ELIZABETH ROSNER
My darkest blues started this way, fourteen years ago. I was on a plane heading east, from California to New York, toward what would turn out to be my mother’s death. I didn’t know that at the time, only that she had been rushed into surgery with such urgency that I had to drop everything and fly. I prayed the entire journey, at least for the grace of time to say goodbye. During the seemingly interminable wait for my connecting flight in Chicago, I tried to reach the hospital for some hopeful update about her condition. “She’s not answering the phone in her room” was the only information I could get from the operator. “I can’t tell you anything else.” My father, sister, and brother weren’t answering either. I flew through clouds and weather, landscape invisible below, tears streaming down my face. The last time I had seen her, just three weeks earlier, she was lying in a hospital bed while receiving a transfusion. Her oncologist assured me she had at least three months to live—“worst-case scenario,” he said—but my mother whispered to me when I kissed her cheek: “I’ll never see you again.” I kept telling myself she was the kind of person who said those things.
When I finally landed at the Albany Airport, my father and siblings were all there. For a delirious moment I allowed myself to believe that everything was all right, that this was why they had all come to meet me. But the second I looked at my father’s face, I knew she was gone. My legs gave way and I fell onto the grimy airport carpet, where I stayed, sobbing. Passengers steered around me and I didn’t care for a second what they thought or imagined. Grief was in charge now. It wasn’t going to let go for a long, long time.
Until that moment, the year had promised to be one of the best of my life. I’d signed a publishing contract for my first novel with a major New York house, along with an advance to write my second novel. Just as I was celebrating the most exquisite reward for years of hard work and perseverance, my mother’s breast cancer recurred with a vengeance. She died so quickly that even her doctors were surprised.
Her funeral passed in a freezing blur; we sat shivah according to the Orthodox customs; I watched my hair turn gray at the temples, seemingly overnight; I flew back to my life in California. The tears came so often and so relentlessly that I developed eye infections. Sitting in a paper gown for my annual physical, my doctor asked if I might consider trying Prozac. “My mother died,” I wept. “I’m very sad. Aren’t I supposed to be sad?” Her inquiry both angered and disappointed me, implying that a finite amount of sorrow was “appropriate” for mourning one’s only mother. Although I came from a long line of depressives—my mother included—it felt bizarre and wrong to abbreviate my grief, especially by way of a pill. And I’d never been particularly impressed by the way medications treated my mother’s mental state. She had eventually been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but for years her mood swings seemed just as unmanageable when she was on meds as when she was off.
Within a year of her death, my first novel was published to a few days of great fanfare. A week later, on what was to be the first day of my multi-city book tour, terrorists flew two jetliners into the World Trade Center. More falling, much more falling down. It was only in a delayed reaction many months later that I realized I had felt forced to disregard my own tremendous sadness in order to defer to the larger, much larger, tragedy of 9-11. As a daughter of two Holocaust survivors, this kind of deference to other tragedies was second nature to me.
Eighteen months later, I managed to resume my optimistic journey in publishing. My first novel came out in paperback with a new cover, promising a new life. Also as promised, time had eased some of the grief over my mother’s passing. And I fell in love.
Here is where the story starts to sound happy, right? I met the man of my dreams—handsome, brilliant, talented, passionate, fun. If only my mother could have met him! I often thought. She would have been ecstatic. She would have said things like, “You two would make such gorgeous babies!” and “He reminds me of someone I was in love with when I was young!”
But we did not have babies.
That perfectly amazing love of my life was actually a man who had told me on day one that his lifelong approach to relationships was, “I cheat and I leave.” He spoke those shocking words out loud. I heard them. It was quite possibly the one and only time he told the truth. Some part of me could have chosen to cut and run in the opposite direction; certainly a woman paying a different kind of attention would have done that. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that woman.
I was the woman who believed her heart to be infinitely vast and infinitely powerful. I was the woman who deserved to be chosen as the one he would never be able to leave, the one who would finally and irrevocably prove to him that he didn’t need to cheat and leave. He didn’t need to look anywhere else for anything. I had enough of everything for both of us: a beautiful home, a sizeable bank account, and a career with travel for two! I would fly him to Europe for the first time in his life. I would introduce him to my French editor and treat him to champagne in a Paris hotel room. I would sit across from him on the TGV to Bordeaux, adoring and generously supportive, planning the rest of our fabulous shared happily-ever-after life.
My novel won prizes. We drank a lot of wine. We laughed and made love and acted like superstars. We wrote parallel journal entries about our trip and after returning home, we threw a party for all of our friends. We called it “The French Commotion,” inviting a houseful of guests to bring their favorite French snacks so that we could regale them with our tales, and then judge them all in a hilarious scarf-tying competition. We were the King and Queen of our dance community: beautiful and successful and brilliant and magnanimous. We ruled.
That is, we ruled, but not quite in a shared monarchy. In an almost-but-not-quite-secret recess of my mind lived the haunted awareness that I was living in “the best of times and the worst of times.” The stealthy infidelity he had perfected with his previous wives, girlfriends, lovers was (of course) happening to me too—I just couldn’t name it clearly yet.
Desperately ignoring my inner terrors, I completed and published a second novel. We took more trips: to Italy, to Kenya, to New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I paid for everything and in far more ways than monetarily. There were signs everywhere, you see. Comments from my dearest girlfriends about ways he seemed to hug them a little too long; hints that he’d been seen at a restaurant with “some blonde,” and always, relentlessly, the dancing, oh yes the dancing. Outrageously flirtatious, overtly sexual; writhingly, blatantly seductive. This was the stuff that happened right in front of me. Who knew what went on in the rooms I didn’t enter, didn’t know about? He knew. And he wasn’t admitting any of it. He was, you could say, simply practicing what he preached. Lying and cheating. Only this time he didn’t leave.
We argued about boundaries and rules and agreements and compromises. It was a form of torture: daily, hourly, minute by minute. I threw him out for a while after he explained to me that the reason he wasn’t paying much money for sharing my home was that he was contributing to our life by way of “being monogamous against his will.” I said, “You mean I’m paying you not to fuck other women?” I kicked him out, righteous and furious, but tragically I continued seeing him. Can I blame any of this foolishness on persistent grief over my mother’s death? Hard to say. More likely I was holding on to images of her own tragic mismatched dance with love. I maintained a fatalistic conviction that this man and I were destined to be together, that life without him could never be better than life with him. About a year later he moved back into my house, and then I got cancer.
The diagnosis came on the morning of my forty-ninth birthday. The fact that breast cancer killed my mother and two of my dear friends was not lost on me, yet somehow I accepted the diagnosis with a surprising degree of equanimity. Only later would I recognize this state of relative calm as a variation on a perpetual awareness—something I had learned early and often from both of my parents—that terrible things were always happening and always about to happen. Moments of happiness merely existed in order to seduce you into dropping your guard. What you really needed to do was practice a state of hyper-vigilance at all times, bracing yourself for the next cataclysm, which was one small step around the corner, one breath from now.
The diagnosis was “invasive cancer” and required not only one but two surgeries, the second one less than three weeks after the first. It also ensured that I would have to go through chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Hello, catastrophe, a voice whispered with something like satisfaction. I knew you were around here somewhere!
Meanwhile, in the realm of the heart, I was dancing on the edge of a precipice. My nervous system was in a condition of constant alarm, but given my family addiction to drama, this seemed normal. In retrospect (that horror show of perfect accuracy), I have a sad certainty that my immune system was paying the price for my cumulative adrenal overload. I would have slugged anyone who suggested that we “give ourselves cancer,” but I did and still do have an aching sense of sorrow about the means by which the “universe” chose to wake me up from my sleepwalking.
I shame myself by writing this. I shame myself by remembering my complicity in this destructive relationship. I shame myself and yet I long to cleanse myself of the shame by typing these words and sharing them. I didn’t know how to love. Now I do.
Here is one thing I want to say: for a very long time, I could not find a way to forgive myself for loving an insecure, cowardly, broken person who was ruthless enough to cheat on his so-called partner while she was going through treatment for breast cancer. It wasn’t him I couldn’t forgive (though it’s pretty obvious by now that I haven’t quite forgiven him. It remains an item on my spiritual to-do list). It was me I couldn’t forgive. The woman who had “given herself cancer.”
Truth?
The day I heard my diagnosis, my first thought (unbidden) was, Maybe now he’ll stop sleeping with her. I pretty much knew who she was, you see, no matter how many times he told me Gaslight-style that I was “going through menopause and acting paranoid.” That I was “living in the past,” a sadistic reference to the previous time he had been sleeping with “her” and lying about it. He was a disturbed wreck, but what did that make me?
What finally “cured” me and enabled me to throw him out for the second and final time? I got a letter in the mail from his girlfriend, the one I knew by name, the one exactly sick and twisted enough to participate in his sick and twisted game. She typed it and mailed it “anonymously.” He was lying to her, she said, and sleeping with yet another woman. She signed it, “your sister in shame.”
On the worst days, I could not eat or get out of bed. The mild nausea I had experienced during cancer treatment was nothing compared to the soul-shaking nausea I felt now. I could not stop crying, could not stop hating all the women (there were several it turns out) who had chosen to fuck someone else’s boyfriend, including while she was at home in bed because she’d just finished a daylong infusion of chemo. I hated him for using me and treating me like garbage, and I hated myself more than anything. I hated that I believed I loved him. I hated that I couldn’t understand why any of it had happened to me. I hated that I hadn’t been smart enough or brave enough or strong enough to say No thanks all the way back on that first day when he told me the rare truth. “I cheat and I leave.” I thought cancer was the worst thing that could have happened to me, but it turned out there was something even worse.
I hate revisiting the story as if it happened to someone else, as if I’ve moved so far beyond it that I don’t feel those feelings any more, as if I can share with you my lessons and growth and recovery. That’s all true to a degree: I have moved far beyond it. Not just in time but in space. I have experienced phenomenal amounts of growth and I have been recovering. “Ing.” As in, a work in progress. A path I am walking. A process.
How the deep dark blues faded, eventually, though imperfectly: It began with a dog. A rescue. As in, she rescued me. Her ridiculous cuteness tugged at my frozen heart, brought back my smile, my giggle. There were glorious devoted friends who stood by me, no matter what, even when I talked the crazy talk of maybe taking him back. I attended Al-Anon meetings and committed myself to transformation (a work in progress). There were long-distance visits to family, and various careful conversations about how I had to be exceptionally gentle with myself because I was so much better a human being than I knew. I found my ability to travel alone to the kinds of gorgeous places I had once only romanticized about: beaches and vacations and visiting writer/teaching jobs. I found my way back to writing and, eventually, to completing and publishing my third novel.
I didn’t take any antidepressive drugs; I never wanted to. Instead, I swam and meditated and walked with my dog. In case it doesn’t go without saying, I stopped dancing. No way was I going to go anywhere near the places where he was still doing his pathetic dirty work. It also helped to hear that yet more women were lining up to take my place beside him so that they could learn the same lessons themselves. I wasn’t the stupidest one after all.
There was even a wide-hearted, deep-souled man who showed me for a brief but oh-so-significant interlude that my heart wasn’t dead, my body wasn’t either, and I could maybe even trust someone again. I could feel excitement and joy and rapture. I could touch and be touched. I could let my body be seen with its scars, not to mention the messiest ones on the inside. The blues faded this way little by little. I discovered it was possible to fall back in love with the world. I could wake up grateful to be alive and not in pain, grateful for my annual all-clear MRI reports, grateful for the sweet black dog and the gorgeous oak trees and the fragrance of roses and the suggestion of rain. I still don’t want you to read this, but I am writing it anyway. Today the color of my blue is paler and sweeter than before, much more beautiful than frightening. I call it the color of sea foam. It helps me stay afloat.