A Mind Unraveled

by Kurt Eichenwald

  From there, it was on to recounting the events that led to my dismissal. Theresa had coached me ahead of time, urging me not to become bogged down in details. She knew from hearing the story herself that I could ramble about what had happened endlessly, shifting from narrative to fury to outrage to depression and back again.

  Bloom and Bayer listened as I expressed my almost unquenchable anger about my experiences. I had prepared for our meeting by reviewing some of my records and occasionally laid out some details that seemed to make both men wince.

  After I finished, Bloom spoke. “What can we do to repair your relationship with Swarthmore?”

  I considered the question. Bloom was one of the good guys. Still, the young man who had been forced to fight the school needed official recognition that the college’s treatment had been wrong, that the impact had been terrible. Throughout my career, I had never been able to shake the dread that everything could suddenly be taken away without warning. That was why I worked myself to exhaustion, refusing assignments only if they conflicted with the needs of my family: I feared that turning down a project could cause me to lose my job and my health insurance. Then there were the nightmares that still haunted my sleep about the night I was thrown out, the pleading as I tried to convince the administration that my treatment and life could end as a result of what they were doing.

  “I need an apology,” I said. “I need someone to tell me, officially, that this never should have happened. And I want back the tuition that was stolen from my family.”

  Bloom nodded. But he made no commitments.

  * * *

  —

  The letter from Swarthmore arrived at our home shortly afterward. Usually, I threw away the school’s correspondence, assuming it was a request for money or an announcement of a rah-rah alumni celebration. But this letter looked different, like something personal. I opened the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of paper. It was from Bloom, writing in his official capacity as the president of Swarthmore. The words struck me hard: After more than two decades, this was the school’s official apology for illegally kicking me out.

  “Theresa!” I called. “Come look at this!”

  Soon after, Bayer called. The administration wanted me to return to Swarthmore and speak about my work as a journalist. This was no ordinary talk but part of a series of special annual addresses often delivered by prominent alumni.

  “You’ll be receiving an honorarium for the lecture,” Bayer said. The amount: equal to the tuition I had told him my family lost for the semester I was forced out.

  I laughed. “You guys are very, very smart.”

  An apology and a tuition reimbursement. For the first time, I felt like Swarthmore actually was my alma mater, not just a place that had handed me an undergraduate degree.

  I told Bayer I would be delighted to deliver the lecture. Then, after I spoke to Theresa, we agreed to contribute the honorarium to the school and pledge twenty thousand dollars more. My decades of freezing out Swarthmore were over.

  * * *

  —

  A stately beech tree spread its limbs over the porch wrapping the Second Empire house reserved for Swarthmore’s president. As I approached the doors, I marveled at the heavy moldings and bounteous windows decorating the residence. In my years at the school, I had never visited the home, but on this evening, I had been invited to join Bloom there for dinner before delivering my lecture.

  The meal was delicious, and Bloom and I spent some time discussing the changes at Swarthmore since the eighties. We chatted about the letter he had sent, and I commented how odd it struck me that the official apology came from someone who had offered so much support. The person who really owed me an apology, I said, was Whitaker, the school psychologist.

  “He doesn’t work here anymore,” Bloom said. “In fact, he was pretty much driven out of Swarthmore.”

  Years after my graduation, Bloom said, Whitaker had set off school-wide controversy. He had been behind an effort to push another student out of the school after he decided she was suicidal, then fought to prevent her return. There had also been complaints that he told a woman being abused by her boyfriend that she bore responsibility for his behavior. After dozens of students launched a campaign to have him removed, accusing Whitaker of unprofessional and abusive practices, Bloom had agreed to assemble a team of outside experts to evaluate the students’ claims. Whitaker resigned rather than allow his activities to be reviewed.

  “Good,” I grumbled. “But it would have been better if he was fired.”

  * * *

  —

  One of the best experiences of my life was taking college tours with my sons. The first time was in 2009 with my oldest, Adam. At that point, I could drive. The medication change that had begun two years earlier in my fruitless effort to regain memories had been brutal, but the side effects had lessened and the seizures abated when I switched from regular Lamictal to the extended-release form of the drug.

  With a schedule of colleges and universities to visit, we drove across the East Coast without ever turning on the radio. Instead, we talked for hours about everything and nothing, about secrets and dreams, about goofy jokes and serious concerns; it was the same experience I would later share with my younger two boys when the time came for their college visits.

  We arrived at Swarthmore after touring a half dozen other schools. Adam had expressed uncertainty regarding my thoughts about the college: Would I want him to attend or be opposed? I told him, even if I hadn’t already made my peace with Swarthmore, his choice of college had nothing to do with me. The decision was his; I would not pressure him toward any conclusion.

  We finished the official tour for prospective students and were walking up the path from Sharples Dining Hall. I could see the spot where I had fallen on my face in the gravel during a convulsion; fortunately, I remembered nothing of that experience, and it never turned up in any frightening dreams.

  I saw a man jogging toward us in sports attire that suggested this was a routine exercise for him. As he approached, his eyes lit up in recognition. I instantly identified him too—Allen Schneider, the psychology professor who was the first official at Swarthmore to witness one of my seizures. He had helped after that convulsion in a hallway, met with me to offer his support, and ultimately led me to Al Bloom.

  “Professor Schneider?”

  “Kurt!”

  He wrapped his arms around me in a tight embrace.

  “I am so proud of you,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  I was amazed. Not only did Schneider remember me, not only did he remember the magnitude of my health problems, but he also remembered fearing for my well-being. Nearly three decades had passed since he saw my seizure, but our experiences still resonated in his mind.

  I introduced Adam to Schneider, and we spent a few minutes catching up. Then he resumed his run. Bumping into Schneider reminded me, Swarthmore was not just a place of nightmares. Yes, there had been trauma, but there had also been much kindness and support. Carl, Franz, Schneider, Bloom, and so many others made sacrifices that brought me to this moment with my son. I had borrowed their strength, and that blossomed, allowing me to confront years of challenges. Some people at Swarthmore almost destroyed me, but the community saved me. I could never allow myself to forget that again.

  Adam and I resumed our wandering, heading toward Clothier Hall, where I had directed Pippin. He stopped on the pathway.

  “Where did you get buried in the snow, Dad?”

  I had always been open with the boys about my experiences, holding back only on disclosing my rape. I finally told them about that while working on this book, asking if the revelation of my sexual assault would embarrass them in front of their friends; each replied that anyone who thought less of me or of them because of the attack was not worth their time.

  But on the day we tou
red the campus, Adam knew that the night of the blizzard remained my most frequent nightmare. He had noticed that, when I discussed my seizures, I rubbed the inside of my right palm, the spot I had scraped along the ground repeatedly, forcing myself to stay awake as I crawled through the snow. Now he wanted me to show him where that horrible experience had occurred. I couldn’t go back.

  “It’s far away from here,” I lied. “We don’t need to go there.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We do.”

  This wasn’t curiosity. He wanted to force me to confront a major source of my fears. The enormity of that spot in my psyche had overwhelmed me for much of my life. And now Adam wanted to drag me back there, to see it again?

  “No,” I insisted. “There’s no reason to go.”

  Adam stopped walking. “We’re going. I’m not moving until you agree to take me there.”

  I knew Adam was stubborn enough that this standoff could last all day, so I agreed. We walked toward Wharton dormitory until we reached the site. I pointed out everything to him. That’s where I fell into the tennis court fence. That’s the lamppost I saw. Those are the stairs I climbed. Those are the windows where I could see students, the ones who couldn’t hear my cries for help. That’s where the student football player found me. That’s the door he carried me through.

  Adam said, “Okay, now look around, Dad.”

  I did.

  “Dad,” he said, “it’s just a place. Something bad happened here. But it’s just a place. See it for what it is.”

  I stared at this monstrous location. Grass, trees, a fence, a building. These were the sights of a thousand other spots on a thousand other college campuses.

  “It can’t hurt you, Dad,” Adam said. “It’s just a place.”

  It’s just a place. It’s just a place. Nothing more. I had surrendered part of myself to this space of grass and asphalt. I had allowed it to control me, to haunt my dreams. But Adam was right. It was just a place.

  I turned and hugged my son. And then I thanked him.

  * * *

  —

  On the evening of March 25, 2011, Theresa and I walked across North Broadway in Los Angeles toward a windowless building. I told her this couldn’t be the right place; with its shabby, dark blue façade, the place looked more like an abandoned warehouse than the site for an important party.

  An employee opened the front door, and we stepped inside. The rooms were gorgeous and well-appointed, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the building’s outside appearance. We were escorted to a back room where crowds milled about. A goat’s head hung on a brick wall, a decoration that struck me as an oddity for Los Angeles. I glanced around for faces I might recognize. No luck.

  Someone called out that the guest of honor would arrive momentarily, so everyone stopped talking. Minutes later, a tall man appeared in the entryway accompanied by his wife.

  “Surprise!” the crowd yelled. My college roommate Carl Moor looked stunned to see so many people gathered to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. He made his way around the room, greeting everyone. When he saw me, we hugged as he thanked Theresa and me for flying in from Dallas for the party. I saw Franz, who had flown from New York for the party, and we also embraced.

  Carl, Franz, and I had stayed close since our final year in college. We visited one another occasionally, spoke by phone and email. My ties with Franz would undoubtedly be lifelong. In a strange twist, he was now my sort-of nephew, since his wife’s stepmother was Theresa’s sister.

  I chatted with Carl’s wife, Ann, whom I had known for many years, and met his two children. Then I resumed looking through the crowd for anyone I had met during that terrible summer in Chicago. I saw Tom, one of Carl’s two friends who had been staples of our social life during those months, and we spoke for a few minutes. Then I ran into Carl’s brothers, Peter and A.J., and we discussed family, jobs, and stories from the thirty-odd years since we had last seen one another.

  The distance I had traveled from desperately ill college student occasionally came up in the conversations with party-goers who had seen me at my worst. Some congratulated me on obtaining my goal of working in newspapers, particularly given that they had heard that years ago I’d been named one of the youngest senior writers ever at The New York Times. Others told me they had read my books, congratulated me on being a New York Times bestselling author, or mentioned they had seen the Matt Damon movie based on my second nonfiction work, The Informant. When asked, I told them I was working on my fourth book, about terrorism and national security after 9/11.

  Eventually, I noticed an older couple across the room and recognized them as Carl’s parents, Lynne and Donell Moor. I thought about their kindness to me in that dreadful time. During spring break of junior year, they also had let me stay in their home while I searched for a summer job. I remembered being touched when Donell told me that he was proud I’d had the courage to travel alone on Amtrak from Philadelphia to Chicago. We all knew that if I’d experienced a grand mal seizure on the train, I would have been taken off at the next stop and brought to a strange hospital in an unknown city, and then I would have had to find my way back home without friends or family to guide me.

  I brought Theresa over to meet the Moors. Hugs and introductions followed. Theresa and I talked about our kids, our work, our lives.

  “How are things with your health?” Donell asked.

  Theresa replied first. “Not well—” she began.

  “Wait!” I interrupted. She was coming at this from a different context, I told her. What the Moors had seen and what she experienced were so dissimilar, the standards of good or bad from the two perspectives were unrelated.

  “I’m doing really, really well,” I told the Moors.

  * * *

  —

  One last promise to keep.

  On a summer day in 2015, my children and I arranged to meet on F Street in Washington, D.C., one block from Union Station. Adam, who had graduated from Bowdoin College the previous year, drove from Baltimore, where he was working as an environmental scientist. Our youngest, Sam, was with me on his college tour, and he was being recruited by the University of Pennsylvania for his skills as a photographer. The three of us stood near a green awning, chatting as we waited on my middle son, Ryan; he was a student at Duke University and had been meeting with New York publishing houses in hopes of a career in that industry. Theresa had wanted to come but couldn’t leave her medical practice for the one-day trip.

  Ryan’s train arrived, and he walked down Massachusetts Avenue to where we were waiting. I hadn’t seen my sons together since Christmas, but I knew everything happening in their lives. They kept Theresa and me updated; having raised them knowing they could speak to us about anything kept open a flow of conversation. We spoke multiple times a week.

  Crowds wandered past as I looked at my three boys, successful young men who never would have existed if I had given up when my challenges seemed insurmountable. They were my reward, the personification of why I had struggled. Now I needed to take that last step, to honor the person I had been, the one who had made a commitment so many decades before that helped me achieve my dreams.

  Small seizures had continued, but I mostly ignored them. After my fourth book was published in 2012, I joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor and then also took a job at Newsweek as a senior writer. I believed things were good until Theresa and my neurologist intervened to once again tell me I did not have as much control as I believed. The doctor added another medication, called Onfi, and I struggled with the side effects as he adjusted the dosage. My boss at Newsweek, Jim Impoco, was supportive and allowed me to take a day or two off whenever I was struggling with the fine-tuning of the treatment. My control improved but was not perfect. My neurologist told me for the first time in 2014 that I had what was known as refractory epilepsy. I did not know what that meant.

/>   “It’s intractable epilepsy,” he said. “It means it’s very difficult to treat. We’ll probably never achieve total control.”

  No matter. Naarden always advised me to find the balance between seizures, side effects, and an acceptable life. By that standard, I was satisfied. I found the balance. I achieved the life I wanted, and it all led to this moment on F Street with my sons.

  Throughout college, Adam had asked, “When will we be going to Washington?” They all knew of the promise I had made to myself.

  “Soon,” I always replied; it wasn’t time until after he graduated. The other two griped that they would be left out for part of this experience, but I had no choice. I explained that I had to abide by the commitment I made based on a fantasy about my future. Only one, the firstborn.

  I told the boys to wait outside and pulled open the bright red door at the entrance of The Dubliner. I glanced around the dining room with dismay—they had rearranged the tables from how they had been decades before. I needed to honor the promise precisely. I owed that to the person I had been.

  A hostess asked me if I wanted a table for one.

  “No, actually I have something really strange to ask you,” I replied.

  She gave me a perplexed smile. “Okay…” she said hesitantly.

  “Many years ago, in the early 1980s, I was in this restaurant at a time when I was very sick. Every day it took a lot of energy and effort to fight. Sometimes I didn’t know if I could keep going.”

  Her confusion gave way to fascination.

  “I was here having lunch, and I gave myself a goal. I wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids. But I promised myself that someday I would come back here with my future son, and sit at the same table, and tell him I was proud of him. I’ve come here today with him to keep that commitment.”