Chapter 33
Dave had always been the one to check the mail. In our modern age of email and text messages and voicemail, I’d come to think of “snail mail” as largely irrelevant, a pile of twenty tedious pieces of paper—credit card solicitations, flyers announcing a new neighborhood pizza joint, bank statements that could just as easily live online—for every one piece of meaningful correspondence. And so, over the years, I’d willingly ceded that chore to him. It’s not something we’d ever talked about or decided on, but as is so often the case in any relationship, we’d settled into our way of doing things, divvying up the minutia of our day-to-day life together. Dave didn’t mind checking the mail, I did, so that was just something that fell in Dave’s column—it was one of his things, the way taking out the garbage and washing the dishes were his things.
And so, that winter, as all of Dave’s “things” shifted from his column into my already-packed column, checking the mail became yet another task to think about in order to keep our day-to-day life afloat. I resisted it at first. I dislike checking the mail on a good day, but in recent months—the stroke, emergency medical transports by land and by air, extended ICU and hospital stays at Fargo and Rush and RIC, dozens of doctor’s appointments, therapy sessions, blood-clotting tests, scans of the heart and brain and pretty much everywhere else, medication lists, Dave’s surgical heart procedure, a pregnancy, a delivery and subsequent hospital stay, a newborn baby with her own medical visits, and so much more—the act of sorting and responding to our family’s mail had gone from inconvenient to outright harrowing.
It was piles and piles and piles of paperwork. Bills that felt like a fresh punch in the gut each time. Insurance fine print that was long and confounding, often filled with pushback that sent a new surge of fight-or-flight hormones churning through my already-hormone-addled body. Disability applications that required my time and attention. Doctor visit summaries and reminders for so many upcoming appointments. An application to get my breast pump reimbursed. Not to mention all of the paperwork that comes with getting a new life up and running: birth certificate application, Social Security registration, her own health insurance coverage, and neonatal appointments. As twisted as it sounds, even the well-wishes and baby gifts arriving in the mail from generous friends and family began to feel like a burden as I thought: Unwrap another package, recycle the packaging, and then write another thank-you note.
Each day it arrived, a never-ending barrage of crushing mail, more paper to add to the pile. I was so tired of it. I was tired of fielding these bills, figuring out which ones needed payment and which ones required me to call the insurance company and wait on some automated line until I finally got redirected to a person with whom I could argue (plead? cry? reason?) to get Dave the treatments he so desperately needed. My to-do list was already too long, but each piece of new mail inevitably meant some new chore, and it was I who would have to manage it.
My way of coping with this was, for a time, to simply stop checking the mailbox altogether. Avoidance. Denial. Walk right past the building’s mailroom and don’t look in. If I didn’t see the piles of paperwork, I didn’t have to do the paperwork. Right?
So then one day, after about a week of not checking the mail, I skulked reluctantly into the mailroom, my tail between my legs, unhappily facing the reckoning. I slid the key in and opened our mail slot, bracing for the backlog. I looked in. Nothing. Empty. Not a single piece of paper. Not a single bill.
Hallelujah! I thought. Halle-freaking-lujah! Maybe things are finally calming down? Maybe I’m finally getting a handle on things, maybe I’ve finally caught up on our piles of paperwork? Not having mail was the single best thing that had happened to me all day.
“Oh, hi, miss?” Just then an attendant who worked the daytime shift of our building’s lobby was peeking into the mailroom. “You’re in apartment 201, right?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Your mailbox was overflowing. The postal carrier couldn’t fit any more mail in, so he moved all of it.”
“Moved it?” I asked, my giddy relief evaporating. “To where?”
“Here.” The man handed me a sticky note. On it was an address. “This is the USPS processing facility for this part of Chicago. You’ll have to go there and collect your mail.”
I took the note, my stomach dropping. How fun it would be to take my infant out in the bitter cold to wait in line at a USPS processing facility in the hopes of finding piles of bills and other medical paperwork.
“You had a lot of mail,” the man said after a moment, a friendly smile on his face.
“Yeah,” I said. “We get a lot of mail.”
“Probably best, then, to check it every day, so the mailbox doesn’t overflow.”
Have you ever wanted to just trade lives? To say: I can’t do this anymore; can someone take over for me? Can someone else carry this for me, even just for a day?
That was how I felt in some of the moments of the deepest dark. I was fried from tending to the baby while trying to stimulate Dave’s brain and recovery while also keeping track of everything at home—keeping the fridge stocked and the prescriptions filled and the laundry clean and the car battery from freezing and the dog walked (even though it was single digits outside), all while trying to keep my own career afloat. And if Dave was not going to return to work, then hadn’t I better begin seriously thinking about how I would become the primary breadwinner? It was not pretty.
What I needed was sleep, and support. I sent out an SOS message. My mother-in-law delayed her planned departure for Florida and stayed with us downtown for a week to help with the baby and Dave. She cooked us lasagna and rocked the baby to sleep and spent hours with Dave, diligently setting up his home office with him, approaching the tedious task with a patience and a calm that I simply no longer had in me. Louisa is like a talisman, one of those holy objects whose very presence in a room keeps the dark spirits at bay. With Louisa in our home, I felt a light and a love that I just did not have when we were home alone.
As Louisa left, my mom flew out to join us. She, too, is a bulwark, the rock-solid support I needed right then. She made me coffee in the mornings and held the baby so I could nap. She walked our dog and stocked our fridge. She brought a fresh energy and positive outlook into our small, struggling family circle. One of my favorite photos of Lilly is from that week my mom spent with us in Chicago in January: it’s evening, and Dave is holding his daughter in his lap, smiling, while my mom looks on in the background, the loving grandmother holding her glass of red wine. The dark night outside the window does not appear as terrifying with my mom in the room, smiling, looking on.
After that, my aunt Christine came. She had not been to Chicago in years, and so she inspired us to get out and see the city. We went to museums and braved the cold to take walks. She cooked for us and opened up about the hard times in her own life, and we had a wonderful visit as she got to know Lilly. Marya came back, too. I just needed support and community and I needed my best friend, with whom I could be entirely raw. Every morning that Marya was there, I would stumble out into the living room, Lilly on my hip, and I would say: “I love waking up and knowing that you are here.” I needed to feel like it was not all resting so squarely on my shoulders. I needed to feel like I could speak and have someone there to listen and to answer and to understand. One day, when our car was towed and then died at the tow lot and I had to trek out in the snow to go jump it and drive it back home, it came as no small relief that I could leave the baby at home, warm, with Marya.
There is one day that sticks in my memory. Dave and Lilly and I were driving to rehab in the morning. I had noticed that, since the stroke, Dave never answered his phone. And not just that—he never checked email, text messages, or voicemails. He just did not care. So, in the car that morning, I urged him to listen to his voicemails. “Oh,” Dave said, listening to one of the recordings. “That was RIC. My rehab this morning is canceled.”
I slammed on the brakes. “What? Why?”
“Not sure.” Dave shrugged. “They didn’t say.”
“Play the message again,” I insisted. “Put it on speaker.”
Dave rolled his eyes but obliged. We listened to the message. They did say: the therapy was canceled because of some issue with insurance.
“When was that call?” I asked. “When is that voicemail from?”
Dave checked his phone. “A few days ago.”
“Why don’t you ever answer your phone?” I asked, my teeth gritted. “Or listen to your voicemails?”
Dave shrugged again. “It’s fine. No big deal. We’ll just reschedule.”
“No,” I growled, “I’ll reschedule. After I deal with whatever dispute this is with the insurance.” I wanted to scream. Not only had we gone to the trouble to load up the baby in frigid weather, arrange her nursing and naps around making this appointment, and then driving through the snow to get Dave where he needed to be. Not only had Dave’s much-needed therapy been canceled because of yet another frustrating insurance dispute. Now it would fall on my shoulders to fix the issue and reschedule the appointment. But Dave had not even bothered to listen to the voicemail. Had he listened to the voicemail, perhaps we could have resolved the insurance issue by now. Perhaps we could have salvaged this appointment. At the very least, we would have been spared the effort of loading us all and driving us all through the snow to rehab.
And what was more, now that Dave had no therapy that day, what were we going to do with him? Was it just another day of arguing at home—Dave insisting he could nap and watch TV while I nagged him to read or exercise or do something to stimulate his brain?
That night, Dave went out to dinner with his friend Brad. Evenings out like this with close guy friends were a welcome reprieve, both for Dave and for me. He could get out of the house and away from me and my evident misery. And I could have a few hours off, with only the baby, who was an easy keep compared to Dave.
That evening, as I was preparing Lilly for bed, changing her diaper and getting her into her pajamas, I began to kiss her soft, squishy skin. In that moment, I heard something I had never heard before: a beautiful, soul-lifting sound. My baby’s first laugh. I froze. I realized that my kisses on her bare skin had tickled her and she had laughed. I looked at her, startled and delighted. It was the best sound I’d ever heard. I kissed her again, this time a bit more vigorously. She laughed again. I kissed her more, on her neck and her shoulders and her arms and her belly. Lilly erupted into peals of sweet, innocent, carefree laughter. I looked down at her with tears pooling in my eyes, crying and laughing over her at the same time. I took a video of these first laughs and sent it to both of the grandmas, my sister, and my sisters-in-law. Marie wrote back: “Isn’t it the best sound? An instant mood lifter.” It was true. As I watched Lilly there, laughing on her changing table, I thought: How is it possible for my heart to hold such overwhelming feelings of joy and grief at the same time?
After agonizing over it and doing a ton of research and speaking to a variety of well-informed sources in my life, I decided that I needed to try a low dose of antidepressant. “Body armor” was how one expert referred to it. My reserves were utterly depleted. My body and soul had been ravaged with the stress on me—the pregnancy, the delivery, taking care of a newborn, all while juggling Dave’s stroke and recovery. I had days when I felt bereft of all hope, and I needed a safety net under me so that I could begin the hard work of pulling myself back up.
I leaned on my friends and my family; I made my need evident in a way that I had never done before. Never before had I been so tapped out, so painfully aware of my limitations. I had always been someone who had prided myself on having it more or less together. I had been the planner, the supporter, the self-sufficient one. I had been the one who listened quietly on the phone to a weeping friend or family member and offered advice or words of comfort. I had not been the one weeping into the phone. I could count on one hand the number of times, prior to those days, that I had wept to my parents. But this—this was beyond me.
I was crying a lot. Because my reserves were so utterly shot, I was quick to snap at Dave. He, understandably, was quick to snap back or, worse, retreat into defensive and silent seclusion. This, of course, only drove me to fresh bouts of fury.
One night in midwinter we had one such argument—I honestly cannot even remember what it was about. But I do remember that I got so mad and so upset about whatever it was he said to me that I picked up the phone and dialed Marya. I could not speak to Dave. I could not look at him. I wanted to ask him to leave the apartment, to kick him out, even though it was probably twelve degrees outside and he was a stroke patient and our infant daughter was sleeping in the next room.
I needed Marya to calm me down, talk me back from the precipice, and she was the right person to do so because she would not simply take my side, and I knew that. She loved me, but she also loved and understood Dave. I did not want to simply vent and rant to someone who would just agree with me, echoing my rage and indignation back to me. That would not be helpful. What I needed was to hear from someone who loved Dave, because I did not feel, in that moment, like I did.
As the phone rang I looked at the clock. Just past eleven in Chicago, after midnight in D.C. Oh crap, I thought. Her fiancé was going to think I was crazy, calling after midnight, crying into the phone.
Marya answered almost immediately. “Hello?”
“Mar. Hi. I’m so sorry—it’s past midnight. Did I wake you?”
“No,” she said. I’m not sure if she was lying. “What’s up?”
“Marya, I don’t want to be married to Dave anymore.”
“OK.” I heard her rearrange herself on the other end of the line, sitting up to attention as I bawled into the phone. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
I relayed to her the details of that night’s fight. It was all more than I could bear. Not only did I resent that I had to nag Dave to do so many things, but I resented the fact that he resented my nagging. If he didn’t want my help, then he could just get out and go figure this all out on his own, because God knows I did not want to be carrying his load anymore. “I just can’t do this anymore,” I moaned. “He says these things that are so offensive. After everything I’m doing for him! Or worse, he’ll say these things that are just completely nonsensical and irrational. I can’t even talk to him. I can’t look at him.”
“OK,” Marya said, her voice calm. “Alli, you need to remember something: Dave had a massive stroke a few months ago. His brain is not entirely healed. He is not entirely himself. Do you know how fast you speak? Do you know how much you throw at him when you get fired up? His brain can’t keep up. I’m sure when you get mad at him and start laying it all out before him, he gets confused and scared and of course he gets defensive. So then he just says something back so that he can defend himself, but it might not make sense, and it might not follow in a completely straightforward logic, and it might not be the most sensitive or thoughtful thing to say.”
She had a point. I stopped and thought about it. She definitely had a point.
“You both need to just take a break from this conversation right now,” she said, urging me to put a pin in it for the night. “Walk away. Cool off. When he says nonsensical stuff, that’s not the fully recovered Dave speaking. You need to give him a break. Give him more time. Look how far he’s come, Alli. He’s going to keep healing. But you need to just be patient. This? This is not helpful, as frustrating and excruciating as it is. You’re right to feel the way you feel. But so is Dave.”
Damn it, she was right. She was so right. This was why I had needed her. I was still crying, but I did feel slightly better. “Marya,” I said, “Rob must think I’m crazy. I’m so sorry for calling you like this.”
“First of all, don’t be a butthead. And second of all, I am so glad you called. You call me like this anytime, OK? Do you know how much I cried to you when I went through that last breakup? You were there for me at all times. I am here for you now. And I know that things will get better. Just get through today. And then, tomorrow? Just get through tomorrow.” I could hear that she, too, was crying by now. She continued: “Right now, that is all that you can do. You can’t control anything beyond that. OK?”
“Yeah.”
“And call me whenever.”
Silence. More tears on my end.
“OK?” she asked.
“OK,” I said.
I had to learn to ask for help. To acknowledge that I could not soldier through this one on my own. I had never been ripped open like this, sapped of my strength and stripped of the shiny veneer of confidence and self-sufficiency that I had always been able to present to the world, not as an artificial facade but because, prior to that, I had generally felt like I was in control. That I could handle it—whatever it was.
But in those days, dark as they were in every sense of the word, all I could do was continue to put one foot in front of the other. Those were the days that taught me just how fragile and fickle and entirely out of my control life truly is. My previously held belief that I could work hard and do the right thing and then plan and control the unfolding of my own life? That illusion was yanked quickly and cruelly from my grasping hands, leaving me empty and lost.
Lacy had called this my “ocean time,” and now another ocean image came to mind. Growing up, we would take family trips out to the eastern beaches of Long Island every summer. My parents had met out there, bodysurfing during a hurricane in the early 1970s (yes, they had both, independently of each other, slipped onto the beach to swim in the rough surf after it had been closed to the public). Swimming in the ocean was always a huge part of our family trips out to Long Island. We all loved to bob atop the rough Atlantic waves, to try to harness their power to glide weightlessly toward the shore.
But, when you’re first getting in, the ocean can be rough, even a bit scary. Especially when you’re just a child. There is always that point when you are paddling out that you have to confront the white, roaring wall of breaking water. The Atlantic can be ferocious, and as a kid I was tossed around quite a few times by waves twice my height, spun in the churning swirl of tidal energy until I was inhaling salty water and did not know which way was up.
Still to this day, even after several summers of lifeguarding, I feel that jolt of adrenaline—that mixture of excitement and fear—when I am swimming out through the breaking line of the ocean waves. There’s always the risk that a wave will break right on you and pull you into its mayhem. And yet, the only way to make sure you won’t be smashed by the approaching wave is to swim directly at the rough, breaking water. It is counterintuitive and it can feel frightening, but there it is: swim right at the breaking wave, either dive under it or jump over it, but there’s no avoiding it. Try to turn back and run away and it will catch you eventually, pulling you down in your futile escape attempt. You have to confront it, you have to go through it, in order to get beyond it.
And then, once you are past the breaking line? Bliss. Weightlessness. Peace and quiet, your body bobbing effortlessly atop smooth waters, your view one of tranquil and expansive blue. I had to keep swimming, directly at the breaking line of my fear and my anger and my sadness and my sense of loss. There was no other way to get around this pain other than to keep moving steadily forward. To keep pushing forward and somehow make my way through. And so that’s what I did.
A calendar hung right above my nightstand, and each night as I climbed into bed, I would tick another day off, exhaling a sigh of relief. I would think: I survived; I made it through another day. I am one day closer to…to what?
As tired as I felt, as weary as I would be each night when I fell into bed, my mind would spin for hours. “Three A.M. is your worst enemy,” Lee said knowingly, when I complained to her of my sleeplessness.
Each morning I would get up, summoned by the first cries of my hungry baby, feeling heavy, not having slept. I would plod through the darkness to her crib, thinking: Today is not forever. I just have to make it through another day.
Dave urged me to remain patient—he told me that we just needed more time. He would continue to improve and to heal. I had to remember and acknowledge how far he had come. I had to listen to the insistence of friends and family members who assured me that Dave was still improving; that I was too close to the situation on a daily basis to notice that positive changes were very much still occurring in him. They reminded me of the days when he could not tell me what city he was in, when he could not make it a few hours without the crushing need for a nap.
“Keep writing; writing will save you,” Lee told me. She had first said those words to me just days after the stroke, early in the recovery—way too early for me to see or understand the wisdom in them. At that time I had been working on my third novel, Sisi, but by then it was mostly just editing that remained. That I could do. That was familiar, a welcome escape, even.
But the creatively taxing work of writing something new? Creating something? I could not fathom it. Writing was where I found my joy. Writing was where I went to play. Writing required space and time and freedom, none of which I had.
And yet. In those exhausting days so many months later, when the fragments of our former life were scattered around us, as trampled and trodden as the late-winter Chicago snow, I returned to these words of advice. Keep writing; writing will save you. I returned to the letters that had accumulated on the pages of DearDave.doc. I was adrift—too far removed from the initial event to have any remaining reserves of energy or hope, and yet still too far away from the “full recovery” toward which we had been striving to feel any peace or confidence that we would indeed arrive at that elusive place.
I realized then that I had to write. I had to write in order to make sense of what had happened, what was still happening. I have always found that I can best make sense of the world and of intense or incomprehensible situations by writing. It is my way of taking inventory, of sorting, of understanding. That was what I needed right then: I needed to do a major inventory—not just of the days and months right after Dave’s stroke, but of the days and months and years that had gotten us to that point. To try to make sense of the present. To try to make peace with the fact that the past felt lost and the future loomed like a vast, frightening unknown.
I would write to understand. I would write to bring together the ragged and disparate threads, to try to weave something comprehensible from the frayed strands of pain and love, loss and hope, fear and faith, beauty and brokenness. I would write to try to find some order, some narrative, some meaning from the daily torment of having lost so much. And so that is what I did. DearDave.doc became the place where I turned, the pages piling up as the days passed, one by one.
Today is not forever, I told myself, time and again. I am one day closer to…to what? To a time, I hoped, when life would not feel so hopeless.
Our present would change. It, like the Chicago winter, had to pass eventually. I had to believe that sometime, somehow, the sun would break through once more, and the light would return.