I was sober now and stable, but I missed the old me, the wild, manic me, who enjoyed drinking in bars and driving too fast down the highway, causing the car to jump from the road into an open sky. I was in mourning, at least in the beginning, for my old self. I also mourned the loss of Calen as he had been before he became sick. Calen had been a bright spirit, charming and energetic, hard to pin down. Everyone loved Calen; he had been the leader of the pack and the charmer of teachers and friends. Who was he now? Who was I?
With each day that passed, I mourned less and less. I slowly realized that Calen and I were the way we were meant to be. I accepted the fact that I had a severe mental illness and that it would always be part of my life because it was part of me. The medications helped control my moods. The pills caused the Creature to remain in hibernation. I wished like hell the pills would kill him, but I could still feel him there and knew he always would be present. Thankfully, his terrifying eyes were closed.
There was no medicine that could protect me from the everyday realities of life, however. There would be days when I would feel sad, just as everyone else does. There would be days when I would feel happy, just as everyone else does. What made my days different was that I had to be on guard for red flags that could warn me that I was about to slip into a manic spell or slide into a bottomless depression. I couldn’t risk either one. I couldn’t risk waking the Creature. I had finally arrived at a place where I took no chances with my medication. I knew I had to take it no matter what, no matter how good I felt. I had plenty of evidence of what would happen if I stopped.
I had always been a night person. I understood that the word lunatic is heavy with stigma, yet I liked that word. I liked how it sounded rolling from my tongue. I’d read that it came from the old French word lunatique, which is from the Latin word luna, meaning moon. The ancients used to believe that the moon causes intermittent insanity in some people. Perhaps it does.
I have always felt a pull from the moon. I have stood outside on warm summer Montana nights and stared at that glowing orb and felt its influence over me. Even in winter, I could feel the full moon before seeing it creep from behind the snow clouds.
I was drawn to the night for its promise of solitude, for its lack of confusion. It’s possible to feel the quiet at night. But my therapist had told me that I could no longer stay up late at night. I’d promised him that I would turn off the light at 1:00 a.m., and I kept that promise. I would switch it off and then switch it back on. Technically, I wasn’t lying, but I was manipulating my environment, and for a while I thought I was being clever.
When I finally realized that staying up late every night put my mental stability at risk, I began taking my medication at 7:00 p.m. and going to bed at ten. It wasn’t easy, but I was changing habits. I began to learn to write in the mornings and afternoons.
Recovery comes in baby steps, and when Tom invited me to have dinner at his house with his wife, Kathleen, a woman I genuinely liked, I felt anxious. I still loved Tom and probably always would, but I’d given up any thought of our ever being together. I wasn’t anxious about being jealous because he had moved on. I was anxious about being in any social situation, even with people I knew well. I still had feelings of inadequacy and failure, not because I had done anything wrong but because of my broken brain. They call it self-stigma!
Tom invited me because Calen had a new girlfriend, and he wanted all of us to meet her. One of Calen’s previous girlfriends had introduced them. She was already there when I arrived at Tom’s house. Megan MacNichol was tall, strawberry blond, and cute. I liked it when we shook hands, because she had a confident grip. During dinner, I learned that Megan had her own recovery story.
Four years earlier, on March 12, 2002, Megan had been a carefree twenty-year-old Montana State University student driving home for spring break. Her best friend, Rebecca, was with her, along with Megan’s yellow lab, Baker.
It was snowing hard, and the girls got caught in a Montana whiteout while driving on a two-way road. Snow was blowing so hard and so thick that it became nearly impossible to see. Megan had slowed her car to fifteen miles per hour when a truck burst through the white sheet, coming right at her. It was a semitrailer going sixty miles per hour. Megan didn’t have time to react. It slammed into her car, completely crushing the driver’s side, pinning Megan inside. Neither Rebecca nor Baker was harmed, but Meagan was bleeding and pinned behind the steering wheel.
Six hours passed before a rescue team cut her loose. It was a miracle she survived. From her waist down she was cut and bruised. Her legs were shattered, but the worst damage was her traumatic brain injury. She was unconscious.
Scans showed that parts of her frontal lobe had been so severely injured that doctors warned her parents she might have a completely different personality when she regained consciousness. She might have little or no memory of the collision or her past. But when she opened her eyes, she was the same person she had been.
Megan went through dozens of painful surgeries and endless hours of grueling physical therapy. She had to relearn basics, such as how to swallow and walk. She fully recovered physically, but her TBI had permanently altered her brain, leaving her with limited short-term memory. She had to keep her daily routine written on a whiteboard so she could remember the rudimentary steps she had to follow each day, such as dressing herself, taking her medicine, and feeding her dog.
When I left dinner that night, she said, “I have trouble remembering names, but I will remember yours, Jessie.”
I almost cried.
My children were moving on with their lives. Sander had finished college, and Mattie was graduating from Bozeman High School. Seeing her walk across the stage wearing her cap and gown made me cry. I’d been unstable and drunk much of Mattie’s childhood. Yet Mattie had matured into a thoughtful and beautiful young woman who was wise beyond her years. I think she had coped so well partly because she always knew, no matter what I had said or done, that I loved her.
All relationships become journeys. I had made peace with myself and accepted my mental illness. I still needed to make peace with someone else: my father.
I’d always felt like an inconvenience to him. With therapy, I’d realized that my feelings of insecurity and abandonment were deeply rooted in my father’s decision to go traipsing off to Africa, leaving all us children behind to be raised by MRA nannies. He had put my mother into the impossible position of having to choose between being with him and being with us. There was a gulf between Dad and me, and even as an adult my conversations with him were always uneasy.
I blamed him, in part, for my inability to sustain a stable relationship with a man. Parents are role models, and my father had been an absentee dad because of his own wants and needs. I felt strongly that his wants and needs had not included me.
Had my father remained a distant figure, it might have been easier for me to accept his coldness. But after my father and mother settled in Big Piney, Dad had become a fabulous grandfather. He’d been eager to entertain his grandchildren, to take my boys fishing, and regale Mattie with stories about his adventures in Africa. He showed each of my children the love and attention that he had been completely unable to give my siblings and me.
It was time for me to confront him and to put my anger and resentment to rest. I decided to do it when he came to visit me in Bozeman.
Like most of us, my father didn’t like being criticized. His introspection was done in private, and as soon as I started talking about MRA and how I’d felt abandoned, he let out an irritated sigh, like a child waiting for a school bell to ring so that he could run outside for recess.
He believed he’d already acknowledged his “uselessness” by admitting in his autobiography that he’d felt more comfortable in a Zaire operating room or traveling with President Mobutu than being with us children. He’d published his mea culpa, writing:
Only years later did I realize that simply being there for your own children is more important than solving their problems. It takes time and hard work to become a doctor; fatherhood, I learned so late, requires at least equal, and often more, effort and perseverance.
Announcing in a book that you were a lousy dad is different from coming face-to-face with those you’ve hurt.
Dad sat quietly while I released my pent-up feelings. When I was done, he gave me a look and said, “Jess, how many times do I have to say I’m sorry? Do you want me to walk around on my knees and say ‘I’m sorry’ over and over until my knees are bloody?”
“Won’t you just say you’re sorry without being all dramatic?” I demanded.
“Okay, I’m sorry, and this isn’t the first time I’ve said that, either, I know that.”
I realized at that moment that I had to forgive him. There was no point in remaining hurt. He was who he was. It was as simple as that. A few days later, Dad sent me a note. It had always been easier for him to write about his feelings than to speak about them. He said that he was proud of my children and of me. He said he loved me.
Perhaps because I was by then a parent and realized how I had harmed my own children because of my weaknesses, that note melted any coldness in my heart toward him.
My father needed cataract surgery, and afterward he developed a staph infection in that eye. It was incredibly painful and also required him to wear a black eye patch to cover his now blind eye. In his early eighties, despite the pain and his failing health, he continued to make house calls around Big Piney, but only to the elderly and dying. My dad loved being a small-town doc. He also loved buying things. He had to have the best of everything, whether it was snow blowers or Dunhill pipes.
On January 15, 2009, Dad fell out of his bed late one night. A young woman, Deanne, whom my parents had hired to cook and look after them when necessary, rushed into his room and helped him back under the covers. A few moments later, Deanne heard him go into his bathroom. Then she heard him yell, “Oh, my God!” and heard the sound of his body hitting the floor.
A colon and prostate cancer survivor, he was dead at age eighty-four from a massive heart attack. I comforted myself by knowing that he had gotten all three of the things he had wanted when it came to dying. He had wanted his dogs with him—check; he had wanted to die at home—check; and he wanted his death to come quickly—check. He was as lucky in death as he had been in his adventurous life.
The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Lancet, and the London Times, as well as the local Kemmerer Gazette, which served Big Piney, published flattering obituaries. The New York Times described my father as “a man with a take-charge personality” who had played a crucial role in helping stop the spread of the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever in 1976, when it broke out in central Africa. My father had used his position as President Mobutu’s personal physician to fly investigators from the US Center for Disease Control (as it was then called) into the epidemic’s hot zone.
My dad had told us about an African priest who had wiped the bloody tears from a woman’s face with his handkerchief while she was dying. He later used that same handkerchief to wipe his own face. That priest had died ten days later. My father had been there in the thick of the outbreak without any show of fear.
All of us gathered in Big Piney for Dad’s funeral. We agreed this would not be a religious affair, although we did have one short prayer. Dad’s experiences with MRA had turned him against organized religion, although he had started going to church later in life and frequently prayed with his patients.
All of us wanted to play a role in his memorial service, which we called “In Celebration of the Life Force That Is Doc.” Glennie became our director, helping choose which role each of us would perform. Mom picked out a reading from Winnie-the-Pooh that she wanted to read because my dad loved that story and often would quip: “Silly old bear!” quoting Christopher Robin.
Two doctor friends were chosen to speak about his professional accomplishments. Sandy, along with Tina’s son, Keir Campbell, gave eulogies. I joined Tina, Calen, Sander, Mattie, and Glenn’s daughter, Annie, in reading a poem entitled “The House by the Side of the Road.” Our “adopted” brother, Tambu, flew in from his Sacramento home to participate too.
Glennie and Sander chronicled my father’s life through family photos and his favorite music in a professional video that they later posted on the Internet. It’s difficult for me to cry in public, but each time I watch the video alone on my computer I sob for him.
Among the most poignant words were those spoken by Keir, who said:
What are we to say of such a man? To him, too much introspection was “navel-gazing.” A solid person was a “good egg.” And his mantra before entering any fray was “Do your homework.”
A complicated simple man. A technophile who opposed gadgetry in medicine. To him nothing could replace hands-on care.
He was a man of indomitable will, an indefatigable fighter of great integrity, empathy, and tenderness. He loved unconditionally the underdog.
When I think of him words come to mind like: endurance, persistence, optimism, self-discipline, and compassion.
To say he touched people’s lives is an understatement. He inspired and motivated and changed lives. He saved lives. He rallied those around him to fight with and against what he saw as humanity’s true enemies: sickness, oppression, apathy—and any kind of bullshit!
If we are to take anything from his full and wonderful life, it is to view the world with your eyes as open as possible. And when you encounter apathy, cruelty, sickness, and pain wrapped in a cloak of normalcy, complacency, or bureaucracy, do not step aside. Do not walk past. But stand and confront it. Oppose it. Attack it. With persistence and optimism, grit and heart.
During Dad’s funeral, I scanned the crowd of about two hundred people. There were prominent doctors alongside Wyoming cowboys with mud on their boots. My father had fallen into the habit of not charging people who couldn’t afford his services. Many of the sick whom he visited were grateful because they had no insurance and little money. They repaid him with home-cooked pies, casseroles, and enduring friendship.
After the funeral, our family retreated to my folks’ compound, where Glenn’s husband, David, set off fireworks, lighting the sky with burning stars that burst and then faded.
I was happy that Dad and I had made our peace.
Life continued after my father’s death, as it always does. I was not surprised when Calen announced that he had asked Megan to marry him. Both had tried to return to college but simply couldn’t. My mom had built Calen a studio behind his remodeled chicken-house apartment. It was large enough for his woodworking tools, an airbrush booth, and a painting room. He began making furniture and continued painting.
Megan had been angry and bitter after her accident because she’d felt it had cheated her out of her future. She told me that she’d changed her mind after she got a job at Eagle Mount, a therapeutic program in Bozeman, where adults and children with physical disabilities can swim, ride horses, camp, fish, canoe, and take part in other Montana outdoor activities. Megan began to see herself as an “ambassador of hope” who could relate to kids with disabilities in ways that others couldn’t because of her accident and brain injury. Both she and Calen found silver linings in their challenges.
They were married on September 4, 2011, at a historic site called Springhill Pavilion, a dance hall that dates back to before Montana was a state and was featured in the movie The Horse Whisperer, which seemed fitting because Megan worked as an equestrian therapist.
I made it through the wedding without becoming too anxious or feeling the need for a drink, even when they had their Champagne toast. I was becoming more and more comfortable with my emerging new and sober self, and now that Calen and Megan were married, Mattie was going to be leaving for college in Portland, Oregon, and Sander was settled in San Francisco, I decided it was time for me to go to the home where I had always felt the most secure—my Mouse House, by North Meadow Creek in McAllister.
I was about to start yet another new chapter in my life, one of sobriety, hope, and purpose.