Craig let me sleep in the next morning, and when I finally crept out to the family room, there was a fire in the fireplace, blocks and Christmas books everywhere, Christmas music playing, and four Meltons on the floor relaxing in their jammies. I joined them, and after several hours of playing like this, the thought crossed my mind that I should probably go do something productive, like Christmas or grocery shopping. Then I thought, but How can I POSSIBLY DO ANYTHING? I have LYME, for Pete’s sake. So we stayed in front of the fire in our pajamas and read books and laughed and ate junk food all day. That night we went to Gena’s house, where we shared a magical evening of old friends and delicious food and a visit from Santa. We hugged and laughed until we cried, and then we expressed our awe that a group of sorority sisters could turn into a mob of women and husbands and babies and love so quickly. We had helped each other grow up, and now we were watching our children grow up together. Together is so good. Not easy, but good.
• • •
Here’s what I learned in the wake of my Lyme news: it’s really hard to distinguish between a chute and a ladder. The days following my diagnosis were filled with little miracles. Maybe all my days are filled with little miracles, but I’m too distracted by what I think is my life to notice them. Sometimes bad news is the best way to see all the good quickly and clearly. Bad news has a way of waking us up, sort of like a glass of cold water in the face. We might prefer waking in a gentler way, but we can’t argue with the efficiency of the cold-water method. And we’ll take it if it means we’re not going to sleep through the party.
In Case of Emergency
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
—Viktor E. Frankl
Sometimes when I call Sister, she answers with, “Well, hello, In Case of Emergency,” since those words accompany my number on her screen. Long ago we read that it’s a good idea to add an “ICE” to your contacts so that if something horrible happens, the person who finds you will know whom to call. So Sister refers to me as “In Case of Emergency” and I call her “Sister.” They mean the same thing.
Something horrible did happen to Sister seven years ago. Three years prior, she married a man whom she loved with every inch of her gigantic heart. Well, we thought she loved him with every inch, but we didn’t understand the true capacity of her heart back then. We don’t believe anymore that anyone loves with her whole heart, just pieces of her broken heart. Now we know that in order for love to be real and true and good, you need to have had your heart shattered. We know now that a broken heart is not the end of the world, but a beginning. Back then, we were still trying to run from broken hearts. We didn’t understand yet what Joanna Macy meant when she wrote that “the heart that breaks open can contain the universe.”
Sister’s heart shattered when, after the torment of a few confounding, excruciating weeks, her husband decided that he was finished being married to her. Because he was abroad throughout much of their marriage, she learned that it was over via e-mail. Just months earlier, we’d bought homes within a mile of each other, with dreams of raising our babies together. But one afternoon it all fell apart, as it does. I sat on the wood floor below Sister’s desk chair, rocking Tish in her infant seat, kissing her forehead and inhaling her new baby smell. While Sister read her e-mail, I held Tish’s teeny hand and looked up to see Sister’s face darken and fall. Then I watched my best friend crumble out of her chair and melt onto the floor next to Tish and me. She curled up in a ball with her hands covering her head, her back to me, the world, and the sky. She heaved and rocked and moaned. Her posture and the noises she made reminded me of a dying animal. I touched my baby Sister’s quivering back, and I looked up at the ceiling and said aloud, “GodDAMNIT. GodDAMNIT. GODDAMNIT.” It was important to me that God knew immediately that I held him completely responsible for Sister’s pain. I pulled out my WTF? billboard prayer and turned it toward the heavens on behalf of Sister.
For months I’d begged God to save her marriage. I’d asked Him to help her, one of his finest creations: a woman who values honor, loyalty, truth, and commitment more than any other person I’ve ever known. A woman who’d spent every moment of her life doing the right thing. She’d earned straight As from birth. She was both the most popular girl in school and the kindest. She specialized in including everyone, especially the loners. She labored through a top-notch university, graduated with honors and spent her weekends volunteering in the state’s only maximum security women’s jail, studying the cycle of domestic violence, and making friends. After her first year of college, she flew to Ireland by herself to learn firsthand about her ancestors and The Troubles. After graduating, she moved to Hawaii for a few months to care for a friend’s grandmother, sling pizzas, and learn to surf. From Hawaii she traveled alone to Mexico to build houses for the homeless. Then she came home and suffered through law school to make a difference for the powerless with her big brain and heart and education. All the while, she cared for the largest and smallest needs of our family and friends. She was the role model for everyone who knew her. She was good, good enough to deserve a good man. And of all the things she’d gotten right in her life, she believed that marriage was the most important.
I was the prodigal daughter; she was the steadfast one. And there we were. I, with two babies and a husband at home. She, shattered on the floor. I’d never done a productive thing in my life except get sober and make babies. I’d done everything backward. She’d done everything, forever, by the book. The right way. Until then, I’d only learned this about grace: sometimes, like in my case, you get blessed for no reason. You get something wonderful that you don’t deserve. But on that day, I learned that the flip side is also true: sometimes you get screwed for no reason. You get something awful that you never, ever deserved. It all slips away. You cannot earn yourself an easy life or even a fair one.
Soon after The Day It All Fell Apart, Sister moved in with us. This brilliant, beautiful, accomplished woman moved into a teeny, cold room in our basement. She never missed a day of work. Her work was hard—often fifteen hours a day hard. She came home late and cried most nights. I’d sit with her and cry too. She couldn’t eat much, but Craig would grill her favorites, and I’d try to convince her to eat a few bites. I’d bring her water in the evening and coffee in the morning. There were no words to offer that didn’t ring of Pollyanna hope and absurdity. I had absolutely nothing I could use to take her pain away. She cried herself to sleep in our basement. Sometimes I’d stand outside her bedroom and angrily pray or sit silently with my back against her door. I was holding vigil, making sure that no more sadness entered that room. It was my ridiculous attempt to protect her.
During that year, I was attached to the phone. I was always on the phone, listening to Sister cry or try not to cry, which was worse. The tortuous days following The Day It All Fell Apart passed slowly. Small bits of information made their way to her and then me, just enough to make each day crueler than the last. The costs incurred by the divorce were equally devastating. Time was relentless and heavy. It felt as if we were going through life with refrigerators strapped to our backs. It was hard to breathe, hard to feel anything but weight and self-pity and anger. After hours on the phone with Sister, giving her nothing but bewildered, agonizing silence and sincere but impotent offerings and platitudes like, “God, I’m so sorry. I love you so much,” I’d have to call my parents to give them the daily report: the information about Sister’s mental and emotional state on that particular day. I was the go-between. Sister couldn’t do it because it was too hard to say twice and because she had a tremendous amount of work to get done and a stiff upper lip to maintain at her law firm. But also because we both knew that my parents were the most heartbroken of all.
My Sister is their Baby, and this was a knock-out blow. My dad was angrier than he’d ever been. He was also incredibly tender with her, but we could all sense the rage below the surface. He is her father, and he considers it his lifelong responsibility and honor to prot
ect his babies from pain. Now, once again, one of his daughters was suffering through something he’d never had to face, walking a path he hadn’t blazed before for us, and that seemed all but impossible for him to survive. So Sister felt it was her responsibility to help assuage his anger, his pain. And she just didn’t have the strength to lead anyone else through the darkness.
My mother was equally devastated—so devastated, in fact, that it was hard for her to let it be as awful as it was. She was hopeful. She had to be, because allowing it to really sink in, accepting that there was no way out of the pain that her baby girl was going through, no matter how much “hope” we directed her way, was unfathomable. So she said things that occasionally made Sister feel that she was being pushed through her grief too fast.
I learned that in these disasters, all we can do is tell our In Case of Emergencies that their grief is real, and if it lasts forever, then we will grieve with them forever.
As far as I was able to tell during those two years, there was nothing else worth saying. It was not going to be all right, ever. Everything doesn’t happen for a decent reason. I was Sister’s In Case of Emergency and I couldn’t fix her emergency. I couldn’t do anything at all except feed her, hold her when she cried, pray angry prayers, keep showing up, and hope that time and my home and presence would offer healing.
I also learned that the In Case of Emergency needs a whole lot of help too. One day I called my parents and said, “You need to come today. TODAY. I need help. It feels like too much today. I’m going to break if I don’t get some air. I need to spend one night not watching her cry. My heart is shattering.”
My mom was so worried about me that she said, “Honey, maybe this is too much for your family. You need to be with your husband and children. Maybe we need to make different living arrangements.” And I froze. I said, “No. NO. Mom, please come here and help me today. But please, don’t ever, ever breathe a word to Sister about how hard this is for me. Not a word, not a glance, nothing, nothing that will make her feel like a burden. She is not a burden. She is a gift. Carrying her through this is an honor—it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life. I just need some help. Come today, and then go and let me get back to work.”
She did. She always does. My parents ALWAYS show up.
Time passed slowly. I would not say we made progress. Everything went in circles, cycles. One afternoon there would be laughter, but it would fall apart again by evening. Time was not a forward march toward hope. It was just a waiting time, like we were all in a bunker together waiting out some nuclear fallout and wondering when, if ever, it’d be safe to go outside again.
What’s funny is that I remember this as one of the hardest things my little family has ever endured. My children and Craig had little to none of my attention. My heart and mind were always on Sister. But when I asked Craig what he remembered about that time, he said, “That was fun, wasn’t it? Having her with us?” That’s all he remembers, really. Just enjoying her company. No wonder she healed at my house.
Sister started dating again after a year. It was horrible. She described dating after the divorce as getting vicious food poisoning from a cheeseburger and then being forced to eat burger after burger while you’re still nauseated by the first one. Sister is beautiful and smart and hilarious, and it seemed that each man she dated would fall in love with her, and then she’d have to break his heart, which would break hers wide open again. Each breakup tossed her right back into her original pain. It was like ripping a bandage off an open wound again and again and again.
Eventually the day came for her to move out. I was terrified and dead set against it. I did not think she was ready. But she reminded me that I would never think she was ready, because I was not ready. I did not trust the world with her anymore. But she went out into the world anyway. The day she moved out, she’d been dating a boy. Everyone knew he wasn’t THE boy, but he was a good and kind one. He was the one to hold her hand while she walked toward the moving van sitting in front of my house. He was there to share the physical and emotional burden of moving out and on. I’ll never forget watching the two of them walking away, hand in hand. I’ve done this only three times in my life, but after I closed the door behind her, I fell to my knees on the floor. I started speaking to God kindly again, for the first time in a year. I said, Thank you, there seems to be hope. Thank you, because she’s still walking. Thank you, for sending a strong, good man to help her take this next step. Life is so, so incredibly burdensome—much more so without a partner to share the weight.
Sister moved in with friends. She broke up with the Good-But-Not-the-One Boy. Life continued to be hard. More confusing information came in about her ex-husband. Her friends started buying homes and having babies.
One day my friend Joanna called me to ask my permission to set up Sister with our mutual friend, John. I was scared and said, “No, no, nope. Absolutely not.” Joanna kept asking. Three months later, I said, “Fine.” He asked for a picture. I sent one of Sister and Tish holding hands crossing a busy street. John replied that he felt like Sister might be too young for him, but the crossing guard was a stunner. I laughed, but just a little.
They had their first date at an Irish pub. John told me later that when Sister walked in, he fell speechless for the first time in his life. He stumbled through hellos. She ordered a Guinness. He thought he’d died and gone to Irish Boy heaven.
They stayed at their table for hours and got kicked out when the pub closed. He walked her to her car, and they both got in and talked into the wee hours of the early morning, when the street sweeper made them leave. I remember getting Sister’s call later that day and hearing something in her voice that made me think Oh. God. He’s gonna be the One.
I KNEW it. He was. Soon everyone knew it.
But Sister wasn’t ready to know it. She had work to do. Although we did everything in our power to stop her, she took a year-long leave from her law firm and applied to work for the International Justice Mission.
Sister was sent to Rwanda. She was to be there for a year. She and John had been dating for six months when she decided to go, but he supported her fully. He said, “Go. Go do what you need to do. I will be here waiting for you.”
We all said that. It was a very, very hard thing to say.
Sister spent the year finding and saving child rape victims and prosecuting child rapists. Occasionally she’d call and explain to me over a horrible connection that she’d been searching through huts to reunite a baby with its family, or that she was at an orphanage holding sick children. I’d say, “Listen. I don’t want to hear it. I spent two hours at freaking Chuck E Cheese today.”
“You win!” Sister would say.
My parents spent the year in terror—terror mixed with ferocious pride. Sister started telling me on the phone that she was considering the possibility that she wasn’t meant to marry. Perhaps God was calling her to lead a life of adventure and service. That maybe she should stay in Africa to continue saving children from evil.
I supported this noble idea not at all. I told her that I thought she was afraid of committing again. I told her that perhaps it felt safer to spend her life saving humanity than to risk loving one human being again. We talked about how loving one person hard and long and well is the hardest thing on earth to do.
She came home. She came home to us—to John, really. Soon after, John asked for my sister’s hand in marriage. My dad said the following: If you hurt her, you are going to need to find a country far, far away where I will not be able to find you. Because I will try. I will spend the rest of my life trying to find you.
“I am not going to hurt her,” John said. John is a good, honest man, and we all knew he was The One for Sister. But we were still scared to death. None of us was sure, after walking through the pain, that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. When Sister accepted John’s proposal, I gave her a necklace that said, “I am not afraid. I was born to do this,” a qu
ote attributed to Joan of Arc before she charged into battle. I knew that for Sister, entering marriage again took every bit of her courage.
On their wedding day, I gave a toast in which I explained that as Sister’s In Case of Emergency, I know what a responsibility it is to be the best friend and caretaker of such a masterpiece of a human being. To John, my parents, Craig, our friends and family, and to Sister, I said:
Sister. She’s a masterpiece. People feel it when they first meet her. They sense it even when they walk by her. Last week we were out shopping and three different middle-aged men stopped us on the sidewalk and said, “I’m sorry, but I just have to tell you how beautiful you are.” She smiled and thanked them graciously but without a hint of surprise, because it happens to her all the time.
But there are beautiful people, and then there is beauty like my Sister’s. Beauty that comes from being born with unshakable, superhuman integrity. Beauty that comes from intelligence matched with wisdom. Beauty that is compassion combined with courage. The beauty that comes from being a woman who can be trusted. All who are lucky enough to know her know this beauty. We know that she’s a work of art. But not everyone knows the process the artist used to create her.
I do. My whole life has been about paying attention to my Sister. Everything she has ever learned or feared or dreamed or wondered has been important to me, and so I’ve memorized it all. I know what she wore every single first day of school since kindergarten. I know she still has most of those outfits. I remember the entire speech she gave when she ran for president of her elementary school, and I remember word-for-word the commencement speech she delivered at her high school graduation. I know the name of her first Cabbage Patch Kid and the names of our, I mean her, future children. I know what she’s thinking right now and exactly what her facial expression will be when this toast is done and the colors she’ll paint her first house. I am my Sister’s biography. I am the song that should be written about her and the poem and the play and the prayer. I’ve got it all, right here. Recording it all, bearing witness to such an amazing life, has been the honor of my life.
Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed Page 4