The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  “It’s not,” my mother said. “How can we make it right?”

  Sometimes kindness means making it right.

  Sometimes kindness means showing up.

  Sometimes it’s trying.

  We have to try.

  * * *

  The day after the hospital with Sarah and Sophia, I kept my son home from school. Life moves so fast—how was he already seven?—and I wanted to hit Pause. We ran on the beach. We hung out at the bookstore. We had lunch at Costello’s, our favorite sandwich shop, and I told him a story about our family.

  “During the Great Depression—” I started.

  We stopped to discuss the Great Depression.

  “My great-grandparents—”

  We stopped to discuss genealogy.

  —opened their farmhouse in Holland, Michigan, to families in need of a place to sleep, a hostel of sorts through the church. My great-aunt Jennie took me into the basement to show me the cots, the marks on the door where kids had carved their names. “Hebrews 13:2,” she told me. I was twenty years old, at a complicated place with religion, but being with Aunt Jennie made me think about the church as a place of kindness as opposed to fear. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,” she recited, and in her voice I heard the poetry, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  We stopped to discuss angels.

  “They take care of us, right?” he asked, mouth full of chips.

  “That’s what I believe.”

  He considered, chewing. “And an angel can be anyone?”

  A nurse in an elevator. A receptionist in a pediatrician’s office. A mother in your hallway. Her daughter reminding you to dance. “Yes,” I said.

  He looked around the restaurant: the woman at the next table, the guy behind the counter, all the people in line. “Anyone?” he said. “Even you?”

  “Anyone,” I said. “Even me.”

  After lunch we headed downtown, Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue. He watched the buildings sprout around us and asked, “Are we going to see Sophia?” thinking of the times we’d visited her at Lurie.

  “Nope,” I said.

  He thought for a second. “Are we going to see David Bowie?”

  That was the map in his head: visiting his buddy at the hospital and a retrospective on Bowie at the MCA.

  We drove into the parking structure, around and around until we found a spot, then down one elevator and up another. The walk was muscle memory, months lugging the infant car seat and scared out of my mind. He wasn’t gaining, wasn’t latching, wasn’t sleeping, and I’d sit in the lobby and sob. It still looked the same: colored walls, cutesy playroom, happy toddlers, and, behind the desk, the receptionist who brought me Kleenex. I knew she’d be there. I’d looked at the staff page online and found her picture, then called to ask if she was working.

  “Why are we here?” asked my son.

  “I forgot to do something,” I told him.

  She looked up, smiled, asked, “Can I help you?” And I gripped the desk with both fists and took a deep breath so I wouldn’t cry and said in a rushing run-on sentence that I was sure she wouldn’t remember but seven years before I had severe postpartum depression and one day at an appointment I started crying in the lobby and she came over and told me I was normal and that seemingly small gesture was a life raft in ways I’d only begun to articulate and I wanted her to know how grateful I was and how grateful my family was and I hoped I wasn’t freaking her out and also she’s an angel.

  I exhaled.

  She reached out and put a hand on mine. “How are you?” she said.

  “I’m good,” I said. Telling her made it true.

  We were still for a moment, holding hands. And then, very purposely, she turned her head toward the lobby. I followed her eyes and there—the God’s honest truth—sat a woman. There was an infant car seat at her feet. She was crying.

  I looked back at the receptionist. I wondered how often this happened, how many of us she had saved. We had a brief conversation that did not involve speaking. “What’s your name?” she asked my son, and as they chatted, I picked up the box of Kleenex from the desk and went into the lobby.

  * * *

  I walked into the Halloween party at our kids’ elementary school, running late from work. I was tired and my feet hurt and the bag of candy I carried was splitting at the base. Hundreds of costumed children ran around screaming. They pulled streamers off the ceiling. Sugar hit the bloodstream. I said hello to Sarah’s boys—a Roman gladiator, a purple hawk—and looked around for Boba Fett. “Hi, Mom!” he said, appearing at my elbow. “Bye, Mom!” he said, and back into the crowd.

  Sarah was onstage, leading the dance game where you freeze when the music stops. She was wearing an orange-and-black tutu and orange-and-black-striped tights. Weird glitter antennae jutted out of her head and her crazy-gorgeous hair was cropped at the chin, cut off the spring before at a fund-raising event for St. Baldrick’s. Her goal was $500; in the end, her hair brought $40,000.

  Sometimes kindness means money.

  I felt a tug on my skirt and looked down. It was Sophia, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood with a long cape and an enormous wicker basket. It was full of lunch meat and cheese cubes and fruit and popcorn and cookies and candy mixed together. Obviously, she’d gone on a solo run to the snack table. “Here is the salami!” she said, holding up her basket.

  I put down the candy and squatted so we were eye level. “How are you, Sophia?” I asked. She was three years old, in treatment for just under a year.

  There are good days and bad days.

  On good days, you celebrate.

  “Come on,” she said, reaching for my hand. “We have to dance!”

  I started to tell her no—tired, feet hurt, broken candy bag—but she gave me a look.

  I knew that look.

  So I kicked off my shoes, climbed onstage, and danced my face off with my friend in her crazy tutu and an angel of a little girl and you know what? It was glorious.

  The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

  I was getting ready for bed when I heard sirens. Not a big a deal in the city, right? We hear them all the time. I brushed my teeth—they got louder. I peed—louder. I took off my pants—louder, closer, the dog was going bat shit. And when I came out of the bathroom I saw red lights splicing through the blinds on my front windows, red stripes running down the living room walls. “What the—” said my husband, getting up from the couch, and that’s when we heard pounding on the door.

  * * *

  At some point in my early twenties, I made a list, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, stuck in an old journal, and then forgotten. Until now, when my life caught up to its question.

  The napkin is crumpled, my long-ago handwriting shaky and near illegible. For sure I was tipsy if not totally lit, hanging with friends at a bar and killing time with hypothetical games: Truth or Dare. Two Truths and a Lie. The Proust Questionnaire. What five things would you bring to a desert island? What five things would you take to the moon? What five things would you need for the zombie apocalypse? Or, in the case of this particular list: What five things would you grab in a fire? I vaguely remember the drunken setup: “You wake up choking, the room’s full of smoke, flames everywhere, you’ve got two minutes to get out before you roast alive. So what do you grab? What is that important?”

  Here’s what I wrote on the napkin:

  Journals. While I applaud my younger self for wanting to save her memories, this choice is totally illogical. Back then I used big green hardbound sketchbooks, stored under my futon in tomato boxes from Jewel-Osco. No way I could have carried them all out in time.

  Later, sick of lugging them from apartment to apartment, I stashed them in my mom’s attic in Michigan. “Aren’t you afraid she’ll read them?” a friend asked, shocked I’d let one of my parents so close to my secrets. Honestly, there’s nothing she doesn’t already know. I tell my mother everything. I always have. I called her sobbing
from a pay phone in Italy after walking out of that gynecologist’s office. When I called her from Prague and told her I was in love, she got on a plane the next day to come meet him. She Facetimes with her grandson every morning so I can sleep for an extra ten minutes. In the chaos following the school shooting in my hometown—no cell phones, landlines backed up, no one able to get a hold of each other, “the victim was a local school administrator”—she got the person who ran the front desk at my dorm in Boston to put her through to an administrator who passed her up the chain all the way to the university president, making him promise to find me right then and tell me that my father was alive.

  After years of reading personal essays by students and storytellers and the complex, often painful relationships they have with their own mothers, I fully understand the gift of having a woman I trust, who supports me unconditionally and loves me fiercely.

  A photo of my parents. My uncle Mike sent it to me. He found it in a box that belonged to my grandmother. I am tiny, in a diaper, trying to walk to what I think is a tree. My dad is wearing cool sneakers. My mom is a total fox. They’re laughing.

  Look: they’re both happy now.

  But it’s nice to see that they were happy then.

  My first edition Anaïs Nin. I did not own a first edition of anything, so the inclusion of Nin on the napkin list is pure pretention on the part of twenty-year-old me; however, I must have mentioned this material desire to my husband at some point because he gave me a rare signed interview with her as an anniversary gift. It lives in a safe-deposit box at the bank and is therefore not at risk for fire damage, real or hypothetical.

  Now, if you’ll indulge what could be construed as pretension from forty-year-old me: occasionally I go to the bank and take the interview out of its box. I pet the fragile, letterpress pages and reread her words. They’ve been helpful as I consider what it means to be a woman telling her own stories: “Our culture has put a taboo on what they call introspection and the growth of the self. Any attention you gave your own world was sinful. And I think what I get mostly in the letters people write to me is that this is a study of growth.”

  Anything that said Marc Jacobs. This is just ridiculous. I didn’t own anything made by Marc Jacobs. I couldn’t afford Marc Jacobs. I couldn’t fit into Marc Jacobs.

  Dear Marc Jacobs: I like your use of mismatched patterns and I have a big, lovely ass. Please make me some pants.

  Birth control. Good girl.

  * * *

  We live on the second floor of a three-flat rental in Rogers Park. It’s your typical Chicago layout: in the front, living room and bedroom number one; in the middle, dining room, bathroom, and bedroom number two; in the back, kitchen and bedroom number three. We’d moved in a year earlier, after bailing on the condo we bought just before the market crashed. It happened so fast: one day we had a home and then—snap your fingers—it was worthless, underwater they call it, which is a poetic way of saying that you’re drowning. We couldn’t sell. We’d just had a baby. I was sick. My husband took a second job. I got better and took a third, then a fourth, sixty-hour weeks of hustling, passing our son between us like a football. It was this wild whiplash between gratitude—we had the jobs, the home, each other—and exhaustion.

  One day I woke up and five years had passed.

  At some point you have to ask yourself how you want to live.

  I typed the word “beach” into Craigslist and an apartment came up in Rogers Park: typical Chicago layout. Steps from the lakefront. Working fireplace. Rent was half our monthly mortgage. My husband and I talked about what would happen, to our credit, to our future. And a week later, I sat on my new front porch, listening to Lake Michigan waves against the sand. My then five-year-old son sat on my lap. I felt him breathing: Slow. Easy. Calm.

  “It’s nice to be home,” he said.

  It was that first deep drink of air after coming up from underwater.

  So imagine how it felt when my upstairs neighbor pounded on our door and told us the building was on fire.

  * * *

  In my late twenties, I sold my stuff and moved to Prague. I wanted to make art. I wanted to reset. I wanted to be light. I took boxes to Myopic Books and posted the big stuff on Craigslist. My journals were already at my mom’s; everything else had to fit in a backpack.

  Passport. I arrived in Prague during the 2004 presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry, a year into the United States–led invasion of Iraq, which the majority of the Czech people vehemently opposed. Everyone I met asked how my country could do such a thing, and “I don’t know” was not a good enough answer. Neither was “I don’t agree with my government” or “I don’t have a say in my government.” This was the home of the Velvet Revolution, a massive antigovernment protest that began with a student march, grew in theaters, and culminated with 750,000 people in the streets as the Communist Party stepped down. To stand in Wenceslas Square and say my voice didn’t matter was ridiculous. I was an educator, an artist, a citizen.

  My voice is more than my vote.

  Here’s the truth: I hadn’t yet done the work of examining my complicity in systems that were hurting people, at home and abroad. I didn’t understand the power in my passport. I didn’t know that I could be furious with my country and, at the same time, cherish it.

  The Klementinum Library is one of the most beautiful in the world: baroque architecture, frescoes on the ceiling, opened in 1722. It’s all rare art and priceless books, not the place to camp all day with my coffee and my questions. Instead, I went to the Internet café down the street from my flat, ordered a pivo, and googled: how is America viewed abroad?

  I was there for a really long time.

  I’m there still.

  Laptop. When I was a kid, I had a mild obsession with Inspector Gadget, a television cartoon about a wacky cyborg detective. He had a niece named Penny who I totally wanted to be, in part because she was a genius but mostly because she had a book that was actually a computer.

  I wonder what eight-year-old me would say about twenty-eight-year-old me, sitting in a kavarna every morning and writing so nonchalantly on such a miraculous device.

  I wonder what my now eight-year-old son will think of his twenty-eight-year-old self, walking on virtual Mars or SWEEPS-11 with a microchip implanted in his eyeball.

  Something like that, right?

  Franz Kafka’s Diaries: 1910–1923. I was there to teach a class on Kafka, not as literary theory but writing for writers, the process and the mess. I’d studied his work for years. He fascinated me. He terrified me. Reading his journals pushed me into my own, so much wonder and fear in my head and my heart and God, what a relief to get it out of me, to read what I think and see what I say.

  You can’t fix it if you can’t see it.

  One part in particular in Diaries that I keep coming back to: a section near the beginning, from the summer of 1910: “When I think about it,” he writes, “I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects.” He talks about this for a paragraph, then stops and begins again: “I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects,” and on for another paragraph, digging deeper, until again he stops and starts again: “Often I think it over and then I always have to say that my education has done me great harm in some ways,” and on again, still deeper. This repeats six times, each section coming at the idea from a different place and arriving at different ideas.

  I use (read: steal) this structure when I’m trying to understand what feels impossible. My fear that the depression will come back, that I will wake up in the morning and not be able to get up off the floor. My fear that something will happen to my child and my heart will split open and a tidal wave of blood will pour out of my body and flood the streets. My fear that members of my family, blood and chosen, will be harmed because of who they love. My fear that members of my family will be harmed because of the color of their skin. My fear of being a person who is concerned only for members of her o
wn family and not all families.

  Knife. It’s a Bucklite MAX with a guthook.

  A present from my dad.

  Birth Control. Good girl.

  * * *

  My upstairs neighbor stood in the hall, red lights strobing, sirens screaming, dog whimpering, not noticing or not caring that both my husband and I were in our underwear. They’d had a fire in the fireplace, he told us. It died out like always, they went to bed, were about to fall asleep, but something made him get up again, a feeling I have all the time. You’re lying there, so tired, so comfy, almost asleep and then: Shit, did I forget to lock the doors?

  If you’ll permit me here a little PSA: I don’t care how snuggly the sheets, I don’t care how warm the bed, I don’t care how many times you’ve checked: if your gut says get up then get the fuck up because when my neighbor went into his living room, he saw the wall behind his fireplace burst into flames.