After adjusting his worldview, Paul also adjusted his role—from soldier to activist. However broad the divide between these two roles, Paul still viewed the world through the lens of social accountability. His accommodated worldview left him still serving his country and still seeing his life as making sense, unlike Cindy Sheehan, who found there was simply no way to understand the world as she had before her son’s death.
The stark difference between their two paths is seen in the final moments of that August 23, 2005, interview on Hardball. “You agree, though, Paul, that pulling out now, yanking the plug, sending the troops home in the next couple of weeks and months, would be bad news?” asked Chris Matthews. Given Paul’s story, it may seem surprising that he responded in the affirmative. America should not pull out of Iraq, Paul believed, as Cindy Sheehan was demanding. “I think it is unrealistic, and I also think it’s morally irresponsible,” he said. “I think, at this point, we do have an obligation to the Iraqi people.”
“Most Americans assume they have to be with President Bush and ‘Stay-the-Course,’ or be with Cindy Sheehan and ‘Bring ’em Home Right Now.’ Neither mantra is realistic,” Paul wrote in a 2006 Huffington Post article. A third choice, he argued, was calling on the most socially accountable people in the country. “Pull all the living former presidents into Washington. Get Secretaries Albright, Powell, Brzezinski, and Kissinger there. Add military experts ranging from General Schwarzkopf to General Batiste to General Zinni to General Clark. Get the best Middle East experts in America. And don’t forget the Iraq Vets. The President and Congress must show some real leadership and get our country’s best people, not just the agreeable ones, all working together to offer new plans and ideas.” Paul believed that, much like his worldview, the solution didn’t have to be one way or the other—the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
After Cindy’s twenty-six-day vigil outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch, he still refused to meet her. Instead, he ended his vacation early. Before Camp Casey rolled up its tents, Cindy announced the next phase of her protest. She called it the Bring Them Home Now Tour. It would follow the president to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina obliterated the city, and then onto the sidewalks outside the White House. Cindy’s demonstration covered forty-two cities in twenty-six states. It solidified her reputation as one of the most highly polarizing figures in America, both loved and reviled, sometimes by the same people, depending on what she posted online on a given day. She continues to be at the forefront of political activism, demonstrating everywhere from Martha’s Vineyard to Oslo, Norway, to Sacramento, where she was arrested as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
From housewife to infamous revolutionary, she’s spent her life since Casey’s death working to shake others’ worldviews. She has written a series of books and booklets, including one that challenges people’s positive assumptions about America. Called Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution, it conveys her intense doubts about fundamental beliefs, ranging from “American has a free press” to “elections matter.”
Two supersurvivors, two rebels. But trauma touched their lives in vastly different ways, leaving one of them still a firm believer in the basic goodness of his nation and the other a deep cynic. From both sides of this chasm, however, they have influenced their country in ways not soon to be forgotten. It’s comforting to know that no matter where we fall in our thinking, we have the power to endure after surviving a catastrophic event. Even while one course is considerably harder to take than the other, this presents an interesting conundrum: in the end, regardless of whether one believes the world is a safe place, haven’t we just replaced one perception, or delusion, for another?
“People aren’t obstinate; their minds are,” Dan Tapster says. He had just produced a MythBusters experiment to test whether it was possible for a child on a swing to complete a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arch. After trying and failing at more reasonable approaches, MythBusters concluded that it would be virtually impossible unless they attached powerful rockets to the swing. Despite the evidence, once again some viewers cried foul.
“Certain people refused to believe our conclusion because they said they had actually done it when they were kids!” says Dan. “They believed they had actually done it. You have to conclude that there are some false beliefs people hold on to that they believe to be fundamentally true.”
Yes, it’s unlikely that all these viewers were lying, though the prospect that they’re delusional doesn’t seem any more appealing. But then again, stories such as Paul’s and Cindy’s remind us that we’re all a bit delusional, clinging to polite fictions until we can’t anymore, because the alternative would be too difficult to bear. The producers of MythBusters are truly fighting an uphill battle.
5
The Company We Keep
I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.
—HELEN KELLER
People rarely recover from accidents such as Amanda Wigal’s.
On a morning in June 2007, Bartlett Lake was buzzing with jet skiers and wakeboard boats as Amanda’s crew of urbane Sea Ray shipmates sunned on the deck. Music wafted through the air, ricocheting from hip-hop to country to rock.
The captain of the party boat, Amanda was in her mid-twenties, small and slim with dust-colored hair that framed high cheekbones and kind eyes. Her outgoing personality, in company with her openness and natural beauty, charmed nearly everyone she met. To know Amanda was to love her.
Amanda’s fiancé, Jeremy, maneuvered the boat into a small cove and anchored it. Amanda brought out sandwiches, and someone opened the cooler. When the day got too hot, they all stripped down to their swimsuits and jumped into the water underneath a vast Arizona sky. Jeremy attached the inner tube to the back of the boat. It was big and yellow, with twin handles. Amanda swam out to the tube and pulled her slight physique inside it. She turned and faced the sky, resting her legs against the inner tube so that only her feet touched the water. She squinted into the sun and waved to Jeremy, who was standing at the wheel of the boat flashing a confident grin, his hand on the throttle. Amanda gripped the inner tube handles in anticipation. The speedboat propeller burbled the placid water to life. Then the boat took off, tugging Amanda’s inner tube behind it. The flurry of wind and speed made Amanda feel invigorated and alive.
From the periphery, Amanda noticed a big white vessel cruising on the wrong side of the lake. Maritime rules controlled unmarked water lanes, dividing the lake like a multilane two-way highway. But not everyone knew the rules, and this misguided cruiser was coming toward them. Jeremy, who had a lot of experience on pontoons and speedboats, noticed the oncoming traffic, too. Thinking quickly, he veered the speedboat away, but he miscalculated, turning a fraction of a moment too late. The speedboat arched away from the cruiser, but Amanda’s inertia swung her into the oncoming vessel. Her head slammed against the hull so hard that the blow knocked her unconscious and sent dark blood cascading into the lake.
A helicopter airlifted her to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition. Comatose, she was later moved to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. During her first critical days in intensive care, nurses noted that a seemingly endless pageant of people filed in and out of Amanda’s room. Friends from every part of her life came to see her as she fought for her life. They stayed by her side every day, held her hands, and told her how much she meant to them. “We love you,” they said. “You can make it!”
Jeremy wasn’t so sure. The neurologists said that Amanda was brain dead and would not recover. The accident replayed in his head with pristine clarity as he searched for any way out of what had happened. But every version of the story ended with Jeremy pulling his fiancée from the water with blood rushing out of the gash in her head. In the pale light of her hospital room, his bride-to-be looked as though she were sleeping. Though she had been beautiful, the accident and the wee
ks-long coma had altered her loveliness. Her skin was as white as the hospital gown that covered her. Her face was buried in heavy bandages. She was intubated, and her breathing was thin and even.
For Amanda’s friends and family, it must have been hard to reconcile this version of her with the vivacious person they knew—the free-spirited college sorority girl, the spontaneous postgrad who was all in for flirty poolside weekends and sprees to the slopes of Utah and the shores of Puerto Vallarta. Amanda was the first person to admit she wasn’t goal-directed. She was young, and she had her whole life ahead of her. She lived in her grandparents’ old condo, which was fully paid for, so discretionary income funded getaways and nights on the town, where she drank with her friends, frequented clubs, and danced. Her friends had nicknamed her Chatty Cathy because all the guys talked to her. Now Amanda might not ever talk again.
Weeks with little change in her condition forced her family and friends to reach an impossible conclusion: Amanda was lost. Neurosurgeons informed them that keeping Amanda alive was only postponing the inevitable. Previously encouraging, upbeat visits turned into opportunities to say good-bye.
At which point, Amanda woke up.
Doctors tend to call cases like Amanda’s miraculous because of their extremely infrequent occurrence. It’s not every day that people with injuries as serious as Amanda’s open their eyes again. But we want to avoid painting a picture of supersurvivors as supermen of sorts, who can overcome even death. Amanda certainly doesn’t regard herself this way. As we will see, she exemplifies many of the inner resources we celebrate in other chapters, such as grounded hope and a strong sense of personal control. But she doesn’t credit these characteristics with her eventual supersurvivorship. Indeed, given her comatose state, marshaling inner resources may not be what brought her back from the brink. For that we should look outside of her, to the love and care she received from others.
“Amanda was always outgoing and had more friends than she knew what to do with,” says Iris Wigal, Amanda’s mother. “She was never one to sit at home. She liked being a part of something, liked being involved.”
And perhaps this is precisely what made the difference. Amanda would later speculate that, even through the opaque fog of her comatose state, she was somehow aware of the presence of her loved ones in the room with her. Although medical science can’t say for sure, Amanda might not have survived without the support of all these people. “I couldn’t believe how many people came to visit,” says Amanda. “My friends, my mom’s friends, people who grew up with me, people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Without them, who do you have to recover for?”
According to dozens of studies, the people in our lives really matter. Psychologists Kathryn Herbst-Damm and James Kulik, for instance, wanted to find out if social support really could make a difference in cases where life and death were at stake. In a 2005 study published in the journal Health Psychology, they followed two hundred and ninety patients from the moment they were admitted to hospice care to the time they died. These were very sick people; hospice is normally offered only to those with no more than six months to live. Most hospice organizations couldn’t function without a core group of volunteers available to visit patients to provide emotional and practical support. About a third of the patients in this study specifically requested and received visits from just such volunteers, while the remaining two-thirds didn’t.
The care and dedication that hospice volunteers display as they accompany people in the final stage of life make them nothing short of angels. But they’re not angels of the supernatural sort, and they don’t possess superhuman healing powers. That’s what makes the results of this study all the more intriguing: The rate at which the patients who were visited by volunteers passed away was almost a third that of those who were not visited. The lives of the former lasted more than two and a half months longer, an eternity to someone hoping to live long enough to witness the birth of a grandchild or to celebrate one last Christmas.
This isn’t an isolated finding. In a much larger study, published in 1997 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a group of researchers headed by Brenda Penninx followed nearly three thousand people for almost two and a half years, investigating the connection between social support and mortality as part of the ambitious Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. The random sample was drawn from municipalities all over the Netherlands, was stratified by age and sex, and included ordinary adults, living at home, who ranged in age from fifty-five to eighty-five. In short, it was the kind of high-quality study you’d do if you wanted firm answers to big questions.
The researchers assessed the amount of social support in people’s lives in a number of ways, including whether they were married or had a partner, their total number of friends and family, and the participants’ personal assessments of the quality of support received. But the most important factor appeared to be the emotional support itself. Twenty-nine months later, they accessed public records to track mortality, expecting some portion of the participants to have died naturally from conditions ranging from heart disease or cancer to accident or simply old age. They found that those study participants who received moderate to high levels of emotional support were about half as likely to have died than those who received lower levels of support. About 13 percent of people with low emotional support had died, compared to only about 6 percent of people with moderate to high emotional support. So, social support may help people literally survive—an important prerequisite for being a supersurvivor of course.
On the psychological front, many studies have shown that aspects of social support appear to provide a buffer to the emotional effects of trauma and other negative circumstances, helping to protect some people from mental health symptoms that haunt others. It’s also one of the predictors of posttraumatic growth, the tendency of some individuals to find benefits in the aftermath of tragedy.
We’ve already met supersurvivors who have acquired, and relied upon, the support of many. Asha Mevlana, in her post-cancer journey to become an internationally renowned musician, has amassed thousands of supportive fans all over the world, who have in turn bolstered her emotionally. Paul Rieckhoff couldn’t have gained the support he needed to start the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization without the national exposure that enabled him to rally hundreds of thousands of veterans and followers to action. Even Alan Lock, who traversed, blind, the second-largest body of water in a rowboat, did so with the love and support of friends and family, who gave him the strength and encouragement to succeed.
None of these people claimed they became supersurvivors on their own.
But isn’t there a dark side to relying on others? Relationships can be less than perfect. Sometimes people disappoint us, distance themselves, or turn their backs. At first Amanda Wigal’s story seems simple, but like all aspects of posttrauma recovery, there’s so much more just under the surface.
Amanda’s visitors liked to bring her gifts, flowers, get-well cards, magazines, and books. When she opened a magazine, words swam on the page. The meaning of the letters, somehow familiar, was missing. Amanda’s memory was foggy. The flotsam of names, faces, and places floated in her mind, unanchored to meaning or context.
Visiting hours at the hospital began early. Each day, people with familiar faces, recognized from some murky place and time, appeared in her room. They spoke to her. Sometimes she replied. Words spilled from her mouth in a gush of broken sounds. Her responses elicited confusion. Her brain was a broken machine, its wires frayed, its mechanisms unhinged.
Today, what Amanda does remember of her time in the hospital comes to her in cockeyed scenes. “I asked a nurse to dial my mother’s phone number,” says Amanda. “When she answered, I told her I was stranded on the side of I-17 and she had to come pick me up. I packed everything and waited for her to come get me.”
And some of these memories, says Amanda, weren’t memories at all but the effects of medication generating dreams that spilled into he
r reality, dreams such as one of the hospital staff killing patients and putting the bodies into beds.
Then there was the morning Amanda woke up in the wrong bed, in the wrong room, in the wrong building. The right half of her body was still weak when she stumbled out of bed, balancing herself against the rail. Tiptoeing past the nurses’ station, she edged along the wall without stumbling once. At an elevator bank, she pushed the Down button. She’d leave the floor and find a phone. But whom would she call? My mom, she thought. I’ll call my mom and tell her where I am. But where was she? It didn’t matter; her mom would find her, would straighten things out, would set things right. As the door opened, a hand touched her shoulder. Amanda turned and said something. It came out in French, a language she had studied in college. This was how Amanda learned she was in a secure unit at Barrow Neurological Institute, and that she wasn’t going anywhere. She attempted a half dozen other escapes, but never got far. Security attached a bracelet to her ankle that sounded an alarm if she left the floor. When that didn’t stop her, they strapped her to beds and wheelchairs.
Amanda’s increasing cognitive abilities were a mixed blessing—good enough to attempt escapes but not good enough to realize that escape wasn’t necessary. The friends who had once poured into her room to wish her good-bye now had no idea how to help her. What could they say? What could they do? It was strange. When she was presumed dead, it was easy for friends to support her. Now that she was alive, friends were barely around.
“I watched Amanda’s social support drop off completely,” says her mother. “It was hard on Amanda after the accident because the dynamics of her relationships changed. To all of a sudden lose them—it hurt her deeply. I wanted to convince people that she wasn’t going to be any different now than the girl she was.” But the around-the-clock care she required, and the years of intense rehabilitation ahead of her, meant that Amanda was different now.
Supersurvivors Page 8