Up Deep Creek

Carolyn B Healy

I stood on the bank and squinted at the two white-clad figures in the middle of Deep Creek’s swirling water. As a nine year-old city girl temporarily plunked down in the Smoky Mountains for a family visit, I was on high alert for things I couldn’t see back at home, and this was going to be a big one.

My cousin Annette, six years older, was on the list of my most admired people. She could cook and sew and win 4H prizes. She had the same name as my favorite Mouseketeer, and I harbored a secret hunch that she was really the famous Annette and the family was keeping it secret. Plus, she was a teenager with teenage friends, some of them boys.

Now she was standing in the middle of the creek in a pretty white dress with lace trim. I bet she made it, I thought in a spurt of pride. I knew from experience what she was up against out there. That water was cold as ice. I knew that because her mother Anna Lou would regularly pile the cousins into her Plymouth and barrel over mountain roads to take us to the swimming hole “up Deep Creek” and then back to her house for popsicles.

Part of my annual immersion into the ways of my relatives was the agonizing entry into that frigid water, a test I had to pass to prove myself. While my cousins dove in and got it over with, I inched in, crunching down to pat the freezing water onto my goose-bumped arms. Once I finally gathered my courage and plunged in, it was a victory. Annette didn’t usually go along, being too busy with more sophisticated endeavors.

I stood on the bank behind Anna Lou and Uncle Commodore, my mother’s brother, and their sons Don and Jim. They seemed to think this was a normal occurrence. I had heard we were going to a baptism but that sounded like a churchy thing, not a swimming hole thing. What were we doing here? And what was a baptism anyway?

Was my petite Grandma there, having clambered down the bank on her tender feet, in her voile dress and Sunday hat with the veil? You know how memory is, focusing in on the main event and leaving the edges blurry. Grandma may have stayed home, since this was a Presbyterian ceremony and the rest of the family, she included, was Baptist. I didn’t know the difference, but they certainly did.

There was a lot of religion in that town. The various Baptist churches, red brick with white steeples in town and the more modest weathered wooden ones up the hollows, seemed to have the strongest foothold. One recent day, I had tagged along on an all-day genealogy outing up into the mountains with my aunts. I snapped pictures of the white clapboard church that a great-grandfather had built, and of the family headstones that surrounded it. It was something. How could a kid from 1111th Street have roots way out here, in a hollow that my aunts could barely find? I was more interesting than I’d thought.

The Presbyterian Church that my cousin was seeking entry to was back in town, painted bright white, right down the hill from her house, a couple of blocks from the almost defunct railroad line, just around the bend from the Baptist one of the rest of the family. But the church that made the biggest impression on me was the one that we had nothing to do with. It announced itself by a gothic-script sign on the highway into town: St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, Masses 8, 9, 10:30 am. It sat on a ridge overlooking the A&P and the Tuckasiegee River, its austere grey stone looking medieval and menacing. I didn’t stop to think that my home church back in Chicago was housed in an odd replica limestone Irish castle that may have looked as misplaced as this one. It also escaped me that my Unitarian church building served as the symbol for the South Side neighborhood that was so heavily Catholic it practically smelled of incense. Nine year-olds aren’t much on irony.

The ceremony was about to start. The other figure, the white-suited preacher, began to stir. He boomed a few words in his God-calling voice, put his arm around my willing cousin and – oh my gosh – dipped her backwards under the water. And held her there. And kept holding her there. Her family stood stock still. Since they were older than I was and better swimmers, I figured that if she needed rescue, they’d be on the job, and I should quell my impulse to splash out there.

The preacher’s incantations continued and to my relief he finally lifted her up, streaming, still breathing, and escorted her to the bank where her mother waited with a white terrycloth towel. We trooped back to the house for the usual pot luck – plates of sliced tomato and cantaloupe still warm from the sun, pyramids of sweet corn picked that morning, fried okra, stacks of cornbread, beef cooked beyond well-done to just this side of charcoalhood, and fried chicken from the poor creature I’d seen my grandfather ax-murder earlier in the day. I might have been the one from the city, but in their way, my relatives were far more conversant with violence than I was, but the necessary violence it takes to run a life close to the land. Dessert was Anna Lou’s coconut cake and watermelon, eaten in the yard so the juice could run down to the elbows.

I never asked Annette what it felt like to be dunked and baptized, being too shy and too young. I didn’t yet know that the result of curiosity could be learning, if only I’d ask. I remember how it felt to me. I’d glimpsed a jaw-dropping event I’d never see again and that my friends back home couldn’t imagine. For a while, the gulf between me and my relatives had widened, with me on the outside peeking in, wondering what would happen next.

But by the end of the meal, while the aunts cleared the table and teased Grandma into sitting on the convertible step-stool while they washed the dishes, and the men rocked on the porch, I played with my cousins out by the lilac bush. We chased fireflies and captured them in Ball jars with perforated lids that stayed on the back porch. Laughter leaked out of the kitchen windows, and the low rumble of the uncles’ voices rolled off the porch. In the process, I was restored. This was my family. I loved their slow speech and Southern story-telling. I loved their food, and how they loved my mother. And I loved Annette who gave me something to shoot for.

I wasn’t required to understand all their ways to belong there. It was a great gift of my childhood to see so early that we could be different yet connected. Annette was the star of that day in my memory but I think I was the lucky one. Later, dishes done, we all gathered in the front room and sat in a giant circle, moths hitting the screens, and the funny stories began. What I would give for a chance to hear those voices again, trying to top each other. Their generation is all gone now except for Commodore who celebrated his 100th birthday this summer. I inhaled all that love and knew I’d have a home here if I ever needed it, and vowed to take all these folks home with me in my memory, where they still reside.

CBH 09/09

Success and Failure - Cuban Style

Carolyn B Healy

Celia got us there with 20 minutes to spare. We collected on the open-air platform and looked around. On the earth road alongside, we witnessed a few centuries’ worth of transportation options whiz by. A horse and cart carried a local man hauling a sack of grain; another cart hauled a tourist couple also rushing to make the train. A bicycle rickshaw scooted by, carrying a local woman dressed for the office, although looking around the very small town, it was hard to see where she might be headed. A series of 1950-era Chevys and DeSotos and a couple of rusty Ford pickups also buzzed by while we waited. A mid-1960’s Soviet Lada, a boxy successor imported once Fidel shut down the supply of the U.S. cars, followed. Cash for Clunkers would be an enormous hit in Cuba if only anyone had any money or the right to buy a new car.

Early that morning, after a sumptuous brunch at the hotel, Celia had urged us onto our luxurious Chinese bus for our trip into the countryside. Maximo sat at the wheel, greeting each rider with nods and a wordless smile. Maximo spoke no English, we were told. We had also been told that Celia, like all guides, would have to watch her words, as you never know who might disapprove and turn her in to the state for unauthorized opinions. That was enough to get us all to keep an eye on Maximo and his motives (How did we really know he speaks no English?), and nervous that our endearing single mother new friend Celia would overstep her boundaries.

She kept us moving all morning, afraid we would miss our connection. Today our tour was to show us the remnants of the greatest of the Cuban crops, sugar, and of the lifestyle it provided for those involved. Into her microphone, as we sped along the National Highway, she described Cuba’s relationship with sugar over the years as the lynchpin of the economy to the near collapse of the industry with the end of slavery, its transfer to the hands of U.S. companies in the years before Fidel showed up and nationalized the companies. It limped into the 1980’s, but once the Soviets collapsed themselves and could no longer be any help with fuel or machinery, it faded further.

We waited on the platform, guiltily snapping photos of modest residents’ daily lives as if we were viewing an ancient culture sprung to life. They want us here, we comforted ourselves; they want us to see how they live and take home evidence so others will know. Or at least they’d like to get a good look at some Americans, the folks they are forbidden to mix with, except on the four hours of nightly U.S. television shows. I can’t figure out the motivation of the regime to welcome Brothers and Sisters and Two and a Half Men into the struggling lives of the Cuban people. Was it to highlight the decadent empty materialistic lives of the capitalist pigs? Or to provide the barest hint of freedom, a nightly secret pleasure to keep the masses reassured that they are not so isolated after all? Even with a nightly drip of American media, how much does the average Cuban know of life outside the island? Deprived of CNN, Internet access and travel, yet taunted by fictional lives set in Malibu and Ohai, CA, what must they imagine?

But Cubans are accustomed to fiction, being raised on a steady diet of claims about the success of the Revolution despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. They receive lectures about agrarian reform while tractors rust in untended fields. They hear about the glories of the generous food rationing system while they dash out the back door to their black market suppliers to gather enough for the family to eat. They are told about the fine highways that crisscross the countryside while they congregate in intersections waiting for hours for trucks to provide stand-up rides to cities outside Havana, because no one making the monthly wage of under $20 can possibly afford a $17 bus ride to a mid-island city.

Cuba has a history of occupation and domination by outside powers. There was always someone coming along to overpower and exploit the Cuban people and strip their resources - a parade of Spaniards, English, French, and yes, Americans.

When the first wave, the Spaniards, showed up in search of gold, they managed to wipe out the indigenous population in a quick 30 years, with European diseases, overwork and mass suicide. This created an opening and a business opportunity for the African slave trade to begin, which continued to the tune of 400,000 individuals before it was done. That was the constant, while the nationality of the colonists rotated, along with the crops they worked – tobacco, sugar, whatever. There was always wealth to be had, but it seemed to slip through the fingers of ordinary Cubans and land right in the pockets of the already rich and favored families of whichever world power was in charge at the time.

When the train arrived, the locomotive chugging and belching steam, we climbed into its open-air cars and settled into polished wooden seats. Celia wrangled the last few of us who had wandered off to get just one more picture of the dusty town.

The train inched out of the station and began its slow climb up the valley that had once been the center of the world’s sugar production. As we began to build up speed, a man dressed in a striped shirt, gripping a guitar, appeared from one of the lanes. He sprinted hard after the train and leapt onto its back platform, grabbing the bar just in time. He strode up the aisle and joined his musical partner waiting with trumpet in hand, and they struck up the Afro-Cuban rhythm we could hear in our sleep.

In the back of the car, another passenger, a young Cuban woman dressed in a white blouse and flowing skirt danced in the aisle with her young friend. He soon tired and an older man stepped up, eager to match her swiveling hips to his. Minutes later, they fell into their seats, satisfied, while the musicians played on. The tourists applauded.

The music never stops in Cuba. At every venue a group pounded out the rhythm and sang until we were out of sight. From our hotels we could hear the pulse of the clubs far into the night. Sometimes there were horns, always guitars and drums, and the voices. Even if we couldn’t understand the words, we knew what they sang about - longing and heat and sex. We could tell that much.

As we proceeded up the valley we passed the occasional house surrounded by tidy garden plots. Mostly we saw expanses of untended fields with remnant sugar cane plants sprouting from dry and cracked soil. When we saw workers, they held machetes or followed oxen pulling a plow. It looked like Fidel’s grand plan for agrarian reform hadn’t quite taken hold.

It was all pretty in a sad way, crisp clouds against a bright blue sky, the hilly landscape still green but raggedy. It was easy to imagine the best years, the growers and their families traveling from their grand Havana homes to the opulent country houses, chugging up the valley to watch the harvest of their wealth.

It got even easier to imagine once we climbed off the train and walked up a slope to one of those country houses, restored to Victorian grandeur with crystal chandeliers and shaded porches. Outside, a market was set up to lure the tourists, full of embroidered clothing and linens and eager vendors chasing down tourists to view their wares. It was one of the few displays of crass commercialism we witnessed.

To escape their pleas, I wandered beyond the stalls. A tower rose from the dusty earth. Architecturally interesting, its stacks of winding staircases and arches invited picture-taking. After snappng a series of artsy shots featuring rolling fields framed by the tower’s arches, I looked up. What was this thing for anyway? Oh. Of course. A slave tower, built so that the overseers could keep track of who was working hard enough and who was not. It focused my attention on the other side of the commercial equation, and interfered with my appreciation of the wealth and luxury that had flowed from the sugar trade.

The slaves arrived from many African tribes over 300-plus years to do the work, at one point accounting for 45% of the population. About a third of them were headed for the plantations, the rest for house slave spots. Over the years, a series of rebellions broke out, the first in 1513, but the system chugged on unabated until outlawed in 1886.

Cuban slavery had some particular features that sound good: a slave could take three days off to try to find a better owner, where he could negotiate his own price and the price of his eventual freedom. Yes, the slave had a potential out, if he could raise enough money to buy his freedom. Some did, and became middle class slave-owners themselves, a spectacular failure of imagination in my book.

Before we start handing out human rights awards, the other facts scream of what we normally associate with slavery. Slaves rarely were allowed to marry, families who arrived together were torn apart, babies born to strong healthy young women were taken to be nursed by other slaves bred for the purpose.

All the success, the riches, the opulence came from a failure of humanity that allowed this systematic exploitation, a violation of decency and fairness. Did all the flaunting of wealth and competitive spending we’d seen throughout Cuba, from the marble burial vaults to the elegant carriages and fancy houses, help answer some of our questions about Fidel’s success here, and the Cubans’ apparent reluctance to oppose him? Did the long history of exploitation begin to explain Fidel’s ascendance as the hero of everybody gets the same and nobody better try to outdo their neighbors?

We climbed back on the train for the return trip, heads full of the competing agendas of the colonists, industrialists, slaves and revolutionaries. Cuba shut down the sugar mills five years ago, giving up the fantasy of reviving the glory days. It seems just as well.

CBH 08/09

Enough Already

Carolyn B. Healy

I turned on the Today Show this morning for the first time in weeks, and they’re just lucky I was prepared to give them a second chance. I had to put them on probation back on the second day of the Michael Jackson death marathon. If they were going to act like the entire world screeched to a halt just because one exceedingly troubled entertainer died, then they’d have to do it without me. I am not without compassion for M. Jackson, as he was clearly victimized first and repeatedly before he turned his attentions to young boys. I just sought some balance and the slightest recognition that he became a predator himself.

Soon after, I left on a lengthy trip where my morning viewing switched to the cruise director’s daily closed circuit TV show, for which he donned a turban and received a lovely facial from the spa staff, and talked on and on about shopping. I didn’t miss Today at all.

Once back, I needed a week to overcome jet lag, and was finally ready to resume my usual habits. Certainly Today was over the pop star immersion by now and back to actual news. I switched it on. What filled the screen but the entire Duggar family, the reality show crew who unapologetically shows off their incredible flair for reproduction, a 21 person mass seated somehow - they must have bleachers in the living room - around the parents.

“The Duggars are here. And they have an announcement,” the off-screen voiced teased. “We’ll be right back.”

Let’s see…this is the Duggars. Whatever could it be? A cure for a deadly disease? Peace in the Middle East? You got it. They are having another frigging baby. Nothing against the baby, who is blameless in all this, but hardly could be considered fortunate, to show up on the doorstep as child # 19? That poor kid will be working for scraps until the cows come home. They are going to have to assign someone to remember his name.

Mrs. D announced it in her strangely childlike voice, the rest of the family stared vacantly, and Mr. D, a John Edwards lookalike, hitched up his belt and tried to look modest. “We are so excited,“ she warbled, “waiting for our 19th child.” Then they chatted with the eldest son’s new wife, pregnant of course, about their upcoming birth, and the segment was over.

It’s enough to make you look kindly on the Chinese ban on multiple children. And makes you wonder just who is raising whom around the Duggar household. I don’t care if both parents permanently gave up sleeping for the next 15 years, there is no way two people can adequately parent 18, now 19, children.

While Mr and Mrs. D are happily reproducing like rabbits, they conscript their existing children to raise the new ones. It’s like a Ponzi scheme for parenting - invest your sperm and egg in this new opportunity, but skim off the resources of other people to make good on it. And act like everything is fine and dandy.

Back in the day when my husband and I formed our notions about family size there was a concept called Zero Population Growth, an early expression of consciousness about how we use the earth. It was based on the ethic that no one family gets to hog more than their fair share of the resources. ZPG guided us down a logical path - just replace yourself and then do a bang-up job of raising your replacements. Lucky for us, it worked out that we had a son and almost three years later, a daughter, so we could carry out that plan.

It wasn’t that I was so enraptured with the ecological part of the idea, but as an only child who longed hard for a sibling, two children seemed an embarrassment of riches, and I set out to give them scads of attention and intention.

I gradually noticed that while most of our friends planned their families as we did, some other folks out there still cranked out kids like they needed to raise their own field hands. This ZPG thing had a pull, but not for everyone. Of course, many powerful forces were at work - religion, family tradition, culture, competitiveness, repeated tries for a child of the other sex, fertility, medical issues.

I understand that everyone has to chart their own course, and I have absolutely no patience with those in the anti-choice faction who are ready to make everyone else’s reproductive decisions for them. I certainly don‘t want to join their ranks. But I do have some thoughts.

The more I see these giant families like the Duggars lionized, the more I wonder why. The Duggars can‘t stop themselves, and parade their lives on TV, looking back at us with smug smiles. I wonder, when they started all of this way back in the 1980’s, did they have this planned or did they just sit back and let it happen?

In 1997, the McCaughey Family from Iowa produced septuplets on top of their one existing child. In religiously-loaded interviews, they credited themselves with refusing the selective reduction of the number of fetuses that doctors recommended, and credited their prayers for the survival of all the children. Luckily for them, only two of the children have cerebral palsy. Their self-congratulation aside, what does this say about the prayers of other parents whose babies were stillborn, or died days after birth; or the prayers of infertile couples who would give anything to be pregnant with one measly fetus? Were those prayers less valid, less fervent, less worthy?

And just last year, Octomom ,who already had six children, two with special needs, added her eight new babies to the mix. The reaction to her news suggests that we may finally have had enough. As she looked coyly at the camera denying that she was angling for a reality show, the celebrity machinery went wild. While journalists and others climbed all over the lawn and seduced her parents into on-air interviews, ethicists were finally asked to examine the issues involved also.

All these families grant themselves permission that most of us would responsibly deny. Is all of this self-congratulation and self-promotion the final and most tragic expression of our acquisitiveness? The one who dies with the most children wins?
Or is this just a freak show that serves to entertain the rest of us who would never dream of turning out two baseball teams under our very own roofs – a cautionary tale about what happens when excess overtakes reason? If so, we have circled back to M. Jackson and his sadly overblown and XXX life?

Here comes the really touchy part. Internationally, we see reports of countries nearly paralyzed by poverty and disease and scarcity of resources. Yet their average family sizes would put them in the running for a TV show on cable. From here, it looks pretty easy to solve. Apply ZPG and you turn an unmanageable situation into a workable one. Sounds logical to me.

But that brings a minefield of potentially explosive issues. Dare to speak of limiting population and you risk charges of colonialism, racism, classism. But reality is clear - producing too many people makes life harder, and in those extreme situations, even impossible to sustain.

At out house, we did what seemed right and it worked out fine. There is the occasional twinge, wondering what it would have been like to throw ZPG to the winds and be surrounded now by many more children. Just like there is the occasional twinge for others who wonder what it would have been like to mount a huge career, or set aside material comforts and go out to save the world. That is what we get to do as life moves along, review our lives and sort out the hard-won wisdom from the regrets.

All other things being equal, like love and plenty to eat, surely there are riches to be had in enormous families that I will never know. And surely there is a quality of connection in small families that the Duggars will never know.

Now, I have to decide what to do about my relationship with the Today Show. I’m pretty sure I know what I’ll do – I’ll tune back in. I have a curiosity problem. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

CBH 07/09

Mammogram 2009

Carolyn B Healy

4:23 am

Fear penetrates my dream – trapped in a warehouse with endless stairs and no door. I awake with sweaty palms and dread. Dream fades. Whew. Reality invades. Shit. Mammogram Day.

6:00 am

Shower, no deodorant.

6:25am

Check email. Do not make To Do list for day, just in case.

6:45 am

Take two Extra-Strength Tylenol. Ha! Outwit the flesh-squeezing bastards.

7:00 am

Remove envelope of old films from closet shelf, safer at my house ever since the year they misplaced (and eventually found) them, making it all worse. Do not look at them.

7:05 am

Drive. Park.

7:10 am

Take elevator to 4th floor. Enter office. Go to bathroom. Complete paperwork. Pretend to watch Good Morning America present the various tragedies that occurred overnight while I thought only of myself. Go to bathroom again.

7:25 am

Follow receptionist to changing room. Choose locker # 11. Strip to waist, don enormous pink-flowered flannel gown with many strings. Wrap tight. Sit in waiting room. More Good Morning America. Maintain cocktail party-style chit chat with other patients. Do not mention that we are all in the Diagnostic Mammogram wing for some good reason, not downstairs in Routine Mammogram.

7:35 am

Experience strange calm, proving once again that reality in the moment is easier to handle than the anticipation of it.

7:40 am

Follow smiling harmless-looking tech into her chamber. Small, blonde, young, dressed in green print lab wear; efficient, informative, apologetic, low key, all you could ask for.

7:45 am

Begin on right side. Take arm out of sleeve. Step forward. Stare through blinds as a woman closes her car door, walks away, approaches building, turns around, returns to car for a forgotten bag, repeats.

7:53 am

Follow directions. Stand here. Lean in. Hold this bar. Relax the shoulder. Sorry. Hold breath. Switch to left side.

8:04 am

Almost done. Just the magnified ones of the incision site to go.

8:08 am

Return to waiting room. Wait. Wait longer. Fight off growing conviction that something is wrong.

8:18 am

Large woman enters, comments to no one in particular that she hasn’t had one of these things in years. Say something encouraging. Look away. Read magazine.

8:20 am

Watch interview with Bernie Madoff’s longtime assistant who had no idea anything was wrong. Believed him. Needed job.

8:23 am

Imagine B. Madoff’s male parts compressed between the clear plastic paddles of the mammogram equipment. Would that be torture? Would that be a problem?

8:25 am

Tech returns at last, asks me to follow her into changing room. Oh no – why can’t she tell me out here?

Tech: It was fine.
Me: What a relief. Now, why didn’t I just say Good? Why reveal my private torment?
Tech: Here’s your paperwork. We’ll see you next year.
Me: Yes. Good. Recall that in previous years they’d given out a carnation to commemorate a good outcome. Budget cuts no doubt. The year it wasn’t okay I can’t remember much, which is just as well. There was no flower, that’s for sure.
Tech: Do you want to wait for your films?
Me: Yes. Thanks.

8:30 am

Dress, return key. Smile. Exhale. Sit in waiting room away from TV. Study other patients. Wonder about percentages: How many get bad news: One in three? Ten? Two hundred?

8:32 am

Check Blackberry. Read notice of Elizabeth Edwards on book tour. Think about timing: mine early, Stage 0; hers late, too late. Think of her children, so young.

8:35 am

Make list for the day: Breakfast out, Drop off donations to resale shop, Clean patio furniture, Buy plants. Appreciate.

8:45 am

Descend in elevator, films in hand. Escape. Dial the important people. Celebrate another whole beautiful year.

CBH 06/09

Mother of the Year

Carolyn B Healy

Elizabeth Edwards slogs forward on her book tour, pundits lob shame-bombs at her, and I cultivate a growing resentment about the whole scenario. My friend Kathy and I even had a spat about her the other night. Kathy thinks she should just stop talking and toss her husband to the curb. Kathy thinks she’s pathetic. I think she’s anything but.

I’d like to talk about Elizabeth without wasting too much time on husband John. Kathy and I agree on him. Let’s just stipulate that he’s the guy you hope your daughter won’t meet. Too good-looking to have been required to develop character, although well-trained in creating and cultivating appearances. An overgrown adolescent. If you don’t agree on the last point, watch clips of his coy flirtation with the videographer he took up with. A middle-schooler lusting after the new social studies teacher wouldn’t display such leering desire. Narcissistic, arrogant. The good-guy imposter genus of the liar-cheater species of the human male. Yeah, yeah. He’s also done good works. He should have stuck with those.

Elizabeth is everywhere these days, promoting her book Resilience, and risking media saturation . So are her critics, who dump truckloads of directives at her feet about how she should feel, talk, and act. I’d like a word with those critics.

I’m a therapist, so listening to people in tough spots is nothing new to me. When I hear Elizabeth refuse to use the other woman’s name or decline to contemplate the paternity of her child, or express more vitriol for the other woman than for her husband, I don’t hear what the critics do – that she is willfully hiding from the truth, deluding herself, letting him off the hook so that she can stay in the spotlight.

Instead, I hear her stating emphatically: I’m at capacity. One more thing and I’ll crack.

Of course she’s in denial. Any healthy person would be. In fact, I believe fervently in denial. It gets a bad rap in the pop culture rush to erase all negative emotion and usher sufferers into closure, whatever that is. It’s portrayed as a thing to get out of. But not so fast. Denial gets us through what is unbearable, as well it should, and it lasts as long as it lasts, until we don’t need it anymore.

To me, the popular bromide that God never gives you more than you can handle is a dangerous lie. Tell it to the many clients I have seen swamped by tragedy yet criticized by onlookers for not responding as they would like. We are only human. We need a temporary trauma regulator, a valve that protects us from overload. Denial is that fail-safe device, part of the hard-wired security system that automatically kicks in when we are overrun by life’s torments. Take that away from Elizabeth and where is she?

Think of what she has lost. Her son Wade many years ago, and all she hoped his life would include. Her health. The loving marriage she thought she had. Her children’s security. Her future. This is about grief and only about grief.

Here’s how it works. Each new loss reactivates the ones before, and we drag all of them along with us for a time, until we can begin to reassemble a life that makes sense.

Why does Elizabeth get the rest of us so stirred up? Certainly her honesty about her medical condition unsettles us, and her blind spots about her cheating husband infuriate us. Her choice to stay married to him disappoints us, but we don’t get to prescribe how another carries out her grief.

She is living out our worst nightmares, but if we turn on her for the way she is doing it, we do none of us justice. And, speaking of arrogance, to imagine that the rest of us know what we’d do in her awful circumstance is at least naïve, and more likely evidence that we’re in denial ourselves.

Here is the elephant in the room that Elizabeth sees and her critics can’t: She is going to die and her children will have the shock of their lives – the kind of shock that will change them forever – their brains, their trajectories, security, expectations, worldview. Her death will cost them in a thousand ways. Grief will climb on board and accompany each of them through the rest of their lives.

While the opinion snipers accuse her of complicity, passive-aggressiveness and the rest, Elizabeth stays put, preserving stability for her children, cushioning them from additional upheavals. She knows that they will end up with their father, and is saving them a side trip into divorce and further trauma. She has a higher mission than pleasing her critics. It’s not that John is worthy of her loyalty, but her children are.

She is colluding – with the notion that they are a family and that John is the person she entrusts with their future. If she has to turn away from full-reality living for a time to accomplish that, to allow herself to direct her attention to the parts of her life that she can still control, so be it.

Her disease has taken away her chance to see her life unfold the way she’d hoped. So did her son’s death. So did her husband’s actions. The rest of us shouldn’t take away her opportunity to complete the things she can control as she sees fit.

There’s one more thing I hear her saying: I may not have much time. But I have something to say, and it wouldn’t kill you to listen. I’ve been places you haven’t and know things that you don’t.

The rest of us might learn something if we’d settle down and listen to her. We’ll know to thank our lucky stars that for most of us, our particular burdens right now pale in comparison to hers. We’ll know to hug our kids, smile at our partners, and locate our compassion.

CBH 05/09

Paddling Toward Today

Carolyn B Healy

I know two people who have been on the Today Show, for very different reasons. The first is Wendy Goldman Rohm, a Chicago area writer and teacher who wrote books on Bill Gates and on Rupert Murdoch and rode her book tour right in there to appear with Katie and Matt.

A book tour sounds glamorous to me who has never been on one. I imagine I’d love the attention and all the stimulating questions, but Wendy says a book tour is a pain. Apparently answering the same questions all day for weeks gets a little grating. On the plus side, they can never take the Today Show away from her.

On a trip to New York several years ago I spent an hour on the plaza at Rockefeller Center watching the show unfold. I watched Katie, Matt and Al out on the plaza chatting. I could look right through the window and see right where the couch is where the interviews take place. I can just picture Wendy – or me – there. This knowledge has proved most useful in my subsequent viewing.

Celebrities must count on that couch, the makeup, the bright lights to make them look their best. They always look so pleased to be perched there awaiting their segment. Last year I saw a real Today Show celebrity shocker however. All morning they had been teasing an upcoming interview with Kevin Spacey, and when they came back from commercial, there he was on the plaza with them out in the elements, as if he was a visiting weatherman. Kevin Spacey is a Big Star and should have been on that couch. He seemed to agree and made a sad crack about being kept outside. I bet he won’t be back at Today very soon.

My second Today Show personality, Emily Kohl, would curl the hair of any parent, which is probably why her story made such a splash. She would remember me only as a basketball mom. I remember her as the scrappy little guard who year after year watched every other girl grow taller and then taller yet. In response, she grew scrappier and scrappier. And that would be where my awareness of Emily would end if not for one post-college venture.

Two years out of college, six years after she had last seen Emily, my daughter received an email. Emily was raising money so that she and a friend could buy a rowboat to take them across the Atlantic Ocean. This is a super fortified industrial strength rowboat that costs upwards of $50,000 if I remember right, a bit over the budget of a couple of post-college young women.

It turns out that there are enough people driven to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat to fill up an entire race, complete with radar, communications equipment and people on shore to monitor progress. Remember when we used to fear that we were raising little girls to be timid weaklings? Cross that one off the list.

They raised the money, launched the boat, and were making decent time 46 days into the race when they were swamped by a 20 foot rogue wave. The boat turned over, water rose inside the cabin and Emily’s foot got entangled. She managed to free herself and pull out two life jackets and a sleeping bag. Despite all their grit and confidence, they couldn’t right it and had to withstand the elements and hold on for dear life.

That’s when the people on shore proved their mettle, summoning a nearby ship filled with young students in a classroom-at-sea project who sped over and picked them up – seventeen hours later.

The fact that these plucky young women had drifted all night, perched on their upside down boat in 10 foot swells and 30 knot winds, wondering when (or if) help would arrive appealed to the morning news cycle. The fact that the rescue ship shot video of their predicament and their relief at being rescued didn’t hurt. There was even a subplot: What did the family go through waiting for news? As a matter of luck or grace, Emily’s parents had been traveling and heard nothing of her peril until it was over.

So there was Emily and her rescue on the Today Show while Katie Couric, a mother herself, shook her head in alarm. Some days later, when they could make it to New York, both girls sat on that couch, getting far more attention than Kevin Spacey.
In case you breathed a sigh of relief as I did and figured that such a bullet-dodger of an experience would be a once in a lifetime thing, I need to tell you that a couple of years later they did it again and completed the race without a hitch, for which they received much less notice.

I get a boost from Emily’s story, something about embracing the thrill of riding the waves instead of huddling in fear on the shore like the rest of us. If I hear that she is trying it again, I’ll probably send another check, shake my head and hope that it comes out okay, and that her parents have another trip they can go on. And hope that my own daughter sticks with kayaking.

CBH 04/09

Freefall

Carolyn B Healy

I was the only kid in Chicago who had never been to Riverview. It wasn’t for lack of interest, as I’d been to Kiddieland over and over and was a real fan. It was a matter of logistics. In that era before expressways, when we’d set out for the occasional visit to the relatives in Oak Park, it took forever. And forever in a 1949 Ford, with no air conditioning of course, was no picnic. And Riverview was all the way on the North Side. For all I knew that would take more than forever.

Finally, early in high school came my big chance. My best friend Leslie and I got to go. I remember that. Whether it was it a school trip, or a YMCA outing, or somebody’s brave mom who drove us there and then disappeared for a few hours I can’t tell you.

We entered the gate and trailed from ride to ride, from The Bobs to Aladdin’s Castle, doing whatever we wanted. I felt liberated, grown up, finally part of the larger world. It was delicious.

My traumatic memory begins in the line for the parachute ride, Pair-o-Chutes. Sticky from cotton candy, head spinning from the rides and the lack of supervision, I looked up. Far far above me loomed the top of the giant tower with two billowing parachutes flapping in the wind. A metal cage dangled and swung from side to side. It was filled with children. They were probably wide-eyed but they were way too far away for me to see.

The machinery clanged, the cage fell and the parachute filled with air. I couldn’t see those children’s eyes, but suddenly I sure could hear their voices – their terrified screams pierced my ears and opened my brain to the fact that I was waiting in line to do the very same thing. What was I doing here?

You could not call me a brave child, but I had been trying to change that. Every day of elementary school I’d had to pass a yard ruled by a giant gray and black barking dog, one of those muscular mountain types, who would growl at me over the fence. Luckily, the fence was made of just as giant boulders and I believed that he probably couldn’t get to me. In eighth grade, I decided that things had to change. Instead of cowering in fear and scurrying by, I would stride by, head held high and show that beast that I wasn’t scared of him. Not at all. At the same time I felt that the owners should be ashamed of themselves, terrorizing young children just trying to get to school.

Also, even though I was beside myself with panic whenever I had to go to the dentist, I kept quiet and worked on developing a steely determination to get through it with dignity. Thank God it was only twice a year. If I had a cavity and had to come back sooner, I was wracked with guilt, shame and self-recrimination over this dental failure, not to mention beset by the familiar panic. But I made it through every time and forgot about dentistry until about a week before the next checkup.

So here I was – at Riverview, in line, marching toward certain death, feeling just terrible that my mother would have to face life without me. In my final moments, how would I handle this situation, given my commitment not to chicken out of things? I would have to be brave. I could do it.

On the other hand, how had I let this happen? Part of keeping yourself safe is preventing unnecessary danger, and I’d walked right into this one. My fear told me that this is the kind of thing other people can do but you can’t.

In fact, other people even want to do this. I eyed Leslie to look for signs of weakness. She looked up too at the screaming children. And laughed. She would be no help. And since I couldn’t bear to out myself as a coward in front of her, no one else could help me either.

The line inched forward and carried me slowly to my fate. I remember laboring to keep up lighthearted chatter while my heart was beating wildly out of my chest like in a cartoon.
Maybe I’d be struck with a sudden illness. Maybe I could excuse myself to go to the bathroom and dawdle my way back and, oh well, miss the whole thing. But Leslie was too good a friend. She would loyally step out of line and wait for me. Doggone her anyway.

Or maybe there’d be a power outage, a lightning strike, or…or…. I ran out of ideas. It was going to happen. We reached the front of the line. The apparatus stopped and the gate flew open. The last occupants, faces glowing with excitement from their fall, were unstrapped and ran toward the exit stairs chattering excitedly.

We climbed in the soon-to-be-dangling basket and were secured in our seats by the bored attendant, who gave the signal with a big wave. We started up.

My terror suddenly broke apart. It was still there, but so was the entrancing and unfamiliar view, the shrinking waves from the crowd below, the silence broken only by the grinding gears. There was a bird. And white clouds against the bluest sky. And the tower which seemed to still be standing.

I looked up to watch our progress. We were almost to the top. Leslie wasn’t saying much either. Maybe she was just a little scared? I couldn’t ask.

We hit the top and the terror kicked in full force. The bottom dropped out and we were in freefall, hurtling toward the sidewalk. What if we didn’t stop?

But we did. The parachute filled with air, the gears caught, and I was …disappointed? At the end, it was not so scary, like going down in an open-air elevator. We hit bottom and clanged into place. It was over. I had lived. Despite the anticlimactic end, I nearly melted into a puddle once my feet hit blessed earth.

The rewards were rich. My thrill came not from the adrenaline rush while falling, but from the post-landing reconfiguration of my identity. I was a person who could do a thing like that after all. I could be terrified, cope with it, and live. I was a survivor. I was brave even. My fear was present and I overcame it. Again. How about that?

But then came the real kicker. It soon hit me that, to be the person I wanted to be, I would need to do this again and again. In the years since I have reenacted my parachute ride repeatedly. Each time, from parasailing off the Florida coast, to the times I’ve stuck my neck out professionally, to the day my three-year-old had heart surgery, I have found that the measure of my initial fear and dread is about equivalent to the pride and relief after completion.

Good thing I got to Riverview that day. It closed soon after and I might have been left to cower and avoid my way through life. I might have learned this lesson in another way, who knows, but certainly not so quickly or so well. What you learn in freefall sticks with you like nothing else.

CBH 03/09