Our friend Ciaran was getting married. An Englishman with an Irish moniker and a Protestant family was marrying a Catholic woman from Ireland, both of them absurdly and blissfully in love and a reminder that no conflict is insurmountable.
Rand had met Ciaran first, years ago at a conference in London, and we’d become friends. We didn’t see him all that often, and though his lines in the drama of our lives were few, he would become a major player. Enter stage left, dramatically change the course of the plot, and leave stage right. Only a few scenes, but afterward, nothing was the same.
He is aridly sarcastic, perpetually annoyed, and altogether charming. Blue-eyed, tall, suffering from a rather acute case of excessive handsomeness, albeit in a buttoned-up kind of way. Not quite James Bond but possibly his accountant.
The first time I spent any real amount of time with him was in the spring of 2008 in Sydney, Australia. It was one of the first big trips I’d taken with Rand, and I knew he was going to be busy with work, so I, recently laid off, planned on locking myself in the hotel room, watching Aussie soap operas, and eating koala-shaped chocolates until he was free in the evening.
Ciaran would have none of that.
“This is my favorite city in the world,” he said, “so under no circumstances are you allowed to hang around here while I’m stuck in a conference. Go,” he pointed to the lobby door. “Get out of here.”
Petrified, as any American is by the inherent authority that seems to accompany the English accent, I obeyed. (Turns out, I was more scared of Ciaran’s scolding than I was of losing my way.) I went to the Sydney Opera House, got lost on some quay (as usual), and took a ferry across the harbor until I spotted something that looked vaguely familiar. For roughly three blocks, I discreetly followed a group of gentlemen I thought were members of the Australian Olympic swim team (parenthetically, I would like to take this moment to note that I love my husband dearly and that sixpacks are probably overrated).
It was the first time I’d ever ventured out in a foreign city on my own. So without much hyperbole I can say that part of the reason my blog exists is Ciaran forcing me out onto the streets of Sydney by myself all those years ago.
I remember when I first told him about the Everywhereist.
“I have good news,” I said excitedly.
“You do have a sister?” was his swift reply.
My response to this unexpected compliment was an elegant snort followed by a gurgling sound, not unlike the mating calls of certain types of swamp creatures, after which I hid behind Rand and refused to speak.
“Well done,” my husband noted of either my reaction or the comment that elicited it—I cannot say which.
After hearing about my tumor, Ciaran sent me a note that said, simply, “I hope you are well. Please note that brain surgery in no way exempts you from being at my wedding.”
His wedding was two short months after my surgery; I promised him we’d be there. And so, that September, we crossed the Atlantic to watch him cast aside the shroud of grumpy old man that he wore so well and to briefly allow us to see him young, happy, and in love.
It’s strange to think of a happy event that takes place during a difficult time in your life. It stands out, it shines brightly against the darkness around it, but it does not remain untouched. The sadness infuses it. You are left wanting to laugh and cry all at once. Not everything has its own spot.
During this time I was still plagued by headaches, which seemed even worse than before—it felt as if they were emanating straight from the hole in my skull and left me feeling like my head had been cleaved in two (arguably, I suppose, it had). I felt isolated from people around me, separated by the unique experience of having my head cut open, unable to discuss my lingering problems when they were so relieved that I was fine and they were ready to move on. They would stare at my face, searching for hidden signs of illness, while I tried to look as normal as possible in hopes of passing the test.
I couldn’t commiserate with other people I knew who had gone through brain surgery, because my case was so minor compared to theirs. They had had numerous surgeries and harrowing recoveries; they had lived with MRIs for years. A select few had brain cancer. I had no right to feel kinship with them when my outlook was so rosy.
I had no reason to be miserable, and yet I was, and my self-pity sickened me. All in all, not a great chapter in the book of Geraldine. But there were other stories to be told, like Ciaran’s. And Rand’s.
The ceremony was in the Republic of Ireland, and the reception was in Northern Ireland. We crossed that invisible boundary from one to the other on winding roads that left me reeling, depositing the contents of my stomach on the side of the road. I felt a perverse pride at throwing up before an Irish wedding, and I tried to laugh off my nausea but wondered if there wasn’t more to it. If there wasn’t something inherently wrong with me, something that couldn’t be cut out of my brain. If I was broken, and no amount of surgeries could fix me.
I wanted to be the sort of person who could have a drink and eat some chocolate and not keel over with head-splitting migraines. Who didn’t constantly feel sick or foggy-headed. Who wasn’t so damn high-maintenance.
I curled up on the bed in our rental cottage while Rand whispered that we didn’t need to go to the reception. I shook my head, dizzy and determined. I brushed my teeth and walked on unsteady feet to the party, leaning heavily on his arm.
My stomach still tender, I drank two ginger ales and picked at the gourmet meal brought to us by men in white coats. But by the time that dessert was served, I was well enough to eat mine and most of Rand’s. (A blissful discovery: in England and Ireland, both dessert and wedding cake are served. A less blissful one: the latter is a Christmas-style fruit cake and is usually terrible.)
I met the bride, bright eyed and stunning, who crouched down next to me, her white dress billowing around her as she inquired about my health. I smiled at what a miraculous thing it was—that on her wedding day, she was pausing to ask me, a stranger up until that moment, about my surgery. Smitten, I told her I was fine.
And at that moment, surrounded by friends, I was. There was only dancing and too much drinking and stealing puffs of forbidden cigarettes and photos of us looking dapper and lovely. For a little while, it almost seemed like everything was in its right place, before the pieces scattered and I wondered if we’d ever be able to get them back where they belonged.
We remained in that sleepy village for a few days longer before returning to Belfast, Rand growing increasingly stressed as time went by. Ireland was supposed to be the first real vacation that he had taken since our own wedding four years earlier. That had been his intention all along—but reality wasn’t aligning. His email was piling up, and coworkers were writing him with increasing urgency.
In the time that I had known him, my husband had taken a struggling tech company mired in half a million dollars of debt and turned it into a multimillion-dollar success. His name appeared on countless rankings—the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, Inc. Magazine’s Fastest-Growing Companies—and in the occasional hilarious listicle, like “The 10 Hottest Male Geeks on the Web.” (I emailed the latter to friends, laughing maniacally, while Rand cringed.) He worked constantly. On the road, at home, on weekends. He was up until 2 a.m. most nights typing away.
He skipped parties and social events to deal with his never-ending work obligations, came home late and ate dinner in a rush before running back to his computer. In recent years, I’d watched the hair over his temples turn gray, watched dark circles take up permanent residence underneath his eyes.
His coworkers once threw him a birthday party at his office and invited me. We all gathered and sang happy birthday as Rand stepped out, thanked everyone, blew out the candles, and went straight back into his office. Someone pulled out a life-size cardboard cutout of him, a joke prop made for another event he couldn’t attend, and we pretended to feed it cake and snapped photos with that, instead.
I had approached
his busyness with varying degrees of acceptance over the years. I figured it was temporary, and I figured he enjoyed it. I knew we were absurdly fortunate how things had turned out. I was able to follow him around the world, to visit friends in far-off places, to live comfortably. But recent months had left him sick and exhausted, unable to sleep, occasionally unable to even walk because of the shooting pain in his back and leg that was exacerbated by stress. If he caught a cold, it would last for months.
He needed a break, was pleading for one, and I was incapable of understanding why he didn’t just take one. It was his company. I failed to understand that being the boss didn’t allow that. For the last few months, when the stress and pain was so intense that he couldn’t sleep, he would tell me that he’d get a break in Ireland. It became a sort of mantra.
It wasn’t until we returned to Belfast, after the wedding, that I found out Rand had booked three speaking engagements over the course of our trip. He had yet to build presentations for two of them.
I found myself sputtering with rage, angry in a way that surprised both of us. I had always been his advocate but suddenly found myself on the attack.
“You’re the one who said you needed to relax.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing to me? Apologize to yourself,” I snapped.
Rand and I rarely fight. We used to, in the early years of our relationship. The kind of tearful, exhausting arguments that lasted so long that by the end we’d forgotten what we were upset about. The kind you can only have when you are in your early twenties and scared to death by your own feelings.
But at some point, we stopped. I think we just realized it was pointless. We always made up, anyway, so it seemed easier just to skip to that part. And I labeled the laundry hampers, so he started putting his dirty clothes in the correct ones, which eliminated roughly 90 percent of all conflicts we had, anyway.
In Ireland, though, things were different. For the first time in our relationship, I didn’t see a resolution. I tried to skip to it—but couldn’t. I imagined him working like this until he died or our marriage fractured from the weight of it. My rage only served to magnify the problem. Rand was now overworked and felt guilty about it. He tried to divide his time in Ireland—attempting to appease work and me, and succeeding at neither.
We took a black cab tour across Belfast, walked through neighborhoods separated by barbed wire and ideology and violence until we were numbed by the sheer devastation of conflicts immeasurably greater than ours, before Rand would run back to the hotel to do more work. We rented a car and drove to the Giant’s Causeway, a geological marvel of basalt rock formations on the coast. They look like giant stacks of stone scones. Or maybe they don’t at all, and I was just hungry.
The drive there is supposedly one of the prettiest in the world. Rand was behind the wheel, driving on the left side of the road, and trying to operate a stick shift after watching exactly one instructional video on YouTube, which I will tell you now is not at all sufficient. Under different circumstances, we’d have laughed. But where we now found ourselves, neither of us did. I took it as a sign that he couldn’t understand when he’d reached his limits. That he couldn’t say no.
He took it as a sign that no matter how hard he tried, it would never be enough.
We climbed around the Giant’s Causeway, tried to take self-portraits for my blog, a site built around our unassailable marriage. I smiled and felt like a fraud. Leaned in to kiss him as he stared at me, wounded and wide-eyed, wondering if this meant he was forgiven. I didn’t know the answer any more than he did.
The time we spent together cut directly into his working hours, leaving him even more stressed and panicked. There was no way out.
“I don’t understand. I’m usually working when we’re on the road. I don’t get why this trip is different.”
“Because this was supposed to be a vacation,” I told him. “This was supposed to be you taking a break.”
We took the train to Dublin, barely speaking on the ride down. It was too dark to see anything outside—only indiscernible shapes on the landscape. Houses, hills, trees—I couldn’t tell. Nothing makes sense in the dark.
In Dublin we toured the Guinness Brewery, a place Rand had excitedly talked about visiting before the trip. Twenty minutes after we arrived, after a few panicked glances at his watch, he explained that he had to go.
“I need to work on my presentation.”
I heaved a sigh and followed him out of the building, despite his insistence that I stay. Wandering through a brewery alone while crying seemed like it might be kind of a buzzkill for the other tourists.
We parted ways on the street, a quick, terse goodbye, a perfunctory peck on the cheek before I watched him quickly disappear down an incongruously sunny street, his pace quick, punctuated by a slight limp, a result of his aggrieved and aching back.
Left alone on the winding streets of Dublin’s trendy Temple Bar neighborhood, I enjoyed the sickening gratification that comes from wallowing in your own sadness. I suspect I’m not alone in this phenomenon. It’s why people keep buying those books by Nicholas Sparks in which all the beautiful people die. My mind leapt to dramatic ends; I envisioned decade after decade of Rand slowly killing himself with work, of me fighting to get his attention, struggling to get time on his calendar to remind him of my existence.
And then I tried to imagine a future without the person with whom I’d spent the last decade. I realized the paradox at the heart of it—that my response to not seeing enough of Rand was to entertain a reality where I didn’t see him at all. I obsessed on this idea until I was near panic, then slowly pulled myself back from hysteria and returned to the familiar comfort of my rage.
I thought he was doing it to himself. I didn’t realize that he felt trapped, unable to extricate himself from something that had grown bigger than he knew how to wield. That he felt like it all rested on his shoulders—that if he failed, he would bring down every single person who worked for him. Stepping back or working less or doing something else were not options. I didn’t understand that he was drowning. I was just angry at him for not being able to breathe.
So I twisted the narrative until it made sense to me—until I became the victim. I told myself that if he really loved me, he would be able to take a break. To put us above his work. He’d done that, briefly, in the days before my surgery. He done it when he thought that there was something wrong with me, and now that he thought I was fine, I’d lost him again. I hated myself for not being enough for him. I hated myself for being miserable despite an enviable life and a cancer-free brain.
There was no resolution in Ireland. Belfast remains divided by its barbed-wire walls, the Emerald Isle cut in two by national boundaries. I wondered if Rand and I would make it. Memories of the trip exist, both sad and happy ones, inextricably mixed together. I can’t put anything in its designated spot. The pieces were scattered, and my heart felt like it might tear in two.
13
SALVATION LOOKS A LOT LIKE WISCONSIN
THERE ARE NO SIMPLE FIXES. When I tell you that things turned out well, that Rand would emerge from his cloud of depression and anxiety and find some sort of balance between work and life, know that it did not happen quickly or easily. The path out of darkness looks different for everyone. It may be paved with religion, or meditation, or therapy, or antidepressants, or (god help us all) regular exercise.
Sometimes the path is remarkably steep—a quick ascent that pulls you out of the gloom quickly, but leaves you so tired that you need to curl up on the coach for several long weeks watching Cary Grant movies in order to recover. Other times the rise is so gradual, you barely notice it, until one day you get out of bed and realize you’re okay. The road may be twisting and riddled with bumps and potholes, or straight and smooth.
Rand’s looked miraculously like the quiet stretch of highway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Make no mistake: it was more c
omplicated than a simple drive. It was a sad and complex journey, one that required doctor’s visits and therapist visits and difficult discussions with numerous boards of directors. But it was on that stretch of road that Rand and I realized he—and we—might be okay.
It was the fall of 2012, not long after our Ireland trip and Ciaran’s wedding. We’d spent the weeks in between walking on eggshells around one another. Rand was still working panicked hours, still sputtering apologies as he left the dinner table, his meal only half finished, to spend the rest of the evening locked away in his office.
“Why can’t you just have an affair like everyone else?” I’d shout at him in some pitiful attempt at jocundity; we’d both try to laugh. I used to describe his company as the other woman. In recent months, I’d stopped.
“I’m the one sneaking around, begging for your time,” I said. “I’m the other woman.”
We tried to joke about it, ignoring the fact that he still wasn’t sleeping, still spent his nights either on his feet in front of a glowing screen or tossing in bed, unable to find a position in which his leg and back didn’t hurt.
But other than putting on brave faces, we still hadn’t done anything to fix things.
“You’re coming with me to Milwaukee, right?” he asked me tentatively one afternoon.
My presence on his trips had not been a guarantee in recent months. But he now had a conference in Wisconsin, a state I couldn’t even pinpoint on a map, and it sounded strangely exotic to me. This is what happens when you are a first-generation American—certain parts of the country remain foreign to you. The Midwest holds a sort of strange mystique. There were entire families there that had been in the United States for generations, people who could trace back their roots to the Mayflower. Homes where everyone spoke the same language.
That there was a part of my home country stranger to me than Europe itself was utterly mind-blowing; I wanted to see it. Plus, I was curious as to what exactly fried cheese curds were, because I wasn’t entirely clear on that point. I told Rand I’d go with him.
All Over the Place Page 16