raised in a family of park rangers, was trading in her hiking boots for sequins and a personal brand. She gave me a green terrycloth hoodie and a couple of tee-shirts.

And Sarah, the former payday lending executive adept at reinvention, was taking massage classes, seeking out a more natural lifestyle, and trying to figure out what was missing in her comfortable family life. She gave me a black linen wrap-around blouse and pink pajama pants.

As I wore each of the items from my friends, I felt like I was trying on pieces of their current or former lives. My existence was so pliable at that moment, with no structure, definition, mementos, or even a set address, that I wondered if a blouse or a skirt could set a new course, one that might turn out better than the one I was on before. I allowed each piece to shape a part of the new me: The new professor wore Emily’s A-line skirt, and the newly single party girl wore Yvonne’s ruffled silk cocktail dress. I tried to get in shape in Megan’s green hoodie, and I tried to prove I was strong and independent in Sarah’s black linen blouse. But more than anything else, what my new wardrobe changed in me was my thinking about clothes.

•••

I can’t remember how long it was—if it could be counted in months or merely weeks —before I returned home for the first time. There, I found a pile of shoes in the corner of my closet. I sat on the floor hopefully sorting through them only to discover that not a single one had a match.

I had been stuck in agonizing paralysis about my future, but had finally settled on a new place to live when my estranged husband called and told me he couldn’t make the mortgage. He moved out, and I returned home that day and immediately changed the locks.

It was 2008, in the throes of the Great Recession, and every indicator of Phoenix’s bursting housing bubble told me I should run away from the house, too. Still, here was something I could own at a moment when so much else familiar in my life was gone. I threw away all the matchless shoes and any other reminders of what had been, cleansed every square inch with disinfectant and burning sage, and posted an ad for a roommate. A nineteen-year-old college student moved in and, almost immediately, so did Yvonne.

Yvonne had met someone new at a conference. She told her boyfriend she was moving out, packed her car with clothes still on the hangers and stuffed it all into the small closet in the back bedroom of my house. I learned to be single living with these two women – one of them new to adulthood, the other my own age but newly in love. I also learned the secret to Yvonne’s expansive wardrobe: a local chain of name-brand consignment shops. We shopped there together, sorting through the designer racks, experimenting with our fashion and inexpensively figuring out what the new “us” would wear.

Yvonne didn’t live with me long. In a few months she got pregnant and moved out to begin a new life as a wife and mother. Megan introduced me to her ex-boyfriend, Marcus, who moved in. Marcus was a buyer for a trendy recycled fashion boutique. He picked out clothes for me at his store and patiently helped me figure out my style in front of a heavy full-length mirror in the hallway. He also began taking me on thrift-store hunts throughout the city.

Before I lost everything, I had done very little second-hand shopping. Raised on the blue-collar edge of middle class, I realized that new clothes—even from K-mart—were a mark of something I had always been reluctant to concede. Now, headed into my thirties, I rebuilt my wardrobe almost entirely with second-hand clothes, from friends or consignment and thrift stores. The process made me conscious of the waste of fast-fashion and clearance-rack junk—cheap clothing that I had, for so many years, bought and thrown away without ever really looking or feeling good in it anyway. At the same time, I began to marvel at how people (including me for a while) could spend so much money on a few items at a boutique or an upscale department store.

Learning to shop second-hand allowed me to live out my ethics, recycling and repurposing more fully in my life. I began shopping for other things second hand: furniture, dishes, silverware, curtains, a bicycle. It became my nature to think first about Goodwill or Craigslist. I continued to exchange things with my friends, too.

Soon after my divorce, Sarah left her husband and became a single mom as she finished massage school. I was searching for myself, but Sarah’s quest was more specific. “I want to experience passion—real passion—before it’s too late,” she told me. As I cycled through my new wardrobe, deciding who I would be, what I wanted and what that new person would wear, I passed on dresses to Sarah.

•••

After my grandfather died a few years ago, I followed my mother down the creaky wooden steps into the musty basement of my grandparents’ house where decades’ worth of flannel shirts hung on a metal rack.

“We’re just going to get rid of them all,” my mother told me.

She remembered my penchant for my dad’s old flannels when I was a teenager.

“I thought Toby and Beck might want some, too,” she offered.

My second husband and stepson are Goodwill pros. Toby is a musician and had been a single dad on a budget, with a punk aesthetic crafted by thrift-store finds. All three of us took flannel shirts that belonged to my grandfather.

When we got back to my parents’ house, my dad saw the Army shirt Beck brought home and went to the basement for a special hand-me-down of his own. He brought up his Army jacket that I had worn throughout my teenage years and gave it to his new step-grandson.

I was back at my grandparents’ house last year after my grandmother died, helping my mom sort through things. My mom pulled out a thick beige sweater of my grandmother’s that she said suited me perfectly, and I picked out some costume jewelry. When we got back to her house, my mom brought out the trench coat that she had worn throughout my childhood from a wardrobe in the basement where it had been covered in plastic for decades and had me try it on.

“I think the eighties are back in style,” she told me, approvingly.

In the winter in Kentucky, where I moved with my husband and stepson a few years ago, you can find us all in layers of other people’s clothes. My whole family is donned in the flannels of a gentle Maryland man, who wore them as he went fishing or watched Westerns, and my stepson is wrapped in my father’s Army jacket, which had been a staple of my own teenage years. When I’m feeling lonely, I put on the taupe trench coat that I remember my mother wearing to church on the rainy Sundays of my youth and swear I can still smell her perfume after several washings.

As I write this essay, I fondle the large wooden triangle on a necklace that had been my grandmother’s and think of Betty Jane, the stylish woman who pulled herself out of poverty and gave me my middle name. I ponder how my world has changed in the years since I began wearing other people’s clothes, and I find beauty in the cycle, the threads of which are intrinsically mine.

•••

AMANDA J. CRAWFORD is a recovering political reporter whose literary work has previously appeared in Creative Nonfiction and Hippocampus. She is a journalism professor at Western Kentucky University and performs with the Americana gothic band Former Friends of Young Americans. www.amandajcrawford.com

When the World Bends

Content warning: suicide. —ed.

By Amber Wong

Before the big splash, Elizabeth and I eased our sculling shells into the water and breathed deep the cool morning air. Fifty-four degrees, no wind: perfect Seattle weather for a Fourth of July row. Perfect timing, too. We’d be on the water at six-thirty and back before eight, so we’d beat the rush of pleasure boats—and their butt-soaking wakes—as they crowded into Lake Union for the night’s premier event, the 2017 Seafair Summer Fourth fireworks show. Up at Gas Works Park, where grassy mounds hid tons of hazardous waste that few Seattleites knew about, people would already be spreading out blankets, ready to wait out the day.

Overhead, high clouds began to blur and fade, turning blue skies even bluer, while freeway traffic rumbled across the Interstate-5 Ship Canal Bridge. Just beyond our dock, the narrow bend of water linking the lake to the bay smoothed out like a fan, rippling lightly at the edges. Conditions couldn’t be better, I thought, as I settled into a shell barely wider than my hips. My fingers tripped lightly along the dock edge as I readied to launch.

“To the Cut?” Elizabeth called out above the traffic din, and I nodded. The Montlake Cut, a crucial navigation link between the fresh water of Lake Washington and the salt water of Puget Sound, is the gateway to the University of Washington’s crew training course. Along the way we’d pass under two drawbridges that carried car, bike, and pedestrian traffic.

As I slid into the shadow of the Montlake Bridge, I felt my chest tighten. I stared at the stern of my boat, refusing to watch the parade of feet and undercarriages undulating overhead. My shoulders tensed when something—water? bird poop?—dripped on my cap. But I kept my hands loose. The moment I emerged back into sunlight, my lungs reopened. I gulped at the fresh rush of air.

Even after eight years, rowing under bridges still spooked me. I could almost ignore the steady drone of tires across the University Bridge’s steel deck grate, but not the teeth-clenching ka-chunk ka-CHUNK under the Montlake Bridge. The irregular thump of tires hitting uneven bridge joints, amplified by the concrete walls of the Montlake Cut, thundered in my head like a runaway train. But Elizabeth and I had an understanding. Over the years she’d talked me through enough rough water that I trusted her implicitly. In her encouraging banter—Relax your grip, I’ll never let you fall in—I heard a deadly serious promise.

Legs pumping, I pressed hard, pausing briefly to enjoy the blue heron standing, in perfect profile, on a rock outcrop. Overhead, our resident bald eagle—his light and dark plumage unmistakably outlined against blue sky—circled slowly, fishing for his next meal. When I reached the mouth of the lake, I lifted my oars and glided next to Elizabeth. We spun our boats and reached for our water bottles.

“Mountain’s not out today,” she announced, nodding to the south. Mount Rainier sat cloaked in clouds. A typical day.

Water traffic was picking up as we headed west back to the boathouse. As we approached the Montlake Cut, two motorboats overtook us, kicking up a wake. “Slow down,” we yelled, and in a rare bit of courtesy, they did. Emerging from the Montlake Cut, we skimmed past a cluster of rowers awaiting instructions from their coach. When we cruised into home stretch, we pulled to out of the boat lane and angled our boats south toward the dock. Under the roar of the bridge, we watched for east-west cross-traffic and waited for our turn to sprint the last forty feet across the waterway.

Elizabeth went first. Dashing south between a westbound motorboat and an eastbound eight-person shell, she approached the dock, then slowed to let another woman in a single scull and a standing paddleboarder cross in front of her. I watched over my shoulder, waiting for my opening.

Suddenly, just off the corner of the dock, I saw a huge splash. Heard a deep WHUMP. Waves burst from that point like an underwater depth charge, rebounding off the dock, colliding in a wild interference pattern. Barely five feet away, the sculler and paddleboarder struggled to keep from capsizing. Elizabeth, caught in the erratic water, quickly braced her oars.

What was that? I scanned the shoreline for clues. It was too big and too loud to be a coxswain, who by tradition gets tossed off the dock by teammates after a race. Even a hefty dog would never plunge that deep. As a dark, motionless blob slowly broke the water surface, I bit my lip to keep from gagging. Here was a person, prone and still, and the only place they could have come from was the Ship Canal Bridge, 182 feet overhead.

Disbelief paralyzed me. A suicide jumper? Here? Amidst the fractured waves I strained to see signs of life while my thoughts bounced like a rain squall on granite. They’re blocking my way to the dock! Can I slip by and not try to help? But if I take my hands off my oars I’ll flip over. Without a life jacket I could drown! Must I risk myself for a stranger who is trying to commit suicide? What’s my responsibility here?

Frantic shouts cut the terrible silence. “What was that? Some fireworks?”

“A cherry bomb? Who threw it!?”

“Oh my god, it’s a person! Who knows CPR?”

“I do,” said Elizabeth. “But…”

“Jump in and do CPR!”

A coaching launch zoomed by. I took a few strokes closer and saw no movement, then lost courage and gave the blob a wide berth. The launch slowed and stopped, drifting in the water for what seemed like minutes. Suddenly it made a tight U-turn and roared in close. Had the rowing coach seen something fall? Had she quickly deduced the horror of what had happened? Alone, on her knees, she leaned down to drag the limp body aboard but couldn’t get enough leverage. Still she held on, struggling to keep the person’s head above water.

From way too close a megaphone voice boomed, “Get out of the way!” I looked up in alarm as a crew team and its coach rounded the corner and bore down on us. Couldn’t they see the coaching launch? I couldn’t flag them down so I yelled for them to stop. They didn’t. I wasn’t lined up with the dock, but I took a big stroke so they wouldn’t hit me broadside. Someone on the dock reached out, grabbed my oar, and reeled me in. I cursed at the coach as he raced by.

Sirens wailed from both shores and from mid-channel, growing louder and louder, finally converging on this spot. Blue police lights flashed on the far shore, red fire truck lights on ours. Medics came running to our dock as a speeding Seattle Harbor Patrol boat cut its siren and pulled alongside the rescue launch. Within a minute the Harbor Patrol moved the body to the dock on the opposite side. Three—or was it four or five?—Seattle police officers stood ready. We crowded the edge of our dock but by then the rescue was shielded from view. Behind us, unsuspecting rowers carried their shells out of the boathouse and slid them into the water. The world had bent in a handful of minutes.

What else could we do? Nothing made sense. In a fog we wiped down our boats, put away our oars. As Elizabeth and I left the boathouse fifteen minutes later, another rower approached with an update.

“He’s alive. His eyes were open and he was breathing.”

Elizabeth and I sighed in relief. But I hated myself for my gut instinct for wondering, for how long?

“He was swinging a hatchet on the I-5 freeway. Drivers yelled at him to stop. He lost control of the hatchet. It dropped just before he did.”

•••

At sixteen I was an Explorer Scout, a division of the Boy Scouts. In 1972, Explorer troops were supposed to be all-male, but my friends and I exploited a loophole to start a co-ed troop of Medical Explorers. We scheduled lots of lectures and field trips because several dads, including mine, were doctors with connections. We even got to volunteer in our hospital’s emergency room. During one evening shift, I pressed fist-sized wads of sterile gauze on a motorcyclist’s leg as he lay moaning on a hallway gurney, then watched a doctor pull glass out of a screaming kid’s foot. I peeked around nurses and doctors as a silent Code Blue was whisked in and pumped for an hour before being wheeled to the morgue.

When the hospital pathologist invited us to watch an autopsy, I thought, oh, just another activity. But when I asked Dad to sign my permission slip, he shook his head.

His eyes were steel. He growled, “I don’t recommend it. That’s not something you want to see. Not at your age.” I was still hopeful, thinking, that’s not a flat denial. As if he’d read my mind, he continued, “I’m warning you for your own good!” His tone dropped ominously. “Because once you see it, you can never unsee it.”

•••

Two hours later, Elizabeth texted me. Feels a little surreal, huh?

I was home drinking coffee, eating a bagel, deciding whether to try to remember or try to forget. Turns out that’s a false choice.

I texted back. Yes. How are you doing?

Feels odd to just go on with your day. Concerned for the person of course. But it was a really close call for all of us. Need to just sit a bit.

Exactly. I’m still sitting.

Alone in my sunlit kitchen, I set down my coffee and choked back the sour in my throat. Elizabeth’s comment put me on edge. Right after the awful splash, my thoughts had flown to the jumper: How can I help? Will he survive? But in the silence of home I focused on me and my tribe, the rowers on the water. In one blind moment we could have been killed. We were open and unprotected. Any heavy mass from 182 feet—an errant chunk of concrete, a thrown backpack or garbage bag, a one-hundred-sixty pound person—would crush like a cannonball. The aftermath would have been gruesome as a bomb explosion. A war zone. I’d never seen one, but my husband and stepson had. Never would they unsee the horror.

I sipped the last of my cold coffee, tried to still the ache in my chest. Repeating the salient, immutable fact—none of us got hurt!—I walked to the kitchen window, away from mental carnage that didn’t exist. Below, the yard was drenched in shades of green. Beyond my neighbors’ rooftops I saw a glimmer of Lake Washington.

I imagined the view from the Ship Canal bridge deck: the 182-foot drop, the flatness of the water, and the vast three-dimensional space between. Images could get distorted, narrowed, especially through desperation’s lens. With boats large and small, from barges to sculls, did we move like targets in a video game? Factor in wind speed—after all, I’m a civil engineer—and the open water below the Ship Canal Bridge could constrict to a pinpoint. If the jumper intended to avoid us, he chose the slimmest margin of error. If not, that same margin of error was our salvation.

Would knowing the jumper’s intent have sharpened or blunted the horror?

Each day we live with incalculable risk. Animate and inanimate objects fall from the sky. Meteorites fall. People fall. No one really noticed, but hatchets fall too.

•••

“So did he die?”

Sitting around the kitchen table a day later with my mah-jongg group, four women I’d known well over twenty-five years, I lifted my glass of wine and felt a gnawing unease. Everyone’s first question was always about the jumper. Why did his presumed death garner so much sympathy? If he’d survived, would the tragedy seem more equal, both of us escaping death by inches? How does his willful jumping—and my sheer vulnerability—factor into the equation?

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. “I don’t know.” I’d searched the news but turned up nothing, so there’d be no resolution. As their voices grew louder, each person positing the jumper’s fate, I signaled “timeout” and interrupted. “The Seattle Times’s policy is not to write about suicide jumpers. Unless a lot of people witnessed it, that is.”

“Did a lot of people witness it?”

Tersely, “I don’t know.” Why did it matter? I had.

“How long was he in the water?”

“Ten minutes?” Why this unnecessary detail? My temples pounded in frustration.

“So how close was he?”

Finally. Like a fever breaking, a welcome relief—someone acknowledged my trauma, my anxiety over the random fragility of life. As I gestured across the length of the table, my voice turned unnaturally shrill. “About ten feet. He was so close! If he’d hit us, he could’ve killed us!”

There was a moment’s silence, followed by a quick chorus of retorts. Clearly my words hadn’t had the intended effect. Instead, I felt like I was being scolded.

“Whoa, you sound angry!”

“It’s wrong to blame him. Of course he wasn’t aiming at you.”

“Think of his horrendous mental pain! It must have been overwhelming!”

What I heard was this: What’s your problem? Don’t you have a heart?

•••

Four days later, Elizabeth and I eased our shells into the water. Earlier that morning I’d debated with myself—Get back on that horse! Or not…—but the weather promised to be perfect, a promise that Seattleites are unable to resist. I was kneeling on the dock securing my oar riggers when a motion high above caught my eye. My head jerked up. Elizabeth saw my reaction and glanced up too. On the bottom deck of the I-5 Bridge, a cherry picker bucket was slowly lowering two men just below the bridge deck. I sighed in relief. In their hard hats and orange vests, I pegged them as state highway inspectors, likely testing for loose concrete. The bucket stopped with a light bounce. I tilted my head, visually measuring their relation to the water. They were about ten feet south and twenty feet below the spot on the upper deck where the person must have jumped. I stared a little too long.

Elizabeth knew exactly what I was thinking. If they fell, would they hit us? With a forced laugh she said, “Well if it’s your time, it’s your time then.” I could hear the thinness in her voice.

I frowned. I didn’t want Fate to be so lazy. Nervously I snipped, “Nah, I think they’re okay.” As soon as I spoke I was sorry. Why was I so rattled? Was I truly afraid they’d hit us? Was I ashamed to be caught thinking only of myself?

Or was something submerged now coming to boil? Was I reacting to the suicide jumper, how furious I was at him for terrifying me, yet how constrained I felt about expressing that anger? Four days of talking to my husband and close friends hadn’t helped—their comments felt way off the mark, strangely off-putting. So because I was alive, physically unhurt, I was expected to stifle my rage, ignore my feelings, and cluck sympathetically about his plight? How much empathy could I muster? Was it better for me to think of him more like a falling chunk of concrete—an object with no agency—than a suicide bomber who launches himself with intent to kill? Must I absolve him at all? Even if he wasn’t trying to kill us, the fact remained: he terrorized us. I felt like screaming, “There’s more than one victim here!”

Could I never unsee that concussive splash just ten feet from where I was kneeling?

I rose to kick off my shoes and heard the gentle lap of water. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked out beyond the dock to the west. There, at the wind-induced open water line between chop and calm, was a sharp demarcation drawn by the form of the land, the bend of the water, and the face of the wind. A warning: do not cross this line. So we’d go east then. I scanned the familiar scene across the channel: the white ferry, the concrete bridge supports belted with graffiti, the row of boats comfortably tucked in their berths. Ivar’s outdoor dining deck, its red and blue table umbrellas snugged down for the night, its dock empty now. All as it should be.

Absently I pulled on my cap and threaded my ponytail through the hole in the back. I stretched my arms wide, felt the air fill my lungs with cool deliciousness. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get to look for our eagle again. I grabbed my oar handles, centered myself down on my seat. As I pushed off the dock, an involuntary glance—up at the men in the bucket, and from there, to the upper bridge deck. The railing was empty. But from now on I would never stop looking.

“Annual inspection for bridge cracks?” I started at the unexpected sound of Elizabeth’s voice right beside me, her boat so close that our oars almost touched. I couldn’t mistake the drollness in her tone.

As her words slowly registered I began to laugh. She’d caught me looking up at the bridge again, searching for ghosts. Nested within her seemingly benign engineering question was a deeper concern: Are you okay?

Until that moment, I hadn’t quite realized how not okay I was. My feelings sat like a jumbled weight on my chest. Like Elizabeth, I’d always prided myself on my ability to stay calm and reason things out, yet these days I felt so roiled, so defeated. Silently I ranted, Why can’t I just get over this?

But with that laugh, that loosened eddy of air, the atmosphere suddenly changed. My internal smog cleared enough so I could see that she was troubled too. In our exclusive club of rowers-who-barely-missed-being-hit-by-a-suicide-jumper, we were virtually the only ones who could reassure each other, You’re not crazy, I was there, too. We had much to discuss. I would soon talk her through her fixation on the hatchet’s trajectory—I heard it splash, did it land right behind me? It wouldn’t fall blade first, would it? I’d feel her first flash of anger when she thought someone was throwing fireworks, trying to scare us. She’d wade with me through my swamp of guilt. Together we would reshape the story into something we could understand, something we could only arrive at after dissecting every detail and every “what if,” hailing our luck again and again, until the day lost its power to haunt us.

•••

AMBER WONG is an environmental engineer in Seattle who writes about culture, identity, and her firsthand knowledge about risks posed by hazardous waste sites. Recent work has been published in Lunch Ticket (Summer/Fall 2017 featured essayist), Slippery Elm, and Metaphorical Fruit, and her short piece, “How I Learned to Write,” won the Writer’s Connection essay contest. Amber earned an MFA from Lesley University and a master’s degree in civil engineering from Stanford University. She is working on a memoir.