friend
IN THE TIME we lived overseas, Richard coped with an ever-changing routine. In America, even though he still can’t make jokes, he learns to laugh at others’ witticisms. His aphasia—the loss of his ability to express himself—hasn’t disappeared, but he can answer questions, understand irony, and respond to body language. Without facial cues, his conversations are a struggle, so telephone calls and email are a disaster. Dr. L thinks he’d become better at technology if he were in a place where he was motivated to learn, such as a setting where he was helping others. We ask the doctor if he thinks Richard is ready to look for a job, real work, work where they don’t know anything about his brain injury. Within weeks, Richard has his answer. He’s cleared to return to work as a staff physical therapist.
In the spring we move to San Luis Obispo so I can begin working as an innkeeper. We live a few miles away from the inn, in a little yellow ranch house in the middle of a postcard vineyard that is so fucking idyllic I can’t stand it. Even in the swelter of summer, the place is gorgeous. This is the kind of place I am supposed to love: the fields are lush, the people are kind, there are beaches for days. My despondency is as incongruent with California as a neon Christmas tree at the seashore. The prettiness of the place is nauseating. Finding thousand-thread-count linens and luxurious towels for wealthy patrons is more vacuous than I could have ever imagined. On behalf of the inn, I spend days searching out trendy recipes to prepare for people so pampered by excess that they won’t stand for a soupçon of oh-so-five-minutes-ago. The lack of meaning in my life is disorienting. In France, I found myself able to join the daily parade of villagers in the cobblestone streets; ordinary tasks felt like creative expression. In America, these same tasks feel trivial, materialistic, bourgeois. The period inn has been whitewashed. We track dirt and scuffs over its surface. Every day, I erase scrape marks from the day before. I decorate the innkeeper’s little room with a bed and framed photographs taken by my friend Carole featuring Castilleja, their flowers shaped like saffron-and-rose-colored paintbrushes. Being surrounded by plant life makes me remember the fields of flowers I danced in as a teenager.
Richard interviews for a part-time staff position at a physical therapy office just a mile down the road from where we’re living. I’m terrified that he’s going to hurt a patient (or himself) by overreaching his physical or intellectual capacity. He’s offered the position and wants to take the job without telling his employer he has a disability. I go along with this plan, mostly because he’s scheduled for three days a week, which should offer plenty of recovery time.
One of the many effects of his identity change is that he’s incorruptible. I know he’ll disclose everything that happens at work. But Richard isn’t able to communicate about his feelings yet. He has no language for what he’s emotionally experiencing. Also, he has no way to say “no.” Because the world exists to him in the present—he has little ability to access the past or plan for the future—requests that come toward him seem like the most urgent thing to do. He cannot differentiate priorities, nor can he remember commitments.
He neglects to wear his bike helmet because he forgets that his brain needs protecting. He tootles on his bike up the dirt road lined with lemon trees. I go running out of the ranch house into the vineyard screaming at him: “If you get hit without your helmet, you’re screwed!” The peacocks jump down from the pepper trees, miffed at the insane shrill that has interrupted their idyllic nap. Richard forgets appointments—even when he writes them in his book—because he can’t discern what’s essential. We miss dinners and doctors and date nights. He lives as if he’s stuck on “oblige.”
One day I come home from work to discover he’s entertaining the missionaries. I drop my bag at the door and hear a steady murmur coming from the living room.
“. . . the conclusion of the system,” I hear a male voice say.
“The end times,” says the other man.
I walk into the living room where two stiff-shirted young men with Bibles stand. Richard smiles and waves from where he sits on the flowery couch, looking like beast-meets-shabby-chic, pamphlet in hand.
“Good afternoon, ma’am. We were just talking with your husband about . . .”
I’m fuming that they’re trying to recruit my sweet, compliant man.
“Out,” I say.
“There’s nothing to fear . . .” says the other.
“Get out. Now.”
The men pick up their things. Shake Richard’s hand. I escort the black-tie boys to the door. They offer me a pamphlet.
“Too late. I’m one of the wicked,” I say, as I close the door.
Richard looks up at me.
“We need to make an agreement about answering the door. If you’re going to ask in the believers, you have to learn to say ‘no thanks’ first, okay?”
He nods. I want to test him.
“Will you clean the house and make dinner?” I ask.
“Okay . . .”
“Say ‘no’ to me,” I say.
“I can do it, sweetness. I can help.”
“Oh my God,” I answer.
A few weeks after he begins at the physical therapy practice, Richard comes home flustered from work. It’s rare to see him express an emotion, so I know something disturbing has occurred. I give him a cup of tea, and then we sit on the couch looking out to the fields of Cabernet grapevines growing beyond.
“What happened?” I ask.
“I burned a woman. I put some electrodes on her body. Her skin got fried.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s upset. It’s like a sunburn.”
“Do you think the brain injury caused you to forget her?”
“How did it happen?”
“It could have been the equipment. But it could have been me. I’m not sure. I meet with my boss in the morning.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t want to lose my job.”
“You made your way to this point, right?”
“What if my license gets revoked?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
Richard turns on the television. Entertainment is his antidote to feeling difficult emotions, or being unable to communicate. He wants the excuse to be with himself; I want more conversation so I can understand him.
“How about we act out the meeting with the boss?”
“Why?”
“To help you get ready.”
“Okay, sweetness.”
I can’t help remembering the letter that I wrote to Dr. L shortly after Richard took the job: Richard’s long-term memory is not improving very much. He cannot retain information over one or more days very well. Often if he reads a book, he forgets it shortly thereafter. Is there therapy or other support we could be providing?
Dr. L wrote back quickly and asked us to continue to use the planner. He told me that it would be helpful to review key information on a regular basis with multiple opportunities for rehearsal, and to teach Richard some type of mnemonic to help him remember. This could be an acronym or a visual, but something he could study and rehearse to prompt him in tricky situations.
Richard, this type of long-term memory issue probably will be with you for the immediate future, wrote Dr. L, and perhaps longer. I would really be creative about ways in which you can access information on your patients so that you are less apt to forget.
Richard meets with his boss. He’s relieved to learn that the woman’s burn heals within a few days. Equipment is examined, and a loose wire is discovered. He gets to keep his job.
In the middle of a vineyard, unexpected events shape your life. One day the ranch and inn’s owner, Cheri, a woman with long limbs and easy laughter, yells for me to come—there’s an owl trapped in netting and someone needs to cut the animal loose. I see Cheri’s stricken face. She can’t stand suffering, and what she has witnessed is reflected in her horrified eyes and in her scattered speech. I run, following her sprint to the edge of the field, frightened about the scene I’m going to find.
Every night after dark I’ve been walking out to the porch to watch the owls hunt for field mice. Accustomed to the Richard’s muteness, I can now stand for hours, watching the owls’ velvet wings move in stealthy silence as they swoop from the tall coast oaks across the wide field to the edge of the vineyard. The owls gobble up hundreds of mice, as do the snakes that live near the barn and under our house, and making mice their teatime.
After we arrived, friends came to visit and found an owl dead on the road. We carried it to a tree trunk near the house, scattered flowers upon its body, gave it a memorial service. Burrowing owls, barn owls, grey owls, great horned owls—the region has so many owls that environmental groups organize night hikes to view them. The owls have become my companions, my allies, my closest friends. I read poetry about owls. I research their hunting habits. I learn how the owls have talons so muscular that they can crush their prey, and such strength that they can carry rabbits, raccoons, small dogs. In this place where my husband is often a stranger, and I can’t find myself in relationship to humans, these owls are kindred. They’re survivors.
Cheri comes to a stop. We’re breathless at the dirt path where an owl struggles to free itself from a green polyethylene net used to block birds from the grapes. I drop to my knees. Each time the owl moves, the collapsible net squeezes its wings into a plastic straitjacket. The only way to prevent the animal from suffocating itself in the synthetic stranglehold is to hold it still. The owl lifts its wings and a string of netting cuts across its throat. Its eyes bulge. Cheri can’t come closer and can’t stand still.
“Get some help,” I say. She runs toward the ranch manager, who’s on a tractor in the field. I have no knife, but even a knife may not cut through this sturdy material. If I yell, I risk scaring the animal into choking itself, so I silently send a message to Cheri to bring back something to cut with. I lean close, but not too close. I want the animal to see me. The owl’s view is vast, not nearsighted. I stare into its enormous eyes—golden, tubular, and still. Unable to move its head to grasp the surroundings, the owl has locked onto my eyes. I whisper to it, a few gentle words that turn into a kind of coo-murmur. My heart beats into my ears so that I can’t hear my voice. The owl could take my fingers with one swipe of its beak, and its talons, which have poked through the net holes, could tear my skin open like a machete. I hold its wings. The owl flutters, chokes, submits.
The ranch manager, Hector, arrives with a knife. In the confusion of hands and pressure and conversation, the owl struggles. I watch the talons open and close, the beak hook toward me. Hector hands me the knife. I close my eyes, will my body to calm. I cannot speak. The owl pulses its feral stare into my sight. I look at Hector and I plead with my eyes: I can’t.
He holds the owl firmly, waiting for me to free it. In my private antiphon, I do not crack. Cancer has made me like this. A woman who cares not for useless talk. Ground to the bone. Whittled.
I hold the knife steady with all of my will. The owl doesn’t blink. Its beak screams silently. There is no fight left. My hands track along the netting. No wound. I must cause no wound. I look at Hector, who seems worried. I begin to saw at the net but it is unyielding. The knife’s steel edge slips and enters the owl’s pillowy, exposed breast. An image of my husband lying on the cold table, his arms bound open, his entire middle naked, his skin swabbed with mustard-colored disinfectant, his legs fixed in position, the surgical knife slicing down his middle from his heart to his pelvis, the blood pooling, the skin lifted, the organs scraped, his body eviscerated. Gutted. Like a wild animal. Like this wild animal. I can’t breathe.
I trace my fingers along the owl’s feathers. No wound. No blood. The blade has found only feathers. My body suddenly feels the desire to urinate with relief. I adjust the blade in my hand, tighten my grip. I slice along the net’s rigid lines and in a few seconds it releases. We hold the owl like we are swaddling pure power with our hands, containing its impulse to escape until the net is cut entirely away. In a flash Hector raises the owl over his head and releases the bird to the sky. The owl flies. Wings stretch, lift, ascend. Soon it’s away from our sight. I look around the field, wide-eyed, slow-blinking, shrewd. I stretch my arms into the wind. I walk back to the field and lie down, aching to fly.
The first time my husband and I went to hang out with the Sufis in the Canadian Rockies, in the late nineties, before the arrival of cancer, they gave us a name. In their tradition, a name is a way of recognizing a person’s essential nature. And too, of calling those aspects out of the person, even if they are hidden or unrecognized. My friends were given the names Fazulanissa, meaning “princess of blessings,” and Shanti, meaning “peace.” The spiritual leader brought Richard and me together and said henceforth we would be known as Wali and Walia. (I whispered some joke about it being more like Wally and the Beav.) We learned that Wali meant “the friend” in Sufi parlance. To be as Wali and Walia was to be friends to each other and to all, in the same way the divine is the Friend. I was bemused, touched, and the feminist in me was more than a bit angry about my name being tied to my husband’s. No one else in our community had received this joined condition. Even our children were given their own perfect, gemlike monikers. Years later, after the visitations of illness and death, after the brain injury that has taken Richard’s memories of our life together, after our children have left, after we have been together and apart in strange and wonderful places around the globe, I want to see that we are joined as the Friend.
Rumi said:
When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point
here.
In the time we are living on the perfect ranch waiting for things to change, I want to point to myself, and say: “Walia. I am that one.”
Instead I say: “I will never leave you, and I don’t know if I can be your wife.”
When I say this he’s sitting on the bed that is not ours, but the one belonging to the ranch, and I’m kneeling on the hard floor in front of him. I’ve lost my temper about the thousandth thing he’s forgotten this month—maybe it’s a date that we’re trying to have, maybe it’s a memory I wish he shared, maybe it’s some shit I wanted him to do. I can no longer pretend that I feel like his lover. Even though we have friends staying with us, I’m yelling, because every facade I’ve been holding up—the good wife, the nice girl, the nurse—is crumbling.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t be the one to tell you what to do! If I get into that position, it makes me your caregiver, not your lover!”
He looks at me with innocent eyes.
“You really don’t know what to do?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“What if I help you find a therapist, someone who can help you figure out ways to commit to using your compensatory strategies?”
“Okay.”
Richard begins the therapy. He starts to use his planner. The forgetting doesn’t change.
“What do you talk about?” I ask, after one of his sessions.
“How to talk to you.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not very well.”
“Do you want to go to the farmers’ market?” I know that we don’t have to talk if we’re with other people.
“Okay.”
I unpack my books and papers from our time in France; I throw away the novel I’ve been writing for four years. I crafted the book just like my mentor wanted me to, and then, halfway through, I realized that I had no interest in the story. The book’s demise isn’t my mentor’s fault; I’ve been the one making her opinion more valuable than my own. I stop writing for a year. I wait for my husband to return.
It’s taking me years to cultivate the kind of detachment I really need. To do so, I have to step back from the people who think they know what’s right for us. I have to stop paying for workshops and just begin the daily work of building this new life. In order to observe my situation clearly, I have to risk saying good-bye to communities that make me feel accepted and loved, not because they’re bad people, but because even their guidance has limits. I have to do this because right now, like Richard, I’m just trying to survive.
I go back to staring at the perfect vineyard, wondering if the owls are safe.
Though my environs are perfect, nothing feels calm. I walk the loop from the little yellow ranch house to the eucalyptus grove to the lemon trees, circumambulating with my grief. I talk on the phone with my therapist, my sisters, my minister friend, my daughter, my childhood friend. I pace the calls, a different person each day, because I’m afraid I’ll poison them with my sorrow. I’m swimming through a toxic sludge of sadness. Every day on my walk, I cry. I mourn the loss of my former life, the graceful, beautiful man I was married to, and now I mourn the person I was with him: protected, desired, womanly. The sex is miserable, the forgetting is constant, our children are away until Christmas, my work is meaningless, and I’m grief-stricken about the unknowable future. Life is as silent as a Zen retreat, one where I’m on constant kitchen duty. In my surroundings of such ponderous luxury, I feel guilty for complaining about any of my problems.
Intellectually, I understand what’s happening: I’m grieving the loss of the life I once knew. The past is no more, and because I’m no longer hoping for a radical change, or pretending things are otherwise, I’m what people call “depressed.” Inside myself, it feels like I’m living in a black hole of waiting. I don’t yet know that it’s fine to wait to see what might show up. This is the beat-beat-beat before the chorus resounds. Entire civilizations have died out and new ones arisen, but I can’t let go of the “us” that I knew once. And I can’t fill up the emptiness with more craving. Look, there’s never been “the one” to complete me. But I didn’t know that losing what you hold on to could hurt like this.
Richard watches television, and I sit on the porch reading books about the brain. My shelves now include books by brain scientists like Michael Gazzaniga, who talks about how one’s beliefs in one’s story get created. The more research I do, the more my perception of my solid self slides.
Good God, I think, you’re making this up. You live in this life, and at the same time you assign meaning to it. Unlike your spouse over there watching a reality show, you amass masses of forethought, made available by the left hemisphere of the brain, which monitors all the other parts of the brain’s network and deciphers their actions in order to create an acceptable sense of a unified self. Brain researchers say there is a part of the left hemisphere whose job it is to make things appear logical, to form the input we receive into stories, stories composed to feed our hungry self-image, stories that rewrite themselves to become what we now believe to be the truth.
The things that shape us, the moments that make us up, may not be possible to authenticate. But our brains create them. The “interpreter” part of the brain can impose order on information that doesn’t make sense, seeking patterns, finding relationships, making personal mythology of the mysterious, irrational, and instinctive.
“Any time our left brain is confronted with information that does not jibe with our self-image, knowledge, or conceptual framework,” Gazzaniga says, “our left-hemisphere interpreter creates a belief to enable all incoming information to make sense and mesh with our ongoing idea of ourself. The interpreter seeks patterns, order, and causal relationships.” Our brains can even be stimulated to create religious experiences: when we receive information that doesn’t jibe with the brain structures that give rise to self-awareness and understanding, one of our possible reactions is to categorize it as a sensed presence, as God.
Those times you call magical, miracles, numinous: any certainty of their otherworldly nature comes from the effect they had on you, how they moved you toward some state you really couldn’t have anticipated.
My husband, in the life we had before, called me his “spiritual scout.” I was responsible for being investigatory, grazing on the offerings, gorging at the godly feast, and then coming home and reporting on it. Viatic rogue to his vicarious aide-de-camp, I was his personal mythology; he was mine. This is how we ended up making our story about ourselves. It allowed us to wake up in the morning, imagine who we were, remember our past, and go about our day inhabiting these roles. Even though we create the narrative, this interpreted version is not who we are. Did Richard already know this?
I sit on the side porch, reading my brain books, looking out to the fields of flowers, dry and brittle from the summer blaze, the bees lilting for some succulent nectar.
“We think we’re willing our own choices from one defined mind, like a queen bee ruling over all. But the human brain has no such sovereign ruler,” I say to the bees.
In the nine months we live in the vineyard, I want Richard to track me, to remember my longings and history and requests, but I cannot track me. I see that Richard isn’t scared of our situation. The sadness he occasionally feels is because he’s concerned about my suffering. I’m the one who is terrified of losing my identity. Especially the “us” that I think I remember. While I’m making dinner, crying to my friends, listening to my husband snore, I slowly wake up to the truth that I have no idea what makes me “me.” And the thing about truth is that it dismantles even as it inhabits.
Something astonishing is happening to me in my aloneness. I’m losing my religion. There’s a long list of beliefs being stripped away: suffering, betrayal, hope, loyalty, freedom, success, failure. Ideas based on the desire for a future, or despair about the past. The ideas don’t all leave at once. And sometimes an idea shifts so strongly, I never return to believing that concept. One day God is an external force, a childlike sense of all that is beneficent. And then God is a higher power, the grace that offers an explanation for what can’t be deciphered. Later, God is a shaman, a dreamer, a force that suffuses the natural world. Finally, there is no God. God is a way of belonging to the club that believes in God. And what’s left inside me that needs to belong is disappearing. I’m not angry with God about what’s happened. My faith in something outside of me, something that can save me, has disappeared. In truth, my belief in needing to be saved from my situation is exactly what is sloughing away. And with that loss, the spiritual-scout self is going too.
Life after cancer eats what isn’t true, our outworn notions, the ideas we hold on to because we want to do life “right,” which mostly means what other people want us to do. But the body doesn’t die. The body changes form, goes on to be dust or food or firmaments. That personality, though, that story we grow attached to: dead, dead, dead.
“I can’t stand it,” I say to Christie over the telephone. “I don’t know how I’m going to stay with him.” I’m walking the grove of the vineyard where we’ve been living for six months now. “This should be Eden: we’ve found work, we live in a sweet house, and after years of the grey, we’re living in sunny California, for God’s sake. But Christie, I feel alone!” An owl gazes at me from the eucalyptus trees.
“Sometimes I think it would have been easier for you if he had died,” Christie says.
She’s speaking a thought I’ve been too ashamed to admit.
“The way that it is, there’s no funeral, no support. No one knows that you lost him.”
I fall on my knees on the stone road. The owl turns its square, spotted head. My lungs fill, as if I have been holding my breath since the night in the hospital when I watched Richard leave.
One week, I call all my friends and family, and everyone says some version of the same thing: “Move back to Seattle. This place is where you can be supported. Richard’s okay. You helped make him that way. You’re not okay. You need help now.”
Movement has long been my ally. In 1968, when my father took a job in the Blue Mountains of Ontario, Canada, I lost my former identity as an American. I arrived at my first day of third grade in a foreign country dressed in a plaid wool jumper my grandmother had sewn, my sisters and I dressed alike from our lace socks to our grosgrain hair ribbons. I tromped through several feet of billowy white, freedom cascading through me like the November snowstorm. In Canada, we had wilder land to roam. We met first-generation families with strange brogues and unfamiliar ways. And we developed an entirely new relationship with nature. I lived as often as possible in the trees. I was out of range of my parents’ view for hours upon hours. I entered into my own rich imagined world. Later, Richard and I were constantly on the move. In Canada: Waterloo, Toronto, Banff. In America: Louisville, Memphis, Seattle, Laguna Beach, San Luis Obispo. Some of these moves were about escape, an attempt to cover my tracks. Every move was a chance for reinvention, a chance to get on the road, a chance to become someone else.
We’ve never gone back to someplace we’ve lived before. We’ve always moved on. But I’m having trouble living with the new Richard. In Seattle, there will be artists and writers whom I can join in conversation. There will be reading. There will be weirdness. There will be too many gloomy days, and a ridiculous number of fleece coats and politically correct opinions, but it’ll feel like home.
“What do you think?” I ask Richard. “Can we go back?”
“I’m not sure I can get a job,” he says.
“Call the company,” I say, handing him the phone.
Five minutes later, he has a meeting scheduled with his old company’s regional director. Six weeks later, we return.
We’re neither homesick for a former geography nor nostalgic for a former community. We already know that you can’t go home again. What we long for has been erased. Gone are the memories that once held us together, gone is the history that made us “us,” gone are the ways we communicated with each other, gone is the mythos of our affair. Gone, baby, gone is the oasis of our (imagined) identity. Still, we need smart people and a city that feels kind.
We move back to Seattle. Dylan gives us a present of these calligraphed words: When I say I am going home, I mean I am going to where you are. The poem is framed on our wall. But every time I read this sentence, I cannot find this home. Home is disappearing along with the character I once called “me.”