Supersurvivors

by David B Feldman

  Amanda and her mother, Iris, had always been close, but their relationship took on an even deeper meaning following the death of Amanda’s father when she was twenty. After that, Amanda and her mother promised to be there for each other, however unimaginable the situation.

  For thirty-three years Iris had been an elementary school teacher, but now she was retired. After Amanda’s accident, instead of teaching ten- and eleven-year-olds, she worked with Amanda, who often seemed like a toddler herself. Iris placed flashcards with basic mathematical problems in front of her daughter. “Can you add these numbers?”

  Jeremy helped in the effort, too. One afternoon, while he was doing the laundry, he noticed Amanda curled up on the sofa, contemplative, her body dappled in sunlight. “Hey there,” he said, sitting down next to her. She registered a tiny smile. He handed her a shirt. She folded it, and then another, stacking them in neat piles. “One, two, three . . .” Jeremy said, counting the shirts out loud with her. She counted along. Though Jeremy didn’t know it, he was taking a page from Jane McGonigal’s playbook. Sometimes, at dinner, he quizzed Amanda on the color of the foods on her plate. In the car on the way to rehab, he drilled her on words that started with certain letters.

  Even though Iris and Jeremy were patiently encouraging, Amanda knew how disabled she was, how long it took her to come up with each number and each word. She ached to get back to being the same bright, fun-loving woman she was before the accident. But every mental and physical struggle convinced her that this might not be possible, at least not completely.

  Amanda moved in with her mother because she couldn’t be left alone to take care of herself. “Recovery took about a year,” Iris remembers. “I monitored everything. We made schedules for her day: get up, get dressed, brush your teeth. She had homework from the rehab clinic—detailed homework. She’d have questions for me. I’d double-check her answers and sit with her when she worked. Her math skills were gone. I mean, this was the girl who skipped two math levels in the third grade!”

  Amanda had sustained an injury to part of her frontal lobes. Among the things she initially lost were specific memories of her life before the accident. She didn’t remember, for instance, that she had been a sales manager at a small promotional products company. She didn’t remember that the job was less than professionally satisfying, or that she had decided to jump ship but changed her mind when the owner announced he was retiring and offered to sell her the company. So after regaining her ability to communicate, Amanda unexpectedly learned that she was the owner of a small Scottsdale business called Brandables.

  Partly to assume Amanda’s loans and partly to provide her with a tangible goal for which to strive, Iris had taken over the day-to-day management of the company. “There was a sense that, as long as the company was waiting for Amanda, she would work hard to get back,” Iris says.

  Before the injury, Amanda’s identity was not tied to the company to the extent that the latter might be used as a carrot for her recovery—not by a long shot. Iris was right, though. After the injury, getting back to Brandables was vital for Amanda. The company now represented a tangible goal to inspire her physical and cognitive recovery. Sometime between the boating accident and learning to function on the most basic human level, Brandables had become something more than just a job. It had become Amanda’s lifeline.

  “I knew people with my injury can’t go back to their old lives,” Amanda admits. “We have to make considerable adjustments.” But she’d wanted badly to get back to a place where she could at least be independent and run Brandables, and she worked every day to get to that point. “The doctors said her recovery was astonishing,” her mother remembers with a smile. “To see where she’d come from to where she was now. She was airlifted in; they said she was brain-dead. They told me to take her off the machines. She was ninety percent back to fully functioning. She got back to the company. It was a proud moment.”

  But it turned out to be far from ideal. In July of 2007, when Amanda slipped into a coma, the U.S. Commerce Department was showing economic growth, low unemployment, and rising wages across the country. Amanda returned to consciousness to find a new world paradigm. In the weeks she’d been comatose, the global economy had gone dark. Over the months, while she was regaining what she’d lost in the blink of an eye, stock and real estate prices plummeted. By December, Amanda was learning to speak again, and the labor markets were shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs.

  Only three U.S. markets had lost more jobs than Greater Phoenix. High-end vendors folded, top restaurants shuttered their doors, and the area’s trendiest spots failed. Shopping centers, at capacity two years ago, were down to a fraction of their occupancy. Of the fifteen suites in the complex where Brandables was situated, only five were now occupied. Like many companies, Brandables was suffering, too. So now Amanda was facing not only cognitive deficits, but also seemingly insurmountable economic deficits.

  “I wanted Brandables to work. I needed it to, in fact,” Amanda recalls with a note of tension. “I didn’t give up on my rehab. How could I give up on my company?”

  First, she did the painful math. The company simply didn’t have the funds to continue paying its employees. As excruciating as it was, to make Brandables work, she would need to lay them off. In solidarity with this difficult decision, she stopped paying herself altogether. “I wasn’t going to let the business go down without a fight. I couldn’t keep the lights on, conduct business as usual, and still make a profit,” she says. It was at this moment she realized that if she was going to stay in business and rebuild the company from the ground up, she was going to have to stop paying her mother, too.

  Amanda found herself surrounded by lifeless racks of apparel and promotional samples in a silent two-thousand-square-foot office. She walked to the desk where her mom once sat, Iris’s candy dish still on display. She passed empty cubicles and wandered through a short walkway into her warehouse, wondering how she was going to fulfill orders on her own.

  Her memory was still weak, so she had to organize herself in such a way that clients’ orders were always visible, otherwise she would forget about them. Sticky notes papered the walls. Whiteboards hanging in the hallways told Amanda about orders she had currently in process—those waiting for screen printing, embroidery, invoicing, or shipping. She operated the packing stations, hauled herself to trade shows, and became a member of the local chamber of commerce. But keeping up this pace on her own exhausted her and began doing her more harm than good.

  “I couldn’t let her fail,” Iris says. “She’s my daughter, and she will always be my daughter.” So one morning, Iris quietly took up duties behind the sales counter. She would never ask for a paycheck. “I never claimed to have Amanda’s business sense, but I had common sense. I didn’t want to lose our bond.”

  Although Amanda had lost the support of friends and now walked the nearly vacant halls of a once-thriving business, she never once felt abandoned. “The funny thing was,” she says with a reflective chuckle, “I never once sensed I was alone.” To understand this, it’s necessary to reflect on the distinction between actual social support and perceived support. Earlier we noted that it’s possible to perceive that social support isn’t available despite having received a lot of it. It’s also possible to experience the opposite; Amanda perceived that she was immersed in a sea of support, even though most people objectively would say she was walking through a virtual desert. Perhaps this perception was due to the reliable efforts of Iris and Jeremy. No matter how many people peeled away from Amanda’s life, she believed that her mother and fiancé would always be there for her. This bolstered her perception that support would be available for as long as she needed it, a belief which kept her going.

  While more than two hundred thousand small businesses in the United States disappeared during the Great Recession, Amanda was able make Brandables one of the top twenty-five promotional distributors in Arizona. Even without the almost-fatal head trauma, this feat baffles
the mind.

  But what makes Amanda’s story remarkable—indeed a story of supersurvivorship—isn’t the million or so dollars the company has earned since its near bankruptcy. It is what happened within Amanda during both her physical and financial ordeals. Indeed, not all supersurvivors are people who have changed the world. Supersurvival is often much more personal than that. Some people revolutionize their personal lives by seeing the world in new, more meaningful ways. Brandables started out being one thing and became something so much more to Amanda. “I needed to keep my company. Brandables suddenly meant everything to me. It became my identity. It went from being my livelihood to being my life,” she says. Brandables carried on, even as store after store around it closed. Customers continued to come. Amanda and her mother filled orders. Today, Brandables is still run by mother and daughter.

  To spend time with Amanda, one would hardly notice the scar above her forehead or the pauses she takes when she is pulling words from her mind. But she is different now, even if the changes aren’t obvious. Since the accident and the loss of many of her former friends, Amanda has needed to rethink the party girl she once was. She spends more time alone. She isn’t as social, and now enjoys being by herself much more than in large crowds. She calls this her newfound sense of quiet.

  As soon as Amanda was able, and Jeremy felt he could take care of her, the two moved back in together. Their relationship had faced considerable adversity since Amanda’s injury only weeks after Jeremy proposed marriage. But they had gotten through it. Despite uncertainties and challenges, Jeremy, like Iris, had remained by Amanda’s side. Thirty-five months after the accident on Bartlett Lake, Jeremy and Amanda were married.

  Amanda had discovered that, regardless of how many people surrounded her, two people would always be there for her. And believing that someone is by your side—someone who makes you smile, but also someone you know you can count on when you need support—is one of the great secrets to supersurvival.

  6

  Awakened by Death

  Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

  —E. M. FORSTER

  Paul Watkins was a man on a mission. Having called the meeting with his business partners, he arrived at the office dressed in a shirt and tie, his dark hair neatly combed to the side, apprehension concealed behind the strength of newfound conviction. “Gentlemen,” he started, placing his briefcase on the conference table, “it’s been a great pleasure working with you, but I’ve decided to leave the company.”

  Mouths agape, his business partners sat stunned and silent. What was going to happen to the company? Over the years, Paul had grown it into a regional powerhouse. His plan had been to lead it to the next level, beyond Louisiana to the national market. He was the majority shareholder. All told, he was worth millions. What about his shares?

  “I want you to buy me out for a song,” he said to his bewildered investors. He’d promised them a great return, but selling his shares to them for a fraction of their value was utterly insane. Paul would be throwing away millions.

  At his high-end apartment in New Orleans’ prestigious St. Charles Avenue neighborhood, Paul opened his kitchen cabinets and removed dish after dish. Dinner plates, saucers, soup bowls, and coffee mugs clanked into trash bags. Standing at his closet, he gazed over the pressed collars and neat hems of the garments he’d worn to business deals all over the country. He yanked shirts and pants off hangers and bagged them to be given away. He donated the Oriental area rugs, the wall art, his television, and many of his books. It had to go. All of it.

  Budgeting a weekly allowance of seventy-five dollars, he left his spacious apartment and moved into a twelve-by-fourteen-foot dirty beige room, swapping his grand window vista for a view of a school parking lot partially blocked by a rickety AC unit.

  But he felt calmer and more surefooted than ever. Assuming he wasn’t losing his mind, why would a sane man do this? “Yeah, I gave it up,” Paul says with a jovial laugh. “I just sort of realized life is short.” But Paul Watkins wasn’t dying, at least no more than any other healthy man in his early forties. Nonetheless, he says, “I wanted to end my life differently.”

  Death is one of our society’s last great taboos. If you doubt this, try bringing up the topic at the next dinner party. If you think talking about religion or money is socially inappropriate, just wait for the baffled looks you’ll inspire when you start chatting about funeral homes and tombstones.

  Most people avoid the topic—and not just in superficial ways. “About 80 percent of us will be physically dependent on others during the last months, weeks, or days of life,” writes celebrated palliative care physician Ira Byock in his foreword to The End-of-Life Handbook. “We will need help with basic daily activities, including the biological needs of eating, personal hygiene, and elimination.” For this reason, doctors almost unanimously agree that all adults should draw up a living will specifying what kind of medical care they would want if they were incapacitated and potentially nearing death. According to U.S. federal law, hospitals are obligated to ask patients if they have such documentation, presumably as a way of prompting them to consider it. Despite these facts, according to a 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only between 18 and 36 percent of people historically have a living will. The twenty minutes it takes to fill one out could mean the difference between life and death, but people generally decline to do so.

  It’s curious that we don’t talk or even think about death more. After all, it’s all around us—not in a gruesome or violent way usually, but as an inescapable fact of life. Think about it: There are seven billion people alive today; this means that there will be at least seven billion deaths within the next one hundred years. That’s about seventy million deaths per year!

  But perhaps the ubiquity and inevitability of death are exactly the reasons we don’t think about the topic. Psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg have spent almost three decades investigating why and how people avoid thinking about death. These researchers’ complex but very interesting conclusions are captured in a set of principles known collectively as terror management theory. They start with a simple observation: We human beings are the only animals able to step back and consider ourselves, our lives, and our futures. We ask pesky questions such as “Who am I?” “What should I be doing?” and “What does life have in store for me?” As a by-product of this self-reflective tendency, we can’t help realizing that, ultimately, the future holds an end to our lives. We are mortal, and we know it. If we were logical creatures, this would terrify us. It’s an inescapable death sentence that will be executed in only a few decades, and that’s if we’re not one of the unlucky ones struck down sooner by a fatal disease or an accident. But obviously most people aren’t walking around in terror. Why not?

  According to Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg, human beings have developed an elaborate set of unconscious defenses to manage the terror of death. The main defense is our cultural worldview. Christian culture, for instance, generally teaches that God created us and endowed us with the ability to choose between good and evil actions, and that if we choose the good ones, we’ll end up in heaven. If you were raised in this tradition, you were taught that, provided you live up to cultural standards of behavior, you will live forever.

  It’s strange to think about, but one of the main benefits of our culture may be its ability to reassure us that we’ll live on after we die. Even secular culture—the culture of consumerism that we all share whether we like it or not—provides us with the possibility of symbolic immortality, in such forms as the legacy we leave, the businesses we build, the works of art we create, and the children we raise. So our culture can reduce death anxiety by offering us immortality, with only the caveat that we must live up to its standards. To the extent that we do what we’re supposed to do—amass accomplishments, approval, status, or money—we’ll live on, in one form or another. We’re able to say to ourselves, “I’m such
a good person/I’m doing such good things/I’m leaving such a good legacy/I’m so respected by others, surely I’m not like those people who die young or die suddenly.” Yes, it’s not totally logical, but neither are human beings. Nonetheless, it has a kind of logic of the heart, which may be enough to distract us from the terror of an impending end.

  According to research, this death denial can have serious consequences. For one, we become very tied to our cultural worldview. If I’m relying on my cultural belief in an afterlife, for instance, to protect me from the full emotional realization that I am destined to die, then anything that could undermine that worldview is a potential threat. This idea led researchers to hypothesize that when people are reminded of death, even in a fairly casual way, they should be more likely both to strongly endorse their own culture’s worldview and to denigrate people of other cultures. In other words, they should become more prejudiced.

  In 2005, German psychologists Eva Jonas and Immo Fritsche joined forces with terror management theory creator Jeff Greenberg to publish a fascinating study addressing this issue in the Journal of Economic Psychology. In the city of Magdeburg, Germany, they randomly stopped pedestrians to ask them questions about their beliefs. Although they told participants that they were surveying people’s “consumption and television behavior,” they slipped in a number of questions about people’s belief in the superiority of German culture—questions about how much they would prefer German cars to foreign cars, to what degree they thought Germans were more handsome than foreigners, and how much they would prefer German food to foreign food, among others. Here’s the interesting part: they stopped half the study’s participants in a small shopping area and the other half directly in front of a cemetery. Presumably, standing in front of a cemetery would, on some level, remind the respondents of death—a condition that the researchers call mortality salience. There was no other difference between these two groups except the fact that one happened to be walking past a cemetery. The results showed that participants who were surveyed in the shopping area liked the German and non-German items approximately equally. Amazingly, however, those surveyed in front of the cemetery displayed greater liking for the German items as well as a decreased liking for the non-German ones.