The Choice

by Edith Eger

  So began a correspondence and a friendship that would last for many years, in which we would try together to answer the questions that ran through our lives: Why did I survive? What is the purpose in my life? What meaning can I make from my suffering? How can I help myself and others to endure the hardest parts of life and to experience more passion and joy? After exchanging letters for several years, we met for the first time at a lecture he gave in San Diego in the 1970s. He invited me backstage to meet his wife and even asked me to critique his talk—a hugely important moment, to be treated by my mentor as a peer. Even his first letter nourished in me the seed of a calling: the search to make meaning in my life by helping others to make meaning; to heal so that I could heal others; to heal others so that I could heal myself. It also reinforced my understanding, however misapplied when I divorced Béla, that I had the power and opportunity—as well as the responsibility—to choose my own meaning, my own life.

  I had taken my first conscious step toward finding my own way in the late 1950s, when I noticed Johnny’s developmental challenges and needed help in meeting them. A friend recommended a Jungian analyst who had studied in Switzerland. I knew next to nothing about clinical psychology in general or Jungian analysis in particular, but after looking into the subject a bit, several Jungian ideas appealed to me. I liked the emphasis on myths and archetypes, which reminded me of the literature I had loved as a girl. And I was intrigued by the notion of bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of one’s psyche together into a balanced whole. I remembered the images of dissonance between Vicky Page’s inner and outer experience in The Red Shoes, and of course I was suffering in the grip of my own inner conflicts. I wasn’t consciously entering therapy to heal that tension in myself—I really just wanted to know what to do for my son and how to heal the rift between Béla and me over what to do. But I also felt drawn to Carl Jung’s vision of therapeutic analysis: It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost. “Saying yea” to myself. I wanted to do that. I wanted to blossom and improve.

  My therapist gave me dream homework, and I studiously recorded my dreams. Almost always, I was flying. I could choose how high or low to the ground to fly, how fast or how slow. I could choose which landscapes to fly over—European cathedrals, forested mountains, ocean beaches. I looked forward to sleep so that I could have these dreams in which I was joyful and strong, flying free, in control. I found in those dreams my power to transcend the limiting assumptions that others often imposed on my son. And I found my desire to transcend what I perceived to be the limitations imposed on me. I didn’t yet know that the limitations that needed transcending weren’t without—they were within. So when, years later, under the influence of Viktor Frankl, I began to question what I wanted out of life, it was easy for me to think that saying no to Béla would be one way of saying yes to myself.

  In the months after the divorce, I felt better. For several years I had been suffering from migraines (my mother had also struggled with debilitating headaches; I assumed they were hereditary), but right after Béla and I separated, the migraines disappeared, departing like a season. I thought it was because now I was living free from Béla’s weather—his yelling and cynicism, his irritation and disappointment. My headaches disappeared and so did my need to hide, to retreat. I invited fellow students and our professors to my house, I hosted raucous parties, I felt at the center of a community, open to the world.

  I was living the way I wanted to live, I thought. But soon a fog set in. My surroundings looked gray-washed. I had to remind myself to eat.

  One Saturday morning in May 1969, I sit at home alone in the den. It’s my graduation day. I am forty-two years old. I am graduating with a BS in psychology from the University of Texas–El Paso, I am graduating with honors. Yet I can’t make myself walk in the ceremony. I am too ashamed. “I should have done this years ago,” I tell myself. What I really mean—the subtext of so many of my choices and beliefs—is, “I don’t deserve to have survived.” I am so obsessed with proving my worth, with earning my place in the world, that I don’t need Hitler anymore. I have become my own jailor, telling myself, “No matter what you do, you will never be good enough.”

  What I miss the most about Béla is the way he dances. Especially the Viennese waltz. As cynical and angry as he can be, he also lets joy in, he lets his body wear it, express it. He can surrender to the tempo and still lead, hold steady. I dream of him some nights. Of his childhood, the stories he told me in letters when he courted me. I see his father collapse into an avalanche, his breath lost in all that white. I see his mother panic in a Budapest market and confess her identity to the SS. I think of the sad tension in Béla’s family stemming from his mother’s role in their deaths. I think of Béla’s stutter, the way his early trauma marked him. One summer day Béla comes to pick up John. He’s driving a new car. In America, we have always owned frugal cars—dumpy cars, our children say. Today he’s driving an Oldsmobile with leather seats. He bought it used, he says, defensive, proud. But my look of disbelief isn’t about the car. It’s about the elegant woman sitting in the passenger seat. He’s found someone else.

  I am grateful for the necessity of working to support myself and my children. Work is an escape. And it gives me a clear purpose. I become a seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher in the El Paso barrio. I receive job offers from more coveted schools in the wealthy parts of town, but I want to work with students who are bilingual, who are facing the kinds of obstacles Béla and I did when we came to America: poverty, prejudice. I want to connect my students to their choices, to show them that the more choices they have, the less they’ll feel like victims. The most difficult part of my job is countering the negative voices in my students’ lives—sometimes even their own parents’ voices—that say they will never make it as students, that education for them isn’t a viable course. You’re so puny, you’re so ugly, you’ll never find a husband. I tell them about my crossed eyes, about my sisters’ silly chant, how the problem wasn’t that they sang these songs to me—the problem was that I believed them. But I don’t let my students know how deeply I identify with them, how hate obliterated my childhood, how I know the darkness that eats you when you’ve been taught to believe that you don’t matter. I remember the voice that rose up through the Tatra Mountains, If you’re going to live, you have to stand for something. My students give me something to stand for. But I am still numb and anxious, isolated, so brittle and sad.

  The flashbacks persist, they happen sometimes when I’m driving. I see a policeman in uniform at the side of the road and my vision tunnels, I feel like I will faint. I don’t have a name for these experiences, I don’t yet understand that they are a physiological manifestation of the grief that I haven’t dealt with yet. A clue my body sends as a reminder of the feelings that I have blocked from conscious life. A storm that assaults me when I deny myself permission to feel.

  What are my disowned feelings? They are like strangers living in my house, invisible except for the food they steal, the furniture they leave out of place, the mud they trail down the hall. Divorce doesn’t liberate me from their uneasy presence. Divorce empties the room of other distractions, of the habitual targets of my blame and resentment, and forces me to sit alone with my feelings.

  Sometimes I call Magda. She and Nat have divorced too, and she is remarried to Ted Gilbert, a man closer to her age, a kind listener and stepfather. She and Nat have maintained a close friendship. He comes to her house for dinner two or three times a week. “Be careful what you do when you’re restless,” my sister cautions. “You can start to think the wrong things. Unimportant things. He’s too this, he’s too that, I’ve suffered enough. You end up missing the same things that drove you crazy.”

  It’s like she has read my mind, the little edge of doubt, the conces
sion that maybe divorce isn’t fixing what I thought was broken.

  One night a woman calls my house. She is looking for Béla. Do I know where he might be? It’s his girlfriend, I realize. She’s calling my house as though I keep tabs on my ex-husband, as though I owe her information, as though I am his secretary. “Don’t ever call me again!” I shout. After I hang up, I am agitated, I can’t sleep. I try to have a flying dream, a lucid dream, but I can’t take flight, I keep falling, waking. It is a terrible night. And a useful one. Audrey’s sleeping over at a friend’s house, Johnny is already in bed. There is nowhere to go to escape from my discomfort; I just have to feel it. I cry, I feel sorry for myself, I am furious. I feel every wave of jealousy, of bitterness, of loneliness, of indignation, of self-pity, and on and on. And in the morning, although I haven’t slept, I feel better. Calmer. Nothing has changed. I still feel abandoned, however illogically, by the husband I chose to leave. But my storminess and agitation have run their course. They aren’t permanent features. They move, they change. I feel more at peace.

  I will have many more nights and days like this one. Times when I am alone, when I begin to practice the work of not pushing my feelings away, no matter how painful. That is the gift of my divorce: the recognition that I have to face up to what’s inside me. If I am really going to improve my life, it isn’t Béla or our relationship that has to change. It’s me.

  I see the need for change, but I don’t know what kind of change will help me feel freer and more joyful. I try a new therapist, for fresh perspective on my marriage, but her approach isn’t useful—she wags her finger at me, telling me that forcing Béla to do the grocery shopping was emasculating, that I should never have mowed the lawn and taken his male responsibilities from him. She picks at the things that were working in my marriage and recasts them as problems and faults. I try a new job, this time at a high school, where I teach introductory psychology and serve as a school counselor. But the sense of purpose I felt at the beginning of my profession begins to be eroded by the bureaucracy of schools, the huge class sizes and case loads, the inability to work effectively with individual students. There’s more I have to offer—I know this, although I don’t yet know what it is I am meant to do.

  This theme prevails: that my deepest and most important work, professionally and personally, is still to come, and still blurry, undefined. My friends Lili and Arpad are the first people to name for me what this work will entail, though I am not yet ready to acknowledge it, much less take it on. One weekend they invite me to visit them in Mexico. For years, Béla and I have vacationed with them together; this time, I go alone. The Sunday I am to return home, we linger over breakfast—coffee, fruit, the eggs I’ve cooked with Hungarian peppers and onions.

  “We’re worried about you,” Lili says, her voice easy, gentle.

  I know she and Arpad were surprised by the divorce, I know they think I made a mistake. It’s hard not to read her concern as judgment. I tell them about Béla’s girlfriend, she’s a writer or a musician, I can never remember which, she isn’t a person to me, she is an idea: Béla has moved on and left me behind. My friends listen, they are sympathetic. Then they share a glance, and Arpad clears his throat.

  “Edie,” he says, “forgive me if I’m getting too personal, and you can tell me to mind my own business. But I wonder, have you ever considered that it might be beneficial for you to work through your past?”

  Work through it? I lived it, what other work is there to do? I want to say. I’ve broken the conspiracy of silence. And talking hasn’t made the fear or flashbacks go away. In fact, talking seems to have made my symptoms worse. I haven’t broken my silence with my children or friends in a formal way, but I no longer live in fear that they will ask me about the past. And I have tried to embrace opportunities to share my story. Recently, when a friend from my undergraduate days who went on to pursue a master’s in history asked to interview me for a paper she was writing about the Holocaust, I accepted. I thought it might be a relief to tell my whole story. But when I left her house, I was shaking. I came home and vomited, just as I had a decade before when Marianne showed us the book with pictures of concentration camp inmates. “The past is past,” I tell Lili and Arpad now. I’m not ready to heed or even understand Arpad’s advice to “work through” the past. But, like Viktor Frankl’s letter, it plants a seed within me, something that will sprout and take root with time.

  One Saturday I am sitting at the table in the kitchen, grading my students’ psychology exams, when Béla calls. It’s his day with Audrey and John. My mind leaps to fear.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing’s wrong. They’re watching TV.” He goes quiet, he waits for his voice to catch up. “Come to dinner,” he finally says.

  “With you?”

  “With me.”

  “I’m busy,” I say. I am. I have a date with a sociology professor. I have already called Marianne, asking for advice. What should I wear? What should I say? What should I do if he invites me to go home with him? Do not sleep with him, she has warned me. Especially not on a first date.

  “Edith Eva Eger,” my ex-husband pleads, “please, please let the kids spend the night with friends and agree to come to dinner with me.”

  “Whatever it is, we can discuss it on the phone, or when you drop the kids off.”

  “No,” he says. “No. This is not a conversation for the phone or the front door.”

  I assume it has to do with the children, and I agree to meet him at our favorite prime rib restaurant, our old date spot.

  “I’m picking you up,” he says.

  He arrives exactly on time, dressed for a date in a dark suit and silk tie. He leans in to kiss my cheek and I don’t want to move away, I want to stay near his cologne, his cleanly shaved chin.

  In the restaurant, at our old table, he takes my hands. “Is it possible,” he asks, “that we have more to build together?”

  His question sends my mind spinning, as though we are already on the dance floor. Try again? Reunite? “What about her?” I ask.

  “She’s a lovely person. She’s fun. She’s a very good companion.”

  “So?”

  “Let me finish.” Tears begin to well in his eyes and fall down his face. “She’s not the mother of my children. She didn’t spring me out of jail in Prešov. She’s never heard of the Tatra Mountains. She can’t pronounce chicken paprikash, much less make it for dinner. Edie, she isn’t the woman I love. She isn’t you.”

  The compliments feel good, the embrace of our shared past, but what strikes me most deeply is Béla’s readiness for risk. This has always been true of him, as far as I can tell. He chose to fight Nazis in the forest. He risked death by disease and bullets to stop what was unconscionable. I was conscripted into risk. Béla chose risk knowingly, and he chooses it again at this table, allowing himself to be vulnerable to the possibility of my rejecting him. I have become so used to measuring all the ways he falls short that I have stopped counting who he is, what he offers. I have to leave this marriage or I’m going to die, I had thought. And perhaps the months and years I’ve spent apart from him have helped me come of age, have helped me discover that there is no we until there is an I. Now that I have faced myself a little more fully, I can see that the emptiness I felt in our marriage wasn’t a sign of something wrong in our relationship, it was the void I carry with me, even now, the void that no man or achievement will ever fill. Nothing will ever make up for the loss of my parents and childhood. And no one else is responsible for my freedom. I am.

  In 1971, two years after our divorce, when I am forty-four years old, Béla kneels and presents me with an engagement ring. We have a Jewish ceremony instead of the city hall union we decided on more than twenty years before. Our friends Gloria and John Lavis are our witnesses. “This is your real wedding,” the rabbi says. He means because it is a Jewish wedding this time, but I think he also means that this time we are really choosing each other, we aren’t in flight, we
aren’t running away. We buy a new house in Coronado Heights, decorate it in bright colors, red, orange, put in solar panels and a swimming pool. For our honeymoon we travel to Switzerland, to the Alps, and stay at a hotel with hot springs. The air is cold. The water is warm. I sit in Béla’s lap. Jagged mountains stretch out against the sky, colors shifting over them as over water. Our love feels as stable as the mountain range, as enveloping and fluid as a sea, adapting, shifting to fill the shape we give it. It isn’t that the substance of our marriage has changed. We have.

  CHAPTER 15

  What Life Expected

  IT DID NOT really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us, Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning. In 1972, a year after Béla and I remarried, I was named Teacher of the Year in El Paso, and while I was honored by the award and felt privileged to serve my students, I couldn’t let go of the conviction that I still hadn’t discovered what life expected from me. “You’ve won top recognition at the beginning of your career, not the end,” the principal of my school said. “We’ll expect to see great things from you. What’s next?”