The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  After twenty-one years, my left hand still lies limp in my lap, but I am exceedingly grateful to have lived long enough to have watched my grandson grow from the small boy who walked independently on his first birthday to the fine young man he has become.

  VI

  After a year of working to regain my ability to speak, I was ready to give a poetry reading at Cooley Dickinson. It was important to me to give the staff at least a glimpse of what the experience of recovering from a stroke was like from a patient’s point of view, and I had written many poems with that focus. It was also time for me to reclaim my role as a public speaker.

  Barbara Jenkins, my speech therapist for the five weeks I was at Cooley Dickinson just after the stroke and again after my five months at Weldon Rehab in Springfield, was working with me. Barbara, a creative writer herself, did videos of me reading my poetry. Then together we watched each video. Sometimes simply hearing a mistake was enough for me to be able to correct myself. Barbara analyzed the mistakes I couldn’t correct myself. Sometimes she wrote phonetic spelling over a word that was causing me difficulty. Other times she had to call on her own creativity to find ways to help me pronounce difficult words. For instance, she drew a little pear beside the word paralyzed.

  Speaking had become much easier over the year, but reading poetry or prose was still extremely difficult for me, and I spent many hours practicing the poems I planned to read at the hospital. By the day of the reading I felt confident that I could get through the reading without an excessive amount of stumbling. Barbara introduced me, emphasizing the difficulty I had had to overcome and the hard work I’d done to be able to read with clarity and expression after having almost lost my ability to speak at all after the stroke.

  Rising from my wheelchair to face the audience of familiar faces, I felt like I was coming home to myself.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I

  2002

  CHRIS HAD BROKEN UP WITH HIS PARTNER AND MOVED TO NEW YORK when he began to write his memoir. He often commented that hearing or reading sections from mine was very helpful in writing his. He called and emailed me frequently to ask questions about his childhood, and about the years covered in what became his book Running with Scissors. I answered everything I could remember.

  The more he wrote, the less he shared.

  As he completed his book, he distanced himself from me. Shortly before publishing it, he asked if I was going to sue him. The question surprised me. I assured him I would never sue him, that he was my son whom I loved and would always love with all my heart. But I understood why he had asked the question when I read Running with Scissors.

  I was shocked and brokenhearted. I went through a gamut of emotions. Even as I nursed deeply hurt feelings and anger toward Chris, I felt compassion for him knowing the pain from which his dark humor arose. But I also struggled with my ego, which wanted to defend me.

  Before newspapers began contacting me with questions—as they did almost immediately after the book’s release—I knew I had to make a decision about how I was going to respond to Chris’s book publicly. I decided to say as little as possible, and I declined requests for interviews.

  Privately, I went through a period of prayer and meditation. I also went through much emotional struggling and journaling. The following are excerpts from my journal of that period.

  6-26-02: I’ve been crying this morning. I felt like I had been hit in the gut and heart again and again. How could Chris do such blatant lying about me? And when he’s not totally lying, he’s presenting me—the me that he’s created—in a hard, cruel, shockingly superficial, light. How can I hold onto my love for him when he’s attacking me unmercifully? Of course I can hold onto my love for him. Nothing could diminish it.

  But how can I deal with the pain?

  6-27-02: I am grateful that my body had no adverse physical response when I read Chris’s book.

  But my guts are in a knot. What I feel is depressed, depressed and guilty that I’m depressed. I don’t even want to write emails to Chris anymore. And yet I long to hear from him.

  6-29-02: What can I possibly say to Chris about his book? That I’m sorry he has suffered so much in his life; that I’m grateful that he found a way to be the writer he’d dreamed of being. I can tell him that.

  7-2-02: I continue to love Chris, but have great difficulty with living with much of what he is doing in relation to me.

  I looked forward to my weekly Tuesday-afternoon massage. My masseur, Brian, had worked for years to relieve the spasticity in my left side. Lying on the massage table he set up in my kitchen, I had relaxed when, from the radio in the background, I heard the announcer saying that All Things Considered was brought to us by this foundation and that foundation and “by Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors, a book about …”

  My thoughts spun in shock, giving me a dizzy feeling that blurred the rest of the sentence.

  “Was that your son he was talking about?” Brian asked.

  “I wasn’t listening,” I lied.

  At the moment of that radio announcement, I felt all safety for me in my village drain away. Though Chris had changed the names of the people in his book, he left no room for doubt about his characters’ identities. His egotistical mother—according to his book—who wrote “mediocre” poetry, lived in an apartment by a river in a small town near the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border, and was paralyzed on one side of her body by a stroke.

  After thirteen years of walking across the river bridge, or beside the falls, holding the handrail while one helper or another pushed my wheelchair, I was one of the most consistently visible people in town. Strangers have stopped to tell me that watching me inspired them. Townspeople often said that when they had something difficult to face, they would think of me to give them courage. What will these people think of me now? I thought. Or others who read the book, or read about it? My town was filled with writers and writers’ groups. The New York Times Book Review was common reading here in this small village tucked between gentle hills, with a river flowing through it.

  I thought of standing with Bubba as we took the cards from the wreaths and bouquets of flowers at his infant son’s grave more than thirty-three years earlier. Years earlier, Bubba’s baby girl had been killed in a collision with a truck on a rain-slicked highway when she was only nine months old. Now his son had just been buried beside her.

  The wind blew a wreath of flowers to the ground. Bubba bent and placed the wreath upright again. Then he stood staring at the carpet of artificial grass covering the freshly dug grave.

  I looked down at his shoes, shined to a high gloss, black shoes that had become a black mirror reflecting the gold of chrysanthemums.

  “If God is punishing me, surely this is enough,” Bubba had said. His voice was leaden—a dirge without music.

  I’d wanted to hug him and say, “No. God is not punishing you. I don’t know why these things are happening to you, but I don’t believe for a minute that God is punishing you.” But our relationship didn’t allow for such intimacy even at such a moment, so I just stood silently there with him, my eyes riveted on the gold flowers reflected in his shoes.

  If Chris is punishing me, surely this is enough. That was the thought that flashed through my mind, bringing back to consciousness my brother’s words spoken so many years before. But I wasn’t facing a tragedy like Bubba had experienced. I had two sons, alive and healthy. Yet I had lost the relationship with Chris that had mattered so much to me. I was left with unbearable loss and grief.

  II

  In The Washington Post Chris was quoted as saying about me: “She thinks she’s famous. Everything to her is about her. She wonders what she’s going to tell her ‘press’ when they call about the book. I’m like, ‘What press?’ ”

  Could Chris hate me so much? I sent him an email saying that I’d read the Washington Post article. I told him that I loved him and would always love him. He replied by email saying that it was great
that his book had gotten two full pages in the Post. He added that the same thing was going to happen soon in the L.A. Times, The New York Times, and the Boston Herald.

  III

  On September 25, 2002, I wrote an email to Chris about the pain I felt in being misrepresented in an article in People magazine for which I’d been interviewed. My email went unanswered. On September 29 I attempted to send the following email to him:

  I see that your book is climbing on the bestseller list again. I am happy for you. I appreciate the enormity of your talent, and the disciplined hard work you’ve put in to develop it.

  I’m enjoying these glorious fall days. I hope you’re enjoying them too.

  I love you unconditionally.

  When I attempted to send the email, the following message appeared on my screen: “This member is currently not accepting e-mail from your account.”

  Reading those words, I bent sobbing over the keyboard. I felt like a large part of my heart had been torn out. I had lost one of the most precious things in my life—the email connection with my son, that thin, fragile line of communication I had nurtured with such care because it was all that I had with him.

  IV

  2009

  When working on my memoir, I talked with Suzanne about the time Chris overheard us making love. She told me that her memory of the occasion was that Chris walked into the room in which we had just made love and that I asked him to hand me my robe from the foot of the bed. Suzanne said she was already dressed by that time.

  My memory was that Suzanne and I were at the kitchen table drinking coffee when I heard Chris walking down the stairs and out the front door. I realized then that Chris must have been in the next bedroom taking a nap while we made love and would have heard us. Was Suzanne’s memory at all shaped by details one of her daughters might have told her about the incident as described in Running with Scissors? (Suzanne herself has never read the book.) Was my memory shaped by an attempt to ease the pain of what really happened, whatever that might have been?

  According to Chris’s account in Running with Scissors, he walked in on us making love on the living room couch, a thing we would never have done. And his disgusting description of our lovemaking as well as his talk with Suzanne outside the apartment were both fiction, fiction his anger toward me must have inspired. That he was having a sexual relationship with Jim contributed nothing to his understanding and acceptance of me as his mother having a sexual relationship with another woman. After Suzanne left, I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. It wasn’t long before Chris returned to the apartment and came into the kitchen shouting angrily at me for having had sex with a woman. Instead of recognizing his emotions and trying to talk with him in an understanding, supportive way, I responded defensively. I hope Chris will find it in his heart to forgive me someday for this, and for all the ways I failed him.

  V

  When John Elder was forty, a doctor friend of his diagnosed him as having Asperger’s syndrome. That knowledge changed John Elder’s life dramatically for the better. He not only had a clearer understanding of his feelings and behavior from the time he was a boy until he was diagnosed, he learned ways in which he could change his behavior in order to relate to others more effectively.

  I didn’t learn of his diagnosis and its effects on his life until he was nearly fifty. Once he and Mary were divorced, he rarely visited or called me. It wasn’t until he began to write his memoir that he began to call me, and then he called frequently. His editor told him he needed to write more about his experiences growing up. Because he remembered so little, he depended on me to tell him my memories of his childhood. I was more than happy to do this, not only because I wanted to help him, but also because it gave me the opportunity to hear his voice.

  His memoir, Look Me in the Eye, has spoken to people over much of the world and continues to educate people about Asperger’s as well as to inspire them. I am proud of him and his memoir, though I was surprised at some of the things he wrote that never happened. No ambulance, but Ethel Swift, Dr. Turcotte’s part-time assistant, came to take me to the state hospital, and John Elder didn’t visit me there. He and Chris were in Georgia with his grandparents the entire twenty-one days I was hospitalized. But more important than questioning our different memories is affirming the fact that not only did John Elder survive his past, but that he has created an incredibly successful and fascinating life.

  He must have been not more than twenty-one when he began to build trick guitars for the rock band KISS—guitars that were lit in various patterns with dozens of tiny lights blinking on their surfaces, and guitars that shot rockets into the audience. He traveled with KISS for several years while building and working on their sound equipment. After that, he went on to be an engineer designing electronic games for Milton Bradley. He then worked at a company that built and installed burglar alarms and at another company that built computer components. And always he has been involved in one way or another with cars.

  After he married Martha, a woman I really never got to know, he built a house on the outskirts of Amherst. Jack lived there while attending the Amherst High School, and spent many weekends with his mother in South Hadley.

  Chris and his partner, Dennis, moved from New York City and built a house on the lot next to John Elder’s, though John Elder rarely saw or communicated with Chris, who spent most of his time inside writing on his computer. After nine or ten years Dennis terminated his relationship with Chris. In their settlement Dennis kept the house and Chris moved to a small apartment in New York near Central Park. Since both John Elder and Chris are now divorced from their partners, they sometimes talk on the phone or email each other. However limited their relationship may be, I’m grateful that my sons have each other.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I

  2005

  “I’M DYING, MARGARET,” JOHN ANNOUNCED AS SOON AS HE SAW ME IN the doorway of his hospital room. His wife, Judy, waited in the hall. She was to take him home the next day to die.

  John was so weak he could barely speak above a whisper. Grateful to have time alone with him, I parked my wheelchair next to his bed. He was struggling to lift a plastic spoonful of crushed ice. He handed me the spoon, and I raised it to his open mouth. Then I continued to feed him crushed ice as we talked.

  My husband for twenty-three years, father of our two sons. He was the person with whom I first saw the vivid colors of fall leaves in the North, and, after that, our first snow, the two of us standing in our backyard in Philadelphia in the middle of the night in our pajamas, snow falling on our upturned faces. “Because I experienced these things first with you,” John wrote in an anniversary note to me years after our divorce.

  I fed him more crushed ice. We said we still loved each other. There was no reason to remember the anger, pain, and sadness, and every reason to remember the love.

  “What do you think happens after we die?” John asked, his eyes lit by fear and longing.

  “I believe we just continue our journeys,” I replied.

  He was quiet. Reflective.

  He opened his mouth for more ice.

  After a while John Elder arrived. I said I was leaving so that they could have time alone together. As I pushed my wheelchair toward the door, John Elder, who stood by the bed holding his father’s hand, reached back and grabbed my hand, gripping it tightly. “Stay,” he said.

  I stayed.

  “So your liver finally gave up, is that it?” he asked his father, and began to sob aloud. He gripped my hand harder. “I’ll dig your tractor out of the snow and park it so you can see it from your window when you get home. Would you like that? And the Jaguar?”

  “Yes, son,” John whispered.

  Still holding both John’s and my hand, John Elder sat down in the chair beside the bed. We talked about happy times during John Elder’s early childhood. Especially we talked about our many adventures camping. John was too weak to say many words, but I elaborate
d on the few images he suggested, and he affirmed the stories I told.

  There, for a few precious minutes, at the threshold of John’s death, we were a family again.

  II

  2009

  John has been dead for four years now, and Chris has written his sixth book, The Wolf at the Table, published in May of 2008. Another memoir, it is a dark, grim book focused primarily on his father. Since reading Running with Scissors, I’d read none of his other books. When I scanned them in bookstores and found each to contain more fiction about the woman he called his mother, I didn’t bother to read more. However, after reporters from several newspapers, including The New York Times, asked for my response to his new memoir, I decided to buy a copy of it.

  I must have read it quickly and put it away, blocking it from my mind. I’d not planned on writing any more about Chris. But after I recently came across an interview with him that I’d not read, I realized that I had to state that John didn’t do several terrible things Chris claimed he did, and I read it again. It’s true that John did many terrible things when we were married, but he didn’t do those things, and I can’t find it in my heart to let those things stand as fact when John is not here to defend himself.

  John certainly didn’t starve Ernie, Chris’s guinea pig. As I remember it, Chris gave Ernie to a little girl, a friend of his from school. And John was nothing but kind to Chris’s dog Grover. I was the one who took Grover to the vet, who did all he could to ease his pain from throat cancer. When Grover’s pain could no longer be eased, John took him to the vet, who put him to sleep.

  John never turned Chris’s dog Brutus against him. Brutus was a gentle, friendly dog all his life and slept on Chris’s bed nights. The only trouble we had with him was when he followed runners passing the house and got lost. He was once lost for several months before someone called and Chris and Brutus were reunited. Sadly, when the time came for us to have to move from the Shutesbury house, the owner of the only apartment we could find in Amherst didn’t permit pets. Chris decided to give Brutus to a friendly fireman from the Amherst Fire Department, so he became the firehouse dog.