A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  Her resentment of this expectation is tied to my sadness over how little of a relationship we had, for most of my formative years. I, too, have my resentments—mainly about the times when I needed her help, and she wasn’t there to provide it.

  My family, never the happiest, self-destructed in my oldest sister’s absence, as my mother grew sick, as my father departed for South Korea, as my middle sister descended into her own undiagnosed condition.

  “I’m sorry for the times I was mean,” my oldest sister tells me, and then, as an afterthought, “and that I didn’t listen.”

  But it’s this, the failure to listen, that has bothered me more than the unkind comments accrued over the years, whose sting I still recall.

  Honest conversations about uncomfortable topics have never gone well with my sister. She similarly didn’t believe me about my father’s violence when I was growing up, until, in my midtwenties, I had emotional backup in the form of my then partner, who stood with me in the yellowing linoleum of the kitchen of my childhood home, as the three of us stood together there, all of us visiting to take care of my mother. She hadn’t believed me about my middle sister’s abusive behavior, until she witnessed me confronting my middle sister about it after I’d moved to the city for college, when my middle sister didn’t deny anything, but instead apologized.

  The denial that always stung the most, though, was in relation to my mother. It caused me to doubt my own reality. It had consequences in terms of responsibility; how could responsibility be divvied up for problems unacknowledged?

  About my mother’s illness, my oldest sister tells me, “I didn’t want to believe that was true about someone I loved.”

  By the time she told me this, after my mother’s death, I’d already deduced this logic on my own—that all the times my sister had refused to listen to me had originated from this reflex, both self-protective and protective of my mother.

  * * *

  In the years prior to my mother’s diagnosis, my wisdom teeth were impacted. They needed to be broken into tiny pieces and vacuumed out.

  You’re going to need someone to drive you home. Someone responsible, said the surgeon. This, due to the general anesthesia I would undergo.

  The consent form language of allergic shock, stroke, heart attack, and other risks didn’t worry me. This mention of a responsible adult did.

  Can I take a cab home? I asked.

  But he was quite firm.

  And so the day of the appointment, I drove to the doctor’s office with my mother in tow. She was tasked with taking me home.

  I had returned to Colorado only for dental work. My mother had wanted me to stay, to take care of her, rather than attending NYU. I wanted nothing more than to leave my childhood home. Everyone else had left, after all—my father, my older sisters. It was my turn to go.

  I lay reclined on the chair, dentists and nurses and other personnel clustered around me. One held a mask to my face and counted backward from ten. Probably my last thought, while drifting away, was, Colorado is so white.

  * * *

  I woke, groggy and confused, and saw the door of my mother’s tan minivan moving closer to my face. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. Then I realized I was sitting in a wheelchair, and one of those white faces—a dental assistant, perhaps—was pushing me through the parking lot.

  The last thing I heard, before I was left alone with my mother, was the assistant’s instructions: Don’t talk. Keep your mouth closed. Clamp down on the gauze pads so your gums don’t bleed excessively. Otherwise you might knock blood clots loose, and you’ll end up with dry sockets. Take painkillers.

  Once we were alone in the car, my mother turned to me in the passenger seat and asked, Where are we going?

  Through thick layers of gauze, I warbled, not… suppose to talk! Hrme! Then my mother drove off, and I passed out. Still fuzzy from the procedure, I fell back and forth between drugged sleep and wakefulness. Each time I woke, I caught a glimpse of the passing streets and trees and buildings. I wondered why we weren’t closer to home, but then I faded out again.

  Until those persistent and familiar notes—fear, panic, and despair—in my mother’s voice awakened me.

  Where are we? Laura, where are we?

  It’s like a punch line of a joke, isn’t it? The Alzheimer’s jokes people still insist on telling me, even after they know my mother is dying.

  But it isn’t funny when you’ve just had surgery. When your mother hasn’t yet been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s (and still won’t be, for quite some time). When all you want to do is lie in bed with some codeine, feeling itchy but pleasantly drowsy, and your mother, tasked with returning you home, has absolutely no idea where you are.

  The biggest problem in this instance was the disruption to her routine. She had no pattern to fall back on, and so we were lost.

  I felt betrayed. I had done so much for her, and yet she couldn’t do this simple thing for me. As usual, she needed me to take over. I needed someone who, for just this brief sliver of time, was capable of taking care of me.

  I wondered how other responsible adults—the ones with the authority to matter—her doctors, my father, my sister—could not see what was so clear to me. My mother was not okay. She was not too young.

  I made yelling noises through the metallic, blood-soaked gauze in my mouth, gesturing, while she got more upset. Mmmrph not suppose to talk! ERGH!

  I tried to stay mindful of warnings of dry sockets. But I was angry. We sat side by side, feeling equally helpless and disoriented, for different reasons.

  I wondered how those same doctors, and those who say maybe it’s better not to know, might feel if they knew my mother was driving on the same streets as them, veering slowly—and as unpredictably as amyloid plaque tangles in the brain—across four or five lanes of traffic, relying only on the watchfulness of other drivers to move out of her way.

  * * *

  Nearly every time someone learns that my mother had early-onset Alzheimer’s, they try to relate by telling me, “my grandmother/grandfather had Alzheimer’s!”

  I want to respond by saying the illness is an entirely different beast when it strikes decades earlier. That it’s different when it’s your mother, when you’re young when the decline begins. I want to say that this beast of an illness upends conventional expectations of who will be responsible, who will be the caretaker, and when. But as with my relationship with my sister, there are some truths that are too difficult to discuss. There are some truths that are too hard to hear.

  * * *

  Over the decades my oldest sister’s and my relationship has endured, despite periods of not speaking, alternating with periods of pointless fights. We have supported each other over the years, in the worst of times. Our relationship has been shaped by emergencies—each of our responses serving as pivot points on a graph. Perhaps the forge of family blood is unique in how it weathers such rifts. But as with sawn wood, look closely and the grain is always visible.

  5 WRITING LIFE

  When I was in the hospital, I scribbled away furiously. I felt as though, along with more valuable things like my very sense of identity, writing was being wrested from me, and so I fought harder for its preservation.

  I clutched the only pen nurses would allow, a half-stub toy of a thing. Gel-coated and squishy, it made my left hand sore. Still I carried on, scrawling in the two wide-lined notebooks my sister brought me, my handwriting even messier than usual.

  Little did I know that my hospital writing, under the auspice of its fuzzy panda and fuzzy fox covers, would contain more logic than any of what followed. Little did I know that after I left, empty months would follow in which I couldn’t write a word.

  * * *

  So many of my fears during my psychotic episode actualized after the fact—around how people portrayed me, their intentions, and their lack of trust.

  It’ll take me years to unpack how conflict with a person in a position of power, someone whom I sho
uld have continued skirting, escalated to the degree it did, or the tremendous consequences that followed.

  I was meant to be writing my MFA thesis. Instead I was confronting the hangover effect of my episode. My life had flipped into a nightmare, much as it had during my episode. The larger issues still loom and are hard to discuss. They boil down to how mental health emergencies are viewed in the law, something over which I have no control.

  The instigating events rendered the small town I lived in miserable. I avoided triggers—a purposeful strategy, yet no easy feat. A friend tried dodging encounters with her ex in the same town; she essentially couldn’t leave her apartment. I clung to Zadie Smith’s words on avoiding cliques, gangs, and groups instead—relieved that at least one writer could be both brilliant, successful, and an outspoken critic of the tyranny of the majority.

  The larger consequences of my episode unfolded gradually, each fresh blow landing just as I’d recovered from the previous shock.

  I arrived at a juncture where I was teetering. My future might involve impossible highs—five years without financial worries, writing at a dream school with dream professors, in a dream city. Or impossible lows—jail. Both extremes originated in the same decision: moving to a place where I knew I’d struggle, in favor of getting a writing education.

  I could justify the three increasingly hellish years I’d spent in rural Indiana by finishing my MFA, or I could fall one completed thesis short of a degree. The only thing I could control was my work, and at that I was utterly failing.

  “Your essays are lacking a sense of purpose,” my thesis advisor told me. With her usual clarity, she hit upon the fundamental issue in my writing, as with my life: that I’d accumulated images and experience, without knowing what to make of any of it. The utterly fracturing experience of a breakdown, in which my very mind felt cleaved in half, hadn’t helped.

  “You have all the tools,” a visiting writer had told me just a few days before. “Now you just have to put it all together.”

  Cohesion—what I’d always desired and lacked.

  * * *

  There’s value, nearly always, in writing through the pain—capturing the images. The notes I wrote in the hospital were surprisingly usable, even if the conditions under which I wrote them were less than ideal. A psychotic episode renders a person overly fixated on the sorts of details that comply with the “show, don’t tell” mandate that’d been hammered into my skull. It was the larger picture, seen in a clear frame of mind, zoomed out from the details, which no longer reflected reason.

  Imagine a mouse running down a string, parcels of gouda tied at regular lengths. Imagine the mouse’s joy. This is what writing technique is meant to accomplish. Even in nonfiction, art isn’t meant to mimic life. It earns its power only by distilling these most painful and joyous moments into consumable morsels, all tidily arranged for the reader to discover.

  When you’re experiencing catastrophe in real time, without the benefit of built-in time for reflection, you’re often too busy scrambling to fulfill a core responsibility of a nonfiction writer: generating meaning.

  The work of an essayist requires facing up to past trauma, finding meaning in what would’ve best been sidestepped, unearthing bits of hope. Nonfiction forces you to inhabit your own pain, instead of co-opting someone else’s. That’s what makes it hard.

  One of my most promising students knows the story he wants to tell—he just doesn’t share it with us. His language is beautiful, but we’re never clear on what’s happening.

  I share this tendency, in writing and elsewhere—to focus on everything but the most important part. Grief, numbness, and anger do strange, distorting things to a person. So, too, do denial and lack of control over one’s circumstances.

  * * *

  My academic training is in fiction, but the form has never fit me comfortably. It’s like a typical women’s top, cut to different proportions than my own. Climbers are often built like gymnasts—torsos broader at the shoulders, narrower at the hips. This lack of fit doesn’t mean our bodies are wrong. It means designers’ conceptions of female shape and form are faulty, or too limited to universally apply.

  Fiction, as it’s taught, demands simplification. In short stories, for example, we’re taught a central conflict is meant to emerge. My life experience runs contrary to this idea of one focal point—the prism through which all else is understood. It’s this pat quality I reject.

  Rather than a prism, I see a wheel. Rotations controlled by forces beyond us dictate extremes. I’ve been buried by chaos, filth, everything undeservedly rotten, all at once, or conversely, been heaped with equally undeserved blessings. A fallacy of youth seems to be that we generate our own luck.

  Defining conflict by one dimension alone, or assigning blame in human interactions and human-made systems—such undertakings are rarely neatly or fairly done. Isolating one variable as a prime driver is fraught with imprecision. This is why economists are accused of dealing in abstractions when they identify exogenous, or acting, forces.

  Fiction techniques taught feel restrictive. As with any other product, packed neatly for sale, they’re designed with certain dimensions in mind. They don’t allow reality, as I know it, to be captured.

  I’m complicit in the system, of course. As a teacher I parrot similarly flawed advice—and learn as much as I do as a student in doing so. Disillusionment and reconciliation seem part of maturing as a writer—accepting the measures by which gatekeepers define “good writing,” resigning oneself to less radical change than what one once desired. Perhaps women’s tops designs don’t need to be thrown out entirely. Perhaps they need only to be tailored.

  The more exciting aspect of maturing as a writer is disavowing rules entirely. Rachel Cusk in Outline, Catherine Lacey in Nobody Is Ever Missing, Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, many others—writers I admire break form. Rather than define a good container as one with cylindrical curves or four equal planes on which to rest, they seek the best container for the content. Perhaps oil is suited best by dark glass, to delay rancidity. Perhaps alcohol is best suited to wooden barrels in which it can breathe. Perhaps food scraps are meant to live with maggots in dark bins, until they decompose into something earthy and organic and vital again.

  * * *

  The great surprise of writing has been how much companionship matters. After nights spent alone with my laptop’s white glow, it’s the resurfacing that revitalizes.

  I graduated from my undergrad a year early. I’ll be lucky if I finish my MFA months late. If I do, it will be because others extended faith, gifted unexpected compassion. Sometimes we rely on the kind words and encouragement of others to persevere. Not wanting to disappoint those who’ve extended faith can be a surprisingly excellent motivator. I’ve experienced such extremes, in the best an MFA has to offer, and the damage it can inflict.

  * * *

  Shortly after I first started climbing, a sponsored climber stopped by the gym where I worked. He brought videos of himself bouldering, brought cans of free Red Bull in a giant Red Bull–shaped cooler.

  After his screening, my boss volunteered me to try a dyno problem in front of everyone else, or a move in which the vertical distance between holds is so great that you have to launch your body upward in the air and catch the next. The sponsored climber was meant to help me learn and send this particular problem. He gave vague advice about getting my feet on to start, stood behind me, and watched.

  The problem was set on an overhanging prow, so that throwing your body upward also meant throwing backward into negative space. To grab the next hold, you had to aim a few inches above it, so that you could essentially fall and latch on to the jug. I’d tried the move a few times on my own without success—I’d fallen just a few centimeters short.

  On my first attempt under his watch, I committed. I threw my body upward and landed the dyno with a satisfying thump.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said, surprised. By this he meant, I think, that he ha
dn’t touched my back to support the move. He hadn’t physically assisted me, and his beta, or advice, had been nonspecific.

  This moment has since become familiar to me: one in which success or failure lies with the energy of those surrounding you, rather than in your own mental, physical, and technical abilities or limitations.

  He had helped me, simply by giving me a reason to fully commit. I knew him then as a sponsored climber. It was later that I saw him as a regular person, separate from his media persona, someone trying to make a living by selling a certain kind of dream.

  Even at that work event, rather than selling adrenaline and success, the stories he told were of the takes we didn’t see—when he tried to repeat what he’d already successfully sent, was too tired, and paid the price in broken bones. The sends don’t come without associated costs.

  * * *

  In Kentucky I climbed once with a newer climber, someone who was physically stronger and better conditioned, but who didn’t have the confidence of experience.

  “It’s like watching you climb a route in the gym,” he said as a compliment, as he watched me warm up on a route.

  When it was his turn, I could see hesitation manifest itself in his body. Doubts translate to moving downward rather than upward, to pausing when you should be throwing faster. We yelled, “C’mon!” in these crucial moments, and he kept pushing. He reached the anchors successfully, without falling or asking his belayer to take his weight.

  When climbing’s hard, it feels very hard. You watch people moving and you can’t imagine their elegance, their power. And then when conditions have aligned, you’re the one floating up rock, remarking at just how easy it is. At how it feels like we’re meant to do this, made for it.