The Choice

by Edith Eger

  When her husband called to tell me Agnes had died, he said he would never get over the grief, but that her passing was peaceful. The quality of love in their family relationships had deepened in her last months of life. She had taught them a truer way of relating to one another. After I hung up the phone, I wept. Through no one’s fault, a beautiful person was gone too soon. It was unfair. It was cruel. And it made me wonder about my own mortality. If I died tomorrow, would I die at peace? Had I really learned for myself what Agnes had discovered? Within my own darkness, had I found the light?

  Emma helped me question how I was relating to my past. Agnes helped me confront how I was relating to my present. And Jason Fuller, the catatonic army captain who came to my office for the first time one hot afternoon in 1980, who sat silent and frozen for long minutes on the white couch, who obeyed the order I finally gave him to come to the park with me to take my dog for a walk, taught me how to face a decision that would determine my future. What I learned from him that day would affect the quality of my life in all of my remaining years, and the quality of the legacy I have chosen to pass on to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

  As we walked around the park, Jason’s gait loosened. So did his face, every step bringing more color and softness. He looked younger all of a sudden, less hollowed out. Still, he didn’t talk. I didn’t plan ahead for what would happen when we returned to my office. I just kept us moving, breathing, every minute that Jason stayed with me an indication that if he felt safe enough, he might be reached.

  After one slow loop around the park, I led us back to my office. I poured us some water. Whatever lay ahead, I knew it couldn’t be rushed. I had to provide a place of absolute trust, where Jason could tell me anything, any feeling, where he knew he was safe, where he knew he wouldn’t be judged. He sat on the couch again, facing me, and I leaned forward. How could I keep him here with me? Not just physically in my office. But ready for openness, for discovery? Together, we had to find a way to move toward insight and healing, a way for Jason to flow with whatever emotions and situations were overwhelming him into catatonia. And if I was to guide him toward wellness, I couldn’t force him to talk. I had to flow with his current state of mind, his current choices and conditions, and stay open to opportunities for revelation and change.

  “I wonder if you can help me,” I finally said. This is an approach I sometimes take with a reluctant patient, a tough customer. I take the attention away from the patient’s problem. I become the one with the problem. I appeal to the patient’s sympathy. I wanted Jason to feel like he was the one with strength and solutions, and I was just a person, curious and somewhat desperate, asking to be helped. “I really want to know how you want to spend your time here with me. You’re a young man, a soldier. I’m just a grandmother. Could you help me out?”

  He started to speak, but then his throat clotted up with emotion and he shook his head. How could I help him to stay with whatever external or internal turmoil existed without running away or shutting down?

  “I wonder if you could help me understand a little better how I could be useful to you. I’d like to be your sounding board. Would you please help me a little?”

  His eyes cinched up as though he was reacting to a bright light. Or clenching back tears. “My wife,” he finally said, his throat closing down again around the words.

  I didn’t ask in what way his wife was troubling him. I didn’t ask for the facts. I went straight for the feeling under his words. I wanted him to take me directly, deeply, to the truth in his heart. I wanted him to be the person I trusted he was capable of being—a person who could unfreeze and feel. You can’t heal what you can’t feel. I had learned this the hard way, after decades of choosing to be frozen and numb. Like Jason, I had bottled my feelings, I had put on a mask.

  What was under Jason’s mask, his frozenness? Loss? Fear?

  “It looks like you’re sad about something,” I said. I was guessing, suggesting. Either I was right, or he would correct me.

  “I’m not sad,” he muttered. “I’m mad. I’m mad as hell. I could kill her!”

  “Your wife.”

  “That bitch is cheating on me!” There. The truth was out. It was a beginning.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  His wife was having an affair, he told me. His best friend had tipped him off. He couldn’t believe he had missed the signs.

  “Oh God,” he said. “Oh God, oh God.”

  He stood. He paced. He kicked at the couch. He had broken through his rigidity and was now becoming manic, aggressive. He pounded the wall until he winced in pain. It was as though a switch had been hit, the full strength of his emotion surging on like floodlights. He was no longer sealed off and contained. He was explosive. Volcanic. And now that he was thrashing around unprotected in all that hurt, my role had changed. I had guided him back into his feelings. Now I had to help him experience them without drowning in them, without totally losing himself in the intensity. Before I could say a word, he stiffened in the middle of the room and yelled, “I can’t take it! I’m going to kill her. I’ll kill both of them.”

  “You’re so mad you could kill her.”

  “Yes! I’m going to kill that bitch. I’m going to do it right now. Look what I’ve got.” He wasn’t speaking hyperbolically. He meant it quite literally. From under his belt he pulled a handgun. “I’m going to kill her right now.”

  I should have called the police. The warning sirens I had felt in my gut when Jason first walked through the door had not rung false. And now it might be too late. I didn’t know if Jason and his wife had children, but what I pictured as Jason brandished the gun was the children crying at their mother’s funeral, Jason behind bars, the children losing both of their parents in the heat of one moment’s impulse for revenge.

  But I didn’t call the police. I didn’t even call my assistant to let her know I might need help. There wasn’t time.

  I wouldn’t shut him down. I would ride the wave of his intention to its consequence. “What if you kill her right now?” I said.

  “I’m going to do it!”

  “What will happen?”

  “She deserves it. She’s got it coming. She’s going to regret every lie she ever told me.”

  “What will happen to you if you kill your wife?”

  “I don’t care!” He was pointing the gun at me, right at my chest, gripping it with both hands, his finger frozen near the trigger.

  Was I a target? Could he take his rage out on me? Pull the trigger by mistake, send a bullet flying? There wasn’t time to be afraid.

  “Do your children care?” I was acting on instinct.

  “Don’t mention my children,” Jason hissed. He lowered the gun a fraction. If he pulled the trigger now he would shoot my arm, my chair, not my heart.

  “Do you love your children?” I asked. Anger, however consuming, is never the most important emotion. It is only the very outer edge, the thinly exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. And the real feeling that’s disguised by the mask of anger is usually fear. And you can’t feel love and fear at the same time. If I could appeal to Jason’s heart, if I could get him to feel love for even a second, it might be long enough to interrupt the signal of fear that was about to become violence. Already his fury was on pause. “Do you love your children?” I asked again.

  Jason wouldn’t answer. It was as though he was stuck in the crosshairs of his own competing feelings.

  “I have three kids,” I said. “Two daughters, one son. What about you?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “A daughter and a son?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about your son,” I said.

  Something broke loose in Jason. A new feeling. I saw it pass over his face.

  “He looks like me,” Jason said.

  “Like father, like son.”

  His eyes were no longer focused on me or the gun, his vision was someplace else. I couldn’t tell what the new f
eeling was yet, but I could sense that something had shifted. I followed the thread.

  “Do you want your son to be like you?” I asked.

  “No!” he said. “God, no.”

  “Why not?”

  He shook his head. He wasn’t willing to go where I was leading him.

  “What do you want?” I said it quietly. It was a question that can be terrifying to answer, a question that can change your life.

  “I can’t take this! I don’t want to feel like this!”

  “You want to be free from pain.”

  “I want that bitch to pay! I’m not going to let her make a fool of me.” He raised the gun.

  “You’ll get your life back in control.”

  “Damn right I will.”

  I was sweating now. It was up to me to help him drop the gun. There was no script to follow. “She did you wrong.”

  “Not anymore! It ends now.”

  “You’ll protect yourself.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ll show your son how to handle things. How to be a man.”

  “I’ll show him how to not let other people hurt him!”

  “By killing his mom.”

  Jason froze.

  “If you kill his mother, won’t you be hurting your son?”

  Jason stared at the gun in his hand. In visits to come, he would tell me what filled his mind at this moment. He would tell me about his father, a violent man who beat into Jason, sometimes with his words, sometimes with his fists, that this is what a man does: A man is invulnerable; a man doesn’t cry; a man is in control; a man calls the shots. He would tell me that he had always intended to be a better father than his father had been. But he didn’t know how. He didn’t know how to teach and guide his children without intimidation. When I asked him to consider how his choice to seek revenge would affect his son, he was suddenly compelled to search for a possibility that, up until then, he hadn’t been able to summon. A way to live that didn’t perpetuate violence and insecurity, that would bring him—and his son—not to the imprisoning seduction of revenge but to the wide open sky of his promise and potential.

  If I understand anything about that afternoon, about the whole of my life, it’s that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can choose—or choose not—to perpetuate. It’s like vertigo, thrilling and terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but traversable canyon. Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and re-enact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

  Craving revenge, holding a gun, picturing himself in his son’s face, Jason was suddenly able to see the choices available to him. He could choose to kill or choose to love. To vanquish or to forgive. To face a grief, or to pass the pain on, again and again. He dropped the gun. He was crying now, huge, rippling sobs, waves of sorrow crashing over his body. He couldn’t stand with the immensity of the feeling. He fell to the ground, to his knees, he bent his head. I could almost see the different feelings breaking over him in waves, the hurt and shame and broken pride and ruined trust and loneliness, the image of the man he couldn’t be and would never be. He couldn’t be a man who had never lost. He would always be a man whose father beat and humiliated him when he was young, whose wife cheated on him. Just as I will always be a woman whose mother and father were gassed and burned and turned to smoke. Jason and I would always be what every person is, someone who will bear suffering. We can’t erase the pain. But we are free to accept who we are and what has been done to us, and move on. Jason knelt, crying. I joined him on the floor. The people we loved and relied on had disappeared or let us down. He needed to be held. I held him. I pulled him to my chest and he sank into my lap and I held him and we cried until our tears had soaked my silk blouse through.

  Before Jason left my office, I demanded that he give me the gun. (I would hang on to the gun for years, so long that I forgot it was still in my closet. When I was packing my office in preparation for my move to San Diego, I would discover the gun, still loaded, in the drawer of a filing cabinet, a reminder of the volatility and pain we often choose to hide away, the potential for damage that persists until we consciously face and dismantle it.) “Are you safe to leave now?” I asked him. “Are you safe to go home?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s going to be uncomfortable for you without a gun. Do you have somewhere else to go if the rage comes back? If you feel like you have to hurt or kill someone?”

  He said he could go to his friend’s house, the one who had told him about the affair and advised him to see me.

  “We need to practice what you will say to your wife.” We made a script. He wrote it down. He would tell her, “I feel so sad and upset. I hope we can find a time to talk about it tonight.” He wasn’t allowed to say more until they were alone together, and only then if he could communicate with words instead of violence. He was to call me immediately if he felt incapable of going home. If the homicidal feelings came back, he was to find a safe place to sit down or take a walk. “Close the door. Or go outside. Be by yourself. Breathe and breathe and breathe. The feelings will pass. Promise me you will call me if you start to feel out of control. Get yourself out of the situation, make yourself safe, and call me.”

  He started to cry again. “No one ever cared about me like you do.”

  “We’re going to be a good team together,” I told him. “I know you’re not going to let me down.”

  Jason came back to my office two days later, and so began a therapeutic relationship that would last for five years. But before I knew how his story would turn out, I had a turning point of my own to confront.

  Once Jason left and I had stowed the gun and sat down in my chair, breathing deeply, slowly, regaining my calm, I sorted through the mail my assistant had given me just before Jason’s unexpected arrival. And there I found another letter that changed the course of my life. It was from U.S. Army chaplain David Woehr, a former colleague at William Beaumont, who was then heading the Religious Resource Center in Munich, where he was responsible for administering clinical training to all of the U.S. Army chaplains and chaplains’ assistants currently serving in Europe. The letter was an invitation to address six hundred chaplains at a workshop Dave would be leading in a month. In any other circumstance, I would have accepted, would have been honored and humbled to be of use. Because of my clinical experience at William Beaumont, and my success in treating active-duty personnel and combat veterans, I had been asked a number of times to speak to larger military audiences and had always felt that it was not just an honor but also my moral obligation—as a former prisoner of war, as a person liberated by U.S. soldiers—to do so. But Dave’s workshop was scheduled to meet in Germany. And not just anywhere in Germany. In Berchtesgaden. Hitler’s former retreat in the mountains of Bavaria.

  CHAPTER 17

  Then Hitler Won

  IT ISN’T THE cold air coming through the cooling vent in my office that makes me shiver. Soon I will be fifty-three years old. I am no longer the young orphaned mother fleeing war-torn Europe. I am no longer the immigrant hiding from her past. I am Dr. Edith Eva Eger now. I have survived. I have worked to heal. I use what I have learned from my traumatic past to help others heal. I am often called in by social service organizations and medical and military groups to treat patie
nts with PTSD. I have come a great distance since escaping to America. But I haven’t been back to Germany since the war.

  That evening, to distract myself from my worry over how Jason is handling the confrontation with his wife, to ease my own swirling indecision, I call Marianne in San Diego and ask her what she thinks I should do about Berchtesgaden. She is a mother now, and a psychologist. We often consult each other about our most challenging patients. Just as for Jason in the long moments when he held the gun, the decision before me now has a lot to do with my children—with the kind of wound they will carry with them after I’m gone: a healed one or an open one.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Marianne says. “I want to tell you to go. You survived, and now you get to go back and tell your story. That’s such a triumph. But … do you remember that Danish family, the friends of my host family back in college? They returned to Auschwitz thinking it would bring them peace. But it just stirred up all the trauma. It was very stressful. They both suffered heart attacks when they got home. They died, Mom.”