My grandparents had always been a welcome steady influence on my life. They looked like the couple in Grant Wood’s painting—American Gothic, the portrait that features the serious-looking farmer with his pitchfork and the stern-looking woman next to him. Mark Twain would say they used a “minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.” Listening to the tender way Dad would speak to them made my heart hurt.
Several months after Alice’s death, we joined my grandparents at a cottage on Isle au Haut, a small island off the coast of Maine in the Penobscot Bay. I’d never seen an ocean at the age of seven, let alone an island; the closest I’d come to a coastline was a sandbar on the Platte River not far from Omaha.
In the way children are able to do in the wake of tragedy—my attention turned to the adventure in front of me.
There was only one way to get to Isle au Haut from the mainland, and that was by a mail boat, which left twice a day from Stonington. The captain of the boat was more than happy to tell us tall tales when encouraged to do so by my father. He warned us to be on the lookout for lobsters, as they snapped off kids’ toes, and for pirates, who liked to lurk in coves around the island. I wasn’t scared of pirates because I was acquainted with them, having mastered the role of Captain Hook in our staged yard productions of Peter Pan, but I could tell by Gayle’s face that she was. I can still feel my hair dampened by the salty ocean breeze as we puttered across the bay, watching the lobster fisherman throwing wooden traps from their boats into the water.
Arlo was waiting for us when we arrived at the landing dock. I remember my father placing a gentle hand on his shoulder as the two of them walked up the jetty toward a beat-up Jeep Wagoneer—one of the few island vehicles, parked on the grass. When it quickly became clear we wouldn’t all fit alongside the luggage, Arlo suggested he shuttle us in two trips, so after we waved Mom and the baby off to the cabin—Dad, Genie, Gayle, and I went on a scouting trip to the General Store. It had everything and nothing at the same time: just enough cans of food to stock the pantry for a few days, just enough hardware to start but not complete a job, just enough toilet paper to buy one roll, just enough candles and matchsticks to keep the house lit for one night.
When Arlo returned, Dad dropped the tailgate on the jeep so we could sit in the back and dangle our legs over the side. I was so happy I started tickling Gayle as we were driving down a dusty road toward the Breeze Cottage, and to stop me she accidentally pushed me off the back. Fortunately we were going slow enough that I didn’t break any bones, just ended up with serious road rash covering my legs. Gayle felt horrid, but Dad didn’t get angry; it wasn’t his style. Instead, he looped a rope across the back so we wouldn’t fall off, and told us no more monkey business. Arlo continued the drive through a thick forest of cypress and beech trees, a forest so peaceful and undisturbed it seemed otherworldly.
When we arrived at Breeze Cottage, a white clapboard house named after the family who had owned it since the 1920s, I spotted Riches Cove and ran to it as if pulled by magic. As I scrambled over one boulder to the next, waves spraying me as they hit the rugged edge, I spotted my father hightailing it toward me, yelling at me to move back. I ran up and jumped on him even though I was soaking wet. He started with the safety lecture, but before he could finish, I ran into the house, where I could hear Genie and Gayle slamming doors.
There were two bedrooms upstairs, a sitting room and kitchen downstairs, and a large porch with rocking chairs and two church-style hard benches facing the ocean, a well, and a bunch of candles.
Mom was sitting on the front porch in one of those old rocking chairs with baby Jen on her lap, and it was the second time in my life I remember seeing her happy. It made me feel quirky, light-headed, and just plain weird.
In Which I Learn of the Existence of Ghosts
Maine, 1971—It didn’t take us long to get to know the ocean rhythms of Riches Cove. Gayle and I spent hours checking out the small pools for starfish and sea urchins and crabs, giving them a poke enough to make them move, but with respect enough to let them be. Then we’d lie on our stomachs across the boulders, chipping away at barnacles and snails until the water started rolling in and we’d have to scramble back. The adrenaline of pushing it until the last minute was better than anything I’d ever experienced, as waves reached heights of nine feet before they crashed against the huge granite rocks where we were stretched out only minutes before.
One day when the tide was out, Gayle and I spotted what looked like a settlement of houses up a hill, so we scaled the bank toward them and found that it was an abandoned homestead sitting on hardpack dirt ground. There wasn’t a sign of anyone, just one cosmic-size creepy feeling. Gayle grew scared and turned back, leaving me to explore on my own.
My first stop was at a shack, where I found a couple of horse-size wagon wheels, lobster traps, tons of pickle jars, and piles of old rusted tools. Then I moved to the house, noticing a number of broken windows. Those that weren’t cracked were so thick with dust that you couldn’t see through them. The front door wasn’t locked, so I crept in. It appeared whoever called it home left in a hurry. The inside was modest, with a kitchen and two bedrooms. Each bedroom had a steel-framed double bed that was still made up with ancient-smelling blankets. Old dishes lined the shelves of the kitchen. Everything was covered in cobwebs and dust. If you had a vacuum cleaner and mop you could move right in, but I was moving right out because it was difficult to guess how long it had been since a human had last seen the place.
When I returned home and asked Mom who lived there, she said the house belonged to a family who died of tuberculosis in the 1920s, including their two children, and I should stay out of there. Even though the owners had died, it was still private property.
I told her I didn’t see any bodies.
She laughed like I was being funny and said the family was buried up the road near the section of wood we liked to play in. I recalled the cemetery she was talking about, surrounded by a low-lying, black cast-iron gate with about fifteen graves. There were no angels, or statues or vaults, just rounded stone tablets worn down from salty air.
When bedtime came, I begged Mom not to make me go upstairs. When she asked “what the hell had gotten into you!?” there was no way I was telling her. I was not in the mood to be entertaining.
When Dad heard all the pandemonium, he came inside and asked what was going on.
I told him I would be quite happy to sleep on the wooden bench in the kitchen, but there was no way I was going up those stairs. He asked why, and I said it was because the ghosts of those dead children were under the bed.
“What children?” he asked.
“The children up the road,” I said.
“What children up the road?”
“The children who died of tuberculosis,” I said.
When he asked why I thought there were children who died of tuberculosis up the road, I told him it was because Mom had told me. He looked coolly at my mother. Then he offered to go upstairs with me and help me look under the bed to prove there were no ghosts. But when one is in a state of terror, it’s no time to talk science. I politely but firmly told him I was not interested in looking under the bed. Ghosts were not seen; you felt ghosts, and therefore this exercise would serve no purpose. He said he could see my point of view and then offered me a nickel just to check.
When I said no, thank you, I wasn’t looking to earn any money at the moment, he said it was very important that I face up to my fear. He vouched for my courage, and he said we would face this together.
I had never been more scared than looking under that bed. Staring fear in that ghostly face did not resolve the terror, but it did dial it down a notch so I could get to sleep. That job offer stuck with me for a number of years.
In Which I Am Introduced to British National Health
London, 1993—Thomas’s uncle strongly recommended that I see a specialist after my incident at Passover, so we found ourselves sitting in the waiting area of the neurology departmen
t at the Whittington, an old Victorian hospital in northwest London.
After an hour, Thomas inquired as to what the delay was, and we were told they were trying to squeeze me into the schedule despite being short on consultants. A few minutes later we were ushered into a scanning room of bulldozer-size neuroimaging machinery. I had never been so anxious for the arrival of a professional I didn’t want to see. Neurologists for me were akin to astronauts, discovering the vast frontiers of the uncharted human mind.
Cue entrance: Man of the Universe. The doctor, our young registrar, wielding a clipboard, looking not so much distracted as purposely distracted and annoyed. I was in slight awe. I apologized for bothering him, not knowing the proper etiquette for a national health system, and thanked him for seeing me. He explained this was his lunch break.
“I’m going to need to ask you some information before we begin.” As he prepared himself for the questioning, clicking his pen, I realized that he reminded me of a high school teacher who had graded me unfairly.
When he asked the standard mental health questions concerning family history and past trauma, I couldn’t think of anything of interest to share. My childhood drama was one I’d never buy a ticket to see, let alone recount. Sharing my mother’s mental health history felt, hmmm, unsafe. What did it have to do with me? In short, I had the healthy pride of a twenty-eight-year-old at the top of her game.
When we got to the end of the list, and he asked my profession, I told him I was currently an aerobics instructor—the only job in which my American accent seemed to give me an advantage. When this didn’t lighten the mood, I added that I worked for ten years in Washington, D.C., for politicians and on a presidential campaign. He made it clear that he found this information immaterial by putting the pen back in his pocket and asking rather brusquely, “Why are you seeing me today?”
I had to dig for the courage to tell him, which only seemed to annoy him further. So I just went for it. I told him I was experiencing sudden paralysis, after which I would collapse. No amount of inner coaching seemed to help. I appeared to others to be unconscious while being horrifyingly aware I wasn’t.
“Why is it horrifying?”
His question threw me. “Well, it’s awful to concern people around me. It looks like I’ve fallen unconscious though I’m not, yet I have no way of communicating. After a few minutes, when I feel control coming back, my limbs twitch, my jaw clenches, and if I fight it, the convulsing gets worse. Afterward I am utterly exhausted.”
He asked me if I had any idea as to why this was happening. I did not. He asked if I was under a lot of stress. I replied on the contrary. I had just rid myself of an ocean between me and the man I loved after a long-distance romance of five years. Given the junior doctor’s flat reaction, this was an overshare.
He then asked me to explain what it was I felt before these episodes. I shared emotional detachment, a sense of distance, and maybe fear.
“Fear often accompanies anxiety,” he explained.
And with that, we entered the old chicken or the egg conundrum: he suggesting that the cause of the problem was stress of which the seizures were symptomatic, me believing the seizures were in fact the source of my stress and anxiety. He clearly wanted the interview over as soon as possible; I needed assurance he wasn’t suggesting this was all in my mind and wanted to preserve a small resemblance of dignity. To help bring the matter to a head, our young doctor asked Thomas to demonstrate what the seizures looked like.
“I’d have to get on the floor,” my fiancé said.
Our young doctor nodded his head in support. So Thomas, in lieu of the ridiculousness of the request, laid on the floor and hammed it up for him. I laughed, mainly to protect myself from humiliation.
“I don’t think an MRI will be necessary,” the intern said, scribbling more notes. “I believe your bride-to-be is experiencing pseudo-seizures and it will do her no good to go on medication.”
Oh, I thought. The term pseudo preceding anything could not bode well. And the bride-to-be comment didn’t sound good either.
Thomas took control of the conversation. “Based on this short interview, you’re confident in making that solid conclusion?” The tone in which he asked the question was so angrily dead of emotion I was suddenly scared of a brawl.
“What would you like me to do?” the doctor asked.
Try not being an asshole, I thought.
“Say something that would suggest you’re taking her health seriously, not to mention her safety.” Thomas said. “She bikes everywhere.”
“They’ll likely stop on their own, but just in case, I will order more tests . . . I have to go now as I’m behind schedule. Excuse me.” And with that, I watched as the voice of science and reason made its exit, medical coattails fluttering behind him.
I looked at Thomas, overwhelmed at the feeling of what was, for the first time in my life, someone stepping in to emotionally help me. His defense of me here, his uncle stepping up to help me after Passover: it made me anxious that this was new family behavior.
In Which I Fall in Love
California, 1987—Though Thomas and I were laissez-faire when it came to issues of faith, God did come up early in our relationship. We met at an unusual crossroad.
I was twenty-three and working on a U.S. senator’s campaign, while also trying to finish my self-financed undergraduate degree at George Washington University in D.C., when I hit my first serious bout of depression. That’s when I walked by a leaflet advertising a cross-country bicycle ride to raise money for a charity and decided the only way I was going to recover was by taking some serious time off. The adventure would get me out of D.C. in its worst swampy months and would provide the opportunity to immerse myself in the spectacular outdoor beauty of the United States while cycling seventy miles a day, and there would be thirty other cyclists to save me from the inner me—the nightmare guest who wouldn’t leave.
I arrived at office headquarters in Palo Alto after an eight-hour cross-country flight from hell, sleepwalking from the effects of two all-nighters prior to my departure. Spotting a couch, and thinking I’d “check out the eyelids,” a fine phrase of my father’s, I plonked down for a quick refresher.
Just as I drifted into that blissful in-between state of consciousness, I heard a rhetorical question. Could I help with a job? I opened my eyes to see a student sporting a well-weathered tank top, then noted the rest of his attire—blue turquoise cycling shorts and green high-top sneakers, and a positively hunky sunbaked athletic physique. Noting his British accent, I found myself reacting to him in the nature of the long-standing feud between our people. I suggested (with some sincerity) that I might be more helpful after a “quick kip.”
He, in turn, suggested perhaps I might delay the nap for “the cause,” and pointed to a box in the corner full of first-aid supplies, explaining a time-sensitive need to count and divide Band-Aids. After making it a point to say it was “for the cause,” I took the box outside so I might at least enjoy the warm evening temperatures, and set to work with my assigned task of multiplication and division, and then just eyeballed it.
After he finished whatever it was that he had to do in the office, the kid, who was clearly younger than me by several years, asked would I mind if he kept me company while he adjusted the balance on the spokes of his wheel—a mechanical skill he introduced as “truing.” Given the effort he was making at being friendly, I felt it only fair to put my initial annoyance on the back burner. This is when I learned his name was Thomas.
He was taking what they call in England a “gap year” before he started university. His charity ride had started in Bolivia, in South America, and he had been pedaling overland for eight months, from the Andes to Central America, and up to North America. You might imagine this struck me as exotic. As he and three other British cyclists were heading in the same direction cross-country, they volunteered to lead the routes for our group.
He was dreading the end of the summer because of schoo
l. I asked him where he was going and he shared that he had an offer to study at Cambridge and was meant to begin that autumn. Though he was thankful for the spot, after seeing what he had seen of the world, the last thing he could imagine was sitting in a lecture hall. What a waste of time it seemed when there was so much in the world that needed doing. I nodded in sympathy, told him I also struggled in the classroom, and gave him my brief résumé, of which he was most impressed. It turned out we were both political scientists by nature. We were soon laughing about the contrasts of our experiences growing up: his in London, mine in the midwestern prairie. But more than that, we seriously dug into meaningful questions in life. We grew excited about ideas, grew heated over philosophical arguments, debated political views in a way that only two young twentysomethings can: like it mattered. For hours. We talked right past sunset, and soon found ourselves sitting under a huge warm summer night sky, stars splattered Jackson Pollock–like overhead.
In time, we circled back to the amazing adventure he had been on. He assured me it wasn’t as romantic as it might sound. He’d had eighteen tire punctures in one week, crossing the Andes, and he was desolately lonely most of the time. And in Mexico someone tried to kill him when he stopped alongside the road to take a picture. An unidentified truck swerved out of its way to hit him. His friends found him several minutes later with a gash in the back of his head. It took sixteen stitches to sew him up—and that was by a local lady with needle and thread before he was airlifted out.
I looked at his head. “My hair grows fast,” he said. “The bump is still there,” and he leaned over to let me feel it. Sure enough. Lumpy. That was only a couple of months ago.
As we neared punch-drunk tiredness, he asked me if I believed in the existence of God. I laughed, surprised at the intensity of the question. He said his near-death experience gave him a lot to think about—he offered by way of the question that he didn’t believe in God, and though he was Jewish, it was a cultural identity, not a religious one. I shared I didn’t believe in God either, though my Christian faith had been important to me in my childhood—for that, I had no regrets.
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