The Runaway
Can grief be outrun?
When the SUV I took from the train station to my hotel in Lhasa last January got blocked by two men haggling over a yak’s head, I had one thought: I could not be farther away from my little red house in Providence, Rhode Island. I’d had that thought before—on a starlit night on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca; on a crowded street in Phnom Penh as a man clutching an AK-47 strolled past me; on a boat in the Mekong River bumping against other boats loaded with jackfruit, mangosteen, and durian. The realization that I am somewhere removed from life as I know it, somewhere no one can reach me, where I can’t read menus or street signs and where the very air I breathe smells different, brings me a strange comfort.
Ever since 2002, when my daughter Grace died suddenly at the age of five from a virulent form of strep, I have had the desire to flee. At first, I wanted to sell our house and move—to Oregon, to Italy, to the moon. It didn’t matter where. What mattered was that I leave the familiar rooms and streets where Grace’s footsteps now echoed louder than they had when she was alive. Our kitchen floor still had glitter on it from the art project she never finished. In the corner of one room I found her ballet tights rolled into a ball, still smelling of the mild stink of her feet. In her bedroom, wrappers from forbidden candy she had sneaked nestled in drawers. When I stepped out the front door, when I walked down the street, I could still see her dashing ahead of me in her metallic purple sneakers, her big brother, Sam, at her side. “Stop at the corner!” I could hear myself shout. I had worried about a speeding car careening down one of the alleys that line our neighborhood when I should have been dreading a microscopic, deadly bacterium. How foolish the panic in my voice seemed now.
After Grace died, I wanted to run away, to go somewhere mysterious and distant. Surely, I thought, there were places in the world where I would not be haunted. I had been a nomad of sorts for most of my adult life. Looking back, perhaps I have always been running away. From a small-town childhood. From broken hearts—my own and those I broke. From loneliness and a restlessness that has bubbled in me for as long as I can remember.
My father used to tell me stories about his years in Peking (Beijing) in the late 1940s. People dropped dead from starvation right at his feet, he said. There were dark rooms where men gambled. Women still had bound feet and limped down the street behind their husbands. He told me how he’d skied in Greece and scuba dived off the coast of Haiti. He ate dog in Morocco and got bit by a mongoose in Cuba. Perhaps it is no surprise then that at the age of sixteen, I took the $500 I’d earned in two years of modeling for the local department store, Jordan Marsh, and flew to Bermuda, where I snorkeled and drank rum swizzles and lay on a beach of pink sand. With the next year’s savings, I flew to Nassau in the Bahamas to eat conch chowder and dance to steel drums. And so it went through college: a voodoo ceremony in Brazil, a double rainbow on Maui, Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
When I graduated, the only job I wanted was as a flight attendant with an international airline. I studied route maps the way my friends studied Kaplan books for the LSATs and GREs. I memorized codes for airports—LHR, CDG, MIL—intending to visit every one. In eight years at the airline, I flew more than a million miles. When not in the air, I sailed down the Nile and climbed the Acropolis; I bought knockoff handbags in Rome and watches in Zurich; I wore out dozens of shoes on cobblestone streets. Even after my job ended, I planned getaways. When Sam was born, and then Grace, I kept going, breaking umbrella strollers on the bumpy sidewalks of Warsaw. Three years after Grace died, my husband, Lorne, and I adopted a little girl, Annabelle, and within three weeks she was on my lap in a boat on Lake Titicaca.
The advice commonly given to grieving people is to stay put. Don’t move, don’t quit your job or leave your spouse. Yet my instinct was to go, to run away as far and as fast as I could. “You can go away,” I was told, “but when you get home, nothing will be better.” Didn’t they understand that in those months after Grace died, I thought nothing would ever be better? Simple tasks became impossible, but when friends invited us to visit them in France that summer, I said yes. It took me an entire afternoon to book three tickets to Paris over the telephone. Reading the numbers off my American Express card proved daunting. They jumped and reversed until I cried. “My daughter is dead!” I sobbed to the frustrated ticket agent. “I still need a valid credit card,” she said.
Finally I had tickets, a travel plan, an escape. Lorne and Sam and I cried our way through Provence, following van Gogh’s footsteps in Arles and shopping the market in Aix-en-Provence. At our friends’ house, I gratefully slept the deep, numbing sleep of jet lag and woke to cold wine, crashing waves, and jaw-dropping views. In the fog of grief, I visited Marseille and ate bouillabaisse. Well-wishers were right: when I got home, nothing had changed. But while I was away, I was distracted and off-kilter in a different way. I struggled with unfamiliar, twisting streets and menus I couldn’t decipher, while at home I struggled with the familiar and I still could decipher nothing. Better, I thought on my first grief-struck night back home, to navigate the foreign and exotic than to fail to navigate what I used to manage so easily.
That was how I found myself in Lhasa, stuck behind the head of a yak. As years passed and the grief continued, I traveled to more remote locations. The farther or higher or more isolated, the better I felt. The unknown brought a strange safety. The vaccinations, the visas, the curve of alphabets I could not read reminded me that the world holds mystery and danger side by side with joy and wonder. These were the same contradictions I’d grappled with every day since Grace died.
On a snowy night eight years after her death, Lorne, Annabelle and I boarded a train in Beijing at midnight, headed for Tibet. The journey would take forty-eight hours, which seemed to horrify people when I told them. But to me, the long trip sounded divine. With my French press coffeepot and a pound of Peet’s French Roast, my knitting and a bag of old New Yorkers, as well as crayons and paper for Annabelle and a dog-eared copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I set up our little train compartment as if it were our home. In many ways it was. My comfort came not just from the places I was going but also from the journey to them. Even after so many years, opening curtains and finding a herd of yaks, or sitting at a table in a crowded dining car eating spicy noodles, brings wonder back into my still-broken heart. As the train slowed on its approach into Lhasa, I whispered to my husband, “I wish we didn’t have to get off. I could just go and go on this train.”
Moments later, we stepped into the thin air of Lhasa, its sky bluer than anything has a right to be. Everywhere we looked, ragged faded prayer flags blew in the breeze. The smell of yak butter permeated our hair and clothes, mixing with the scent of burning juniper. On the road to our hotel, we passed scores of pilgrims moving in synchronized motions, dropping from knees to stomach along the crowded roads.
I took a deep breath. For oxygen, yes. But also to renew myself. Days of travel, by air and train and now car, had brought me here. I was tired and achy and overwhelmed by sights and sounds. And in this way, I moved along a different journey, the one that began eight Aprils before in an intensive care unit, when I stood by my dead daughter’s side and wanted to run. In that moment, I imagined running out of that hospital, away from its smell of death and the sounds of machines stopping and the stillness of my little girl. I wanted to run through the streets of my hometown of Providence, screaming and screaming into the night. But of course I couldn’t. I stood in that room and signed papers and answered questions and held my hand out to the nurse who gave me Grace’s brightly colored clothes in a Ziploc bag. Later, at home in the bed where I had slept for ten years, I heard the familiar sounds of neighbors going to work, college students on their skateboards, The New York Times dropping on my front stoop. Once so soothing, they all felt like an assault. Run, my brain ordered. Run.
Finally, the yak head is tossed into a truck, and the small street opens up. The SUV squeezes between mountains of pale-yellow yak butter and Chinese soldiers carrying rifles. Inside our hotel, yak-butter tea waits for us; orange and pink silk cushions line the floor. Venturing out again, I join a crowd of people in colorful ethnic clothes and monks in yellow robes, jostling through a dark temple. They mumble prayers. They reach out to touch the toe of a statue. They light offerings of incense and butter. I have no prayers, no religion, no ritual except this act of throwing myself into the unknown.
That first night, we climb narrow stone steps to the roof of the hotel. A crooked handwritten sign says WELCOME TO THE ROOFTOP OF THE WORLD. I am gasping by the time I reach the top. The altitude makes my heart pound against my ribs and my head ache. It’s hard to breathe here. Leaning against the sign, I return to that hospital, that ICU. That night when Grace died, I couldn’t catch my breath. The foreign world of death overwhelmed me, sucked the air from me. I remember my hands flailing like a drowning person’s. I remember drowning in grief.
People think grief ends as time passes, when really it just changes shape. You should, they believe, be over it. Although it is true that sometimes days pass without me thinking about Grace, or losing her, it is also true that I can hear a song or glimpse a little blond-haired girl, and my knees will still buckle. When I am housebound for too long, when I must stay put, grief intrudes more often. Over time I have learned to see it coming, to recognize its early signs: the inability to concentrate, the jangling nerves and short temper, too many hours staring at daytime TV. I’ve learned that planning my next escape can ease the pain. I turn off The Barefoot Contessa and pick up a travel guide, mapping out the best flights to Entebbe or Vientiane, the routes I can follow to disappear into a different world. Perhaps I will always be looking for these routes out of grief, for these places that can shake me up, that can remind me that this big world is beautiful after all.
Slowly, my heart calms on that rooftop in Lhasa. I take a long, slow breath and look up at the sky, still so blue it almost hurts. I feel my heart swell with wonder. In the years I have been trying to outrun grief, I’ve learned that escaping makes me grateful to be here, to be alive. In a moment I will be drinking Lhasa beer, eating yak ribs and samosas. But first I stretch my hands upward, reaching toward that sky, as if I can actually touch it.
Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the novels The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread, and the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and The Paris Review. She has recently launched a series for middle readers, The Treasure Chest, and her novel, The Obituary Writer, will be published in 2013.