When we arrived in Quito, Ecuador, we had a couple of days of training and acclimatizing scheduled before we started trekking. Jeff Evans rounded up the team at the hotel for what he called his “pregame locker room talk.”
“It’s all about hormones,” he said. Some of the more cynical guys chuckled, but Jeff knew well enough to just keep rolling.
“Whether on the battlefield or high up in the mountains, part of what our bodies and brains are responding to is trauma. There are five basic hormones that are the most important: endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol. Some of them overlap, but essentially each has a function, a reason for being produced: to be able to keep us alive or incentivize us to do things that we normally wouldn’t do, or to help us rebound from emotional or physical pain. Since you’ll be experiencing some or all of these heading up Cotopaxi, I want to talk a little about each.”
Everyone was listening intently now.
“First are endorphins. They’re designed to do one thing, and that’s mask pain. Endorphins are the main reason why every species has been able to perpetuate. Because when a woman gives birth, she’s flooded with endorphins. If she wasn’t, the woman would be like, ‘Hell no, I’m never having sex again. Because sex makes babies, and having babies hurts like a motherfucker!’”
Everyone laughed.
“Endorphins also mask pain for endurance. To track animals for days, we had to have endorphins. To mask the pain of climbing Cotopaxi, we will need them. When a soldier in action gets his leg blown off and can still reach over, grab his morphine, stab himself in the leg and keep shooting to protect his platoon, that’s endorphins at work.”
Everyone in the room knew exactly what Jeff was talking about.
“Then, there’s dopamine. We get a dose of it when we achieve something, when we hit the target. Dopamine makes you feel good. We make a post on Facebook and get fifty-five likes immediately, we get a shot of dopamine. But it also has a dark side, because it’s highly addictive. We get shots of dopamine from Facebook, from drugs, from drinking; so we need to learn to seek out the shots of dopamine in healthy and organic ways, like finishing a 10K or summiting a mountain, as opposed to the artificial, contrived ones.
“Serotonin is more or less the leadership chemical. It’s based on our pride and status within a group. You get a shot of serotonin from being a part of something that’s positive and powerful and bigger than you, so that’s critical for us as human beings. And it’s especially important for the veteran community to reflect on, because you get flooded with serotonin being a part of something. Same thing with the rope team you’ll be on.
“Then there’s oxytocin,” Jeff went on, “which is like unicorn farts and rainbows and love and trust and friendship and ‘I’ve got your back.’” Everyone cracked up. “It feels good, and everybody loves everybody. You get oxytocin from giving of yourself. It’s the servant hormone. You feel really, really good and connected—flooded with emotional connection to another human being. We have to have it, and to lose it sends us down into an ugly little rabbit hole of despair.”
I was still pondering the concept of unicorn farts when Jeff said, “The last one is cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone. We need it to protect ourselves. We get shots of cortisol when we don’t feel safe. It’s great, and it can save your life, but it can also kill you, because with extended trauma, we get long, sustained hits of cortisol, when through evolution, it was meant to come in short bursts, quick hits. Sustained injections cause high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart attacks. When we live in fear-based environments, when we’re just scared all the time, we’ve got this steady state, low-dose cortisol just surging through our bodies, and it creates a condition of continued stress and fear. And I think that’s honestly what a lot of us, and vets especially, are experiencing. Stress and fear. So what we need to do is put ourselves in positions to manage our landscapes, and therefore manage the way our bodies respond to assaults. And that’s what we’ll try to do as we head up the mountain. And hopefully, as we move forward in our lives.”
It was a lot to take in, but Jeff wrapped it up with a tight summary. “On this expedition, hopefully, we’ll create an atmosphere of camaraderie and fellowship: that’s serotonin and oxytocin. We’ll teach and use the skills we’ve learned to manage personal challenge and mitigate threats like crevasses and avalanches—that’s cortisol. We will journey toward the summit, which will provide us with a reward—there’s your dopamine. It all hinges on managing the stressors and assaulters and nurturing a healthy reward cycle. I think that being outdoors provides us the environment to develop this balance. So let’s see how it goes.”
“What about endorphins?” Matt Burgess asked. “You forgot about them.”
“Oh, they’re gonna kick in the minute you walk out of the Refugio door and start up the mountain. And hopefully, sustain you all the way to the top.”
My roommate in Quito was a medical corpsman named Max, who had yet another heartbreaking background. As we organized our gear in the room and got to know each other better, I learned he was taken from his family by child protective services when he was ten. Most of his family had been convicted felons, mixed up in guns and drugs. In high school, he’d get calls from his father in jail, but he wouldn’t answer the phone. Max even said that once, he’d been watching America’s Most Wanted when he turned to his friend and said, “That guy on the screen—that’s my brother.” Max was a huge, muscular guy, swaggering and confident, at least on the outside. He’d joined our program because, as he put it, for years after coming home from the war, he’d been in “self-medicating and self-destruct mode” and wanted to try to do something better with his life.
But sitting on our beds after the first long day, he said, “Erik, I listened to all that stuff you said today about No Barriers, about change and transformation, but you gotta understand, I’m not you. I can’t be like you.”
His words caught me by surprise. “Why would I expect you to be like me?” I stammered.
“Look, I’m here,” he replied, “and I hope to get something from this experience. I’ve managed to stay out of trouble recently, but I don’t have the ability to affect anyone or anything. About the only thing I’m really good at is kicking people’s asses.”
“But, Max,” I argued, “you’ve already led and served your country. You can contribute again. You’re capable of more than you think.”
“Nah,” he responded. “My problems began way before I joined the military. Marching fifty miles with a giant pack? Summiting a mountain? Those are easy, but taking this experience and using it to change somehow, that’s bullshit. I don’t even know what that means. Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to look in the mirror and be okay with who I see, with what I’ve done, with the things that have happened to me, but right now I don’t know.”
I felt the deep pain behind his words, like, thirty years later, he was still peering out at an uncaring, intractable world through the eyes of a ten-year-old child, terrified and panicked, as social services dragged him away from his family. I didn’t push back, given everything he’d just shared. The day had obviously stirred up some debris and restlessness in him, and that was enough for now. I was already learning that there was a blurry and shifting line between challenging the team toward something bigger and driving them over an abyss, and part of me wondered if the two were almost the same thing. Once they felt exposed, backed up against the edge, you needed to be ready because you were awakening a tempest, one that, until that point, had lain largely dormant.
The balancing act began soon enough as we started our acclimatizing trek toward Cotopaxi. On the team we had some soldiers who’d been in combat and some who hadn’t, and that became a point of contention as the two factions began to have friction and divide. Dan said that Jamie, who had lost his leg in a motorcycle accident in peacetime, was inflating his PTSD symptoms just to get attention. Some murmured that those who hadn’t seen combat didn’t belong on the trip. Max accused one guy of downright faking his symptoms and lying about his combat record.
“I can take one look at you and tell you’re a poser,” Max said. I impulsively stepped between them and, for a moment, thought Max was so riled up he was going to swing at me. He towered over me and put his huge hand on my shoulder as he yelled, “Get out of my way, E! This is none of your business!”
But I stood my ground. “You could take me out with one punch,” I said, trying to sound relaxed, “but you’ll have to live the rest of your life with the fact that you knocked out a blind guy … that’s bad karma,” I added. That seemed to edge down the mood and end the immediate crisis, but the bad blood persisted.
The next few days, we ascended into the rolling plateaus of the páramo grasslands, undulating expanses of tall, spiny tussock grasses, giant rosette plants, and dense shrubbery. Since none of the gringo leaders had done this trek before, we relied on the local guides, which turned out to be a mistake. However, our biggest blunder was following the route description relayed to us by the locals. After receiving instructions, Charley announced with seeming confidence that it would be an easy day, just a few miles over rolling terrain, but the purported three-hour tour wound up taking nine hours.
On typical expeditions, this happened quite a bit. I remember on Aconcagua asking Chris, our leader, how far to the summit. He replied, “I could throw a rock to it.”
Two hours later and still climbing, I said grumpily, “You have one hell of an arm.” Chris just laughed, but this was different. Part of building trust as leaders was presenting accurate information, especially for soldiers who were used to the structure of military life, with all its manifests and mission briefings. And this group was still fragile, only tenuously ascending back into the world. Jamie, an amputee, was fighting through the high grasses, the sharp plants tearing at his face and pack. His prosthetic leg kept getting caught in deep hidden ruts between the tussocks, wrenching against his stump. It was causing blisters, and I could hear him nearby, groaning and letting out deep, exasperated breaths.
“Easy terrain, my ass,” he said as he yanked his prosthetic out of another hole and turned around. “You guys screwed me,” he said angrily. “I’m going back to camp.” He trudged off, not speaking to anyone. Charley followed him back and miraculously arranged a bus to carry him around the entire mountain range to get to our next Refugio. I felt terrible, realizing our lack of planning had only furthered his mistrust. Adventure could quickly turn into a nightmare that retriggered the brain into a state of fight or flight. And once there, you were no longer learning or growing but in total shutdown. As they left, I thought of Jeff’s hormone talk. I turned to him. “Cortisol,” I said.
“Yeah,” is all Jeff replied, with worry in his voice.
Later, I came across Matt Burgess sitting on the side of the trail, taking off his running shoes. “I went cold turkey on the cigarettes back in Quito,” he said. “I’m having a pretty rough day of withdrawals. Plus, Charley told us the terrain wouldn’t be too severe, so I didn’t wear my heavier boots. I think I just reinjured the ankle I broke back in Macedonia. It’s swelling, and my shoe is cutting into my skin.”
To my astonishment, Matt shoved his shoes in his pack and began tromping through the prickly grasses in his socks. The terrain began dropping away so steeply, he was falling down, tumbling over fallen trees, and thrashing through the thick vegetation. Eventually, he was so exhausted, he just sat on his backside and began sliding downward, sending piles of leaves, rocks, and deadfall tumbling down onto his teammates below. He hadn’t brought enough food or water, and even though the guides shared theirs, he went silent, not saying a word for the next three hours. I imagined him fuming inside, hating Charley, Jeff, and me for talking him into this hideous expedition. I wondered how much more he could take and secretly feared this was the beginning of the end for Matt. As leaders, we had blown it. This debacle of a day had given the team just the chance they needed to lash out, blame, retreat, and quit.
At the Jose Ribas Refugio at 15,840 feet, it really started to fall apart. The high Refugio was the staging point for our summit bid. For most of the vets, this was the highest elevation they’d ever been to, but Jeff described the glorious snowcapped dome of Cotopaxi hovering nearly four thousand feet above us. The Refugio was pretty spacious, holding about eighty-five people, but we weren’t the only group readying to summit. It was crowded as we piled in. The trek from the trailhead up to the hut had been cold, sleeting, and windy, and folks were tired. Some had headaches, and fuses were short.
Dan and Jamie had been riding each other since Quito, and it escalated again as Jamie demanded a lower bunk and started aggressively clearing a stranger’s gear off the bed. Dan called him on it, and the two were soon in each other’s faces in a full-blown shouting match.
“I could kick your ass right now,” said Dan, “but you’re not worth it.”
Jamie grabbed his gear and left. I followed and caught up with him a hundred yards down the trail.
“I’m fuckin’ outta here!” he yelled. “I can’t handle these people, any of this. You are all a bunch of hypocrites; you call this a team? Nobody is true to each other. And don’t let me get started on the guides. You get us lost on the mountain. You say the hike will be an easy three hours, and it’s a death march. The whole thing is flawed. I’m going home.”
Some of what he’d said was true. There were a few on the team who had been immature, even bullies. Instead of lifting everyone up, they had pulled people down. And we, as guides, had been working hard yet had failed to understand the support Jamie had needed to continue. The truth ingrained in his words made it sting all the more. I didn’t know how to respond.
“You know I’m right,” he said, his voice catching.
I knew that Jamie had tried a couple of other veterans’ programs and left in a similar way. I didn’t want it to happen again. “Even if you’re a thousand percent right,” I said, “it’s still a terrible mistake to leave. You’ve got to see this through.”
“I can’t,” he replied. “I’ve tried, and it’s not worth it anymore.”
I stepped forward and squared up with him, touching his arms with my palms. He was crying now.
“How do I tell you,” I yelled over the wind rushing down the hillside, “that your brain is betraying you? It makes sense to blame, to blame the team, the guides, to blame your folks, to blame the alcohol, or even blame the motorcycle that took your leg. Everything you know tells you to turn outward and mistrust the world for all the shit it’s piled on you. But that’s only the path of least resistance, and it’s dead wrong. This is the time to do the exact opposite of what your brain is telling you to do. You’ve got to turn inward. If you blow it all up right now, it will confirm all your suspicions, but then you’ll never know what’s inside you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said so softly I could barely hear him. Then he turned downhill and began walking away. Like the first time, Charley hiked down and found him at the road. He arranged a car for him, but this time it was taking Jamie to Quito, from where he’d be flying home.
I was devastated and sank down on the nearest rock. As I thought about this disastrous trip, the sleet turned to snow. The irony wasn’t lost on me either. We were on the flanks of an active volcano. It seemed quiet up there now, but over the last three hundred years, Cotopaxi had erupted fifty times, sending lava and ash a hundred kilometers in every direction—to the Pacific Ocean to the west and on to the Amazon Basin to the east. Our trip so far had been nothing short of volcanic. We had only wanted to help, but all we’d done was exposed their wounds and confirmed their fears. I remembered Dr. Bach-y-Rita’s story about rehabilitating his father after his stroke. Walking was out of the question, so his brother had first taught him to crawl, then shuffle on his knees, and finally to walk again. The wounds of the mind had to be similar, I thought, except nobody fully understood the steps to resume walking again. How could you teach someone to turn inward when his brain had no idea how to start the process? Then I heard Jeff’s voice beside me and felt his hand on my shoulder.
“You should come inside. We have a big day tomorrow.”
When I got back up to the Refugio, Jeff went inside and left me with Matt Burgess, who was standing in the courtyard. I thought he’d probably broken down and gone out for a smoke because of all the stress. “Having a cig?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he said. “I told you I went cold turkey, and I’m sticking to it. The withdrawals are giving me the cold sweats and making me shaky, but being up here in this fresh air actually helps. I realized the nicotine was only a mask. All the anxiety, all the pain, it was still there.”
I was preoccupied by Jamie’s abrupt departure. It was crushing to lose one of our team in this way, and I worried how this was going to impact the others and the rest of the trip, especially with tomorrow’s long summit.
“Jamie’s gone,” I said bluntly. “He’s not coming back.”
Matt didn’t respond at first, and when he spoke, it seemed like he was changing the subject. “Erik, there’s a book that means a lot to me. I’ve been reading it every night throughout this trip—that is, when I haven’t been too exhausted to lift my head up. Can I read you a quote from it? It’s by Marianne Williamson, and I think it may explain why Jamie left.” He pulled the book out of his backpack and, with his gruff, Sling Blade voice, read to me as high mountain winds whined over the hut roof.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves,
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
Matt stopped reading and said, “I graduated second out of 110 other soldiers from Military Police School. I was being fast-tracked. I was supposed to be promoted, but when I came back from Iraq, I lost everything. Erik, that passage, it’s me. I’m terrified of that light. I fear success more than I do failure. See, failure’s easy. It’s familiar, like an old friend, but the idea of success is overwhelming. So I make excuses, mistrust everyone, and overdramatize things—all to avoid success. That’s Jamie. That’s Max. It’s easier to sabotage yourself than it is to build something.”
“What is that light?” I asked.
Matt was deep in thought for a minute and then said, “I think of it as being centered, full of assurance that no matter what happens, we will be okay. For me, that means loving myself, which is sometimes hard to do. We often spend our lives disconnected from our potential, from ourselves. It would have been so much easier to stay home, to not even apply to this program, to stay in the darkness I was living in. The light was terrifying. Although I know the light will propel me forward, I know it’s also a path with the most resistance.”
I thought of Terry Fox, of Hugh Herr and Mark Wellman. All of them were just broken-winged birds with no business to ever fly again. Yet that light had transcended. I thought of Arjun then, how he sometimes walled himself off from his own possibilities. Then I felt my own wall crumbling, and I saw myself sitting at a table alone in the lunchroom just after I’d gone blind, those same thoughts of isolation, of helplessness, of crippling self-doubt flooding to the surface. In those early days of blindness, when I dared to dream about bigger things, other, darker voices stepped in, like hecklers in a theater, like squatters crowding into an abandoned building: “Who are you to think that you deserve something more?” But like Matt, I knew somehow the only way forward was to keep my heart open, if only a sliver, so that the light could begin to grow.
“We’re a lot more alike than you might think,” I said. “I spend a lot of time wondering if I’m an imposter, like some kind of Walter Mitty character whose dreams outweigh his means.”
“Well, a lot of your dreams seem to have come true,” Matt said as the temperature dropped and the sun crept behind the mountains. “I know that tomorrow is going to be the hardest thing I’ve done in my life, but I know I have to do it. There’s an inner voice telling me that if I don’t try, I’m going to stay stagnant and keep struggling; if I don’t do this, I’ll never move forward.”
I patted Matt on the shoulder. “One step at a time,” I said. I had no idea whether he would summit Cotopaxi the next day; in fact, I had serious doubts. Physically, he was another broken-winged bird, but weren’t we all?
We left the Refugio just after midnight and reached the glacier around 2:30 A.M. The plan was for about an eight- to ten-hour ascent and a six- to eight-hour descent. Charley, Jeff, and the other guides each led a rope team. Matt joined Charley’s team, and we all crept upward. The day began with some excitement, when one of the soldier’s crampons failed to penetrate into the ice, and he took a big fall. I was impressed by his three rope-mates who reacted in textbook fashion, diving to the ground and arresting his fall with their ice axes.
Global warming had over time severed the glacier, searing it with huge crevasses that were wider than normal. There was even a section where an entire portion of the mountainside had collapsed, and someone said it looked like tufts of giant white popcorn. We weaved and scrambled through these broken chunks of ice for hours. Jeff Evans said it reminded him of the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Everest, and he nicknamed it the “Khumbu-Paxi Icefall.”
Well up on the mountain, my rope team was lagging far behind. Our team had a soldier who’d had nineteen surgeries to repair his foot. He’d almost lost it, and it was still not fully healed. We had an above-the-knee amputee, and all day his prosthetic had been giving him trouble. Another soldier was afraid of heights, and she was just happy to be at her altitude record. When it became obvious that we weren’t moving fast enough, we decided to turn back. There would be no Coto summit for us. As the day warmed, avalanches and dangerous icefall became more likely. A second rope team had gone past the turnaround time and made the heartbreaking decision to descend, just a half hour from the summit.
Through it all, there was Matt, plodding, picking, weaving, and wheezing his way up the mountain. Numerous times it appeared that he would quit, clinging to his rope ascender and staring up with tears in his eyes at the few thousand feet of forty-degree slope between him and the summit. Charley noted that he was shivering, shaking, and extremely weak, and he seriously questioned the wisdom of bringing him any higher. But he knew how badly Matt wanted it, so he went against his better judgment and urged him on. As they moved up through giant, overhanging seracs, Matt could barely breathe. He was wobbling, sometimes buckling to his knees, hardly able to stand. But after twelve arduous hours, Matt Burgess stood on top of Mount Cotopaxi, at 19,347 feet.
Charley hugged him and whispered in his ear, “Poco a poco, se va lejos.”
Matt, his voice raspy to nearly inaudible, said, “Huh? What’s that mean?”
“Little by little, you go far,” answered Charley.
As it turned out, only Charley’s and Jeff’s teams made the summit. Nine veterans, including Matt Burgess, stood on top of that conical volcano. Matt was so broken down from his efforts he was coughing and gagging incessantly on the descent, and his legs jellied; he was stumbling and falling, becoming a danger to his rope team. Through a few sections, Charley had to shoulder him and carry him fireman-style as Matt babbled, going in and out of consciousness. At one point, Charley heard him whisper, “On the way up, Charley Mace, I hated you. But now I love you.”
When we finally all got back to the Refugio, Matt had been moving continuously for nineteen hours, and it became obvious he needed medical attention. We worried that he wouldn’t be able to get on the plane to fly home. He spent two days in his hotel room, wrecked, barely able to rise from bed, and coughing so raggedly it sounded like he might break a rib. Matt was prone to pneumonia from his medical challenges, and Jeff listened to his lungs gurgling and thought he might have it again. Outside his room in the hallway, I whispered to Charley, “I’m not worried whether the trip was a success anymore. I’ll just be happy if no one sues us.”
When I asked Jeff’s opinion, all he said was, “Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong. Maybe growth happens more like the way Cotopaxi spews lava and smoke. It explodes from deep inside the earth and lays a fresh coat of skin over the old terrain. That’s how the earth constantly redefines itself. Growth is not pain-free, and it ain’t for sissies.”
I stepped back into Matt’s room. It smelled like sweat and dirty socks as I leaned over his bed, touched his hand, and asked, “Matt, can I get you anything?”
“I’m good,” he said, almost imperceptibly. Then he squeezed my hand, pulled me in close, and croaked, “Thank you.” The next day, he rose zombielike, shuffled silently through the airport, and managed to get on board.
I also got on the flight, and when I arrived home, my mind was still consumed by questions and second-guesses, but everyday life quickly took over. There were soccer games, teacher conferences, and school plays to attend. There were other struggles to contend with, much more immediate than a faraway expedition.
While I was away, Ellie was having some ongoing troubles with Arjun. She was a dedicated mom and loved playing games with the kids, taking them on outings, playing sports with them. But she’d try to play soccer with Arjun, a game she’d played for years. “I’ll kick the ball to you,” she’d say, “and you kick it back to me.” Arjun would purposely kick it in the wrong direction and make a game out of having Ellie run for it. The family would play Monopoly, and Arjun, sensing he was losing, would “accidently” kick the board, sending the figures, buildings, and cards scattering everywhere. The worst was when the family was setting up the Christmas tree. Ellie carefully showed Arjun her favorite ornament that she’d loved and cherished since she was a young girl. It was a delicate, hollowed-out egg with a blue ribbon wrapped around it; there was a tiny plastic window through which you could see this little toy soldier inside. Arjun asked to hold it. Ellie hesitated but reluctantly handed it to him. As soon as she turned her head, she heard a sickening crunch. She tried not to react, to raise her voice or show anger, but inwardly, she was heartbroken and fought back tears.
The act seemed, at the surface, defiant, but Ellie knew it was actually more of a question, as if he were asking, “You say you love me, so let’s test that theory. Will you still love me if I do this?” Crack! “’Cause if this isn’t real, I’d like to know sooner than later, before my heart is shattered, just like that egg.”
I was only home for a day when Arjun came down with severe flu-like symptoms. As it got worse, we took him straight to Urgent Care. While there, Ellie left the room for just a minute, and when she came back in, she saw the nurses trying to insert a tube up Arjun’s nose. Apparently, they were trying to tell what kind of flu strain he might have. I sat in a nearby chair, completely unaware, because Arjun was totally silent, just taking it as they hovered over him, wrestling the rubber tube up his nostril. Unlike how Emma would have reacted, unlike other children, he wasn’t crying. He wasn’t fighting. This had been the case in the orphanage too, when Sabitri told us Arjun had been chased by a vicious stray dog. He’d fallen and busted open his chin. He hadn’t cried then, or when the doctor in Kathmandu stabbed him repeatedly with needles, checking for tuberculosis. He hadn’t even cried when he crashed into a hedge on his maiden bike ride down the hill in front of our house.
As Ellie saw what was happening, she was irate. The nurses hadn’t bothered to try to explain to Arjun what they were doing. They’d treated him like some kind of automaton. Ellie rushed over to the bed, got in front of them, and held him close. She explained what they were doing, and why it needed to be done. When the nurses finally withdrew the tube, he remained stoic. Ellie turned his face to hers and said, “Arjun, it’s okay to cry. That was a terrible thing to go through.” A few tears came then, but not many.
At this same time, my energetic guide dog of eight years, Willa, was also sick, and, tragically, it wasn’t just a flu. She was listless and didn’t want to eat or drink. We all loved Willa despite her quirks, like the times we’d leave the house for an hour and return to a collection of Emma’s stuffed animals, Arjun’s dirty socks, and my underwear all heaped in the middle of the living room floor. Willa would stand drooling over the slobbery pile, and I think it was her way to show us how much she missed us. She was sneaky too. Once when Ellie and I were at a movie theater, we were blissfully unaware as Willa army-crawled under five rows of chairs and was sitting in the front sharing a bucket of popcorn with a total stranger. But by five years old, she was a seasoned pro. She could step off the airport train, immediately find the escalator, and then cruise right to the moving sidewalk toward my gate; she could also locate my exact hotel room, pointing her nose to the door handle, and the next morning find the revolving front door of the hotel lobby. She was a star, but now she was sick. A large tumor appeared from under her tail, and the veterinarian diagnosed it as cancer.
There was nothing to do, and in her last days, we fed her all the treats she could never eat as a working dog: bacon, cheese—all mixed with peanut butter. When she could barely lift her head, we called a vet who came to our home so Willa could pass in a familiar place, surrounded by her family. We placed her on her blanket near the railing in the living room, where she’d spent hundreds of hours as the kids drew artwork and did their puzzles. Emma and Arjun had made the courageous decision to be there at the end during the euthanizing procedure. I thought it was important for them to witness this inevitable part of life that sometimes came much too soon. They kissed her, then gently held her paws and told her how much they loved her. They said good-bye as Willa’s eyes closed.
The strange part was, Emma, always the avowed and devoted animal lover, cried a little bit as you’d expect, then sniffled, and seemed okay. Arjun, who on the other hand never had an especially close bond with Willa, broke into a deep, mournful wail that didn’t end. We’d heard that soulful cry before. It was the night before he’d left Nepal for America. Ellie said he lay on the bed in the hotel room and sobbed, and it seemed to come from as deep a place as pain could come. Now he cried in that same way, plaintive and inconsolable. We all held him for a long time until there was nothing left inside him.
I’m not a psychologist, but if Jeff’s analogy was right that change didn’t come as a soft summer breeze but in an erupting volcano—or in a torrent of burning tears—then saying good-bye to Willa may have been part of Arjun’s own process of letting go. Of what, I wasn’t exactly sure, but there had been a lot of disruption in his young life. He’d been separated from everything he’d known and asked to trust and love new parents and a new big sister. The transition was staggering. I think Willa’s death represented other long-ago memories for him, fuzzy and dreamlike, yet piercing his consciousness like the tip of a spear thrust up from the depths. After the tears dried, I prayed Jeff was right—that this was a chance to deposit over the wound a fresh layer of hope and possibilities.
Emma, now beginning seventh grade, was struggling with her own turbulence. She’d applied for the honors program earlier in the summer and had been turned down. But now, two weeks after school had begun, a student had dropped out and one spot had opened up. The teachers had offered the spot to Emma and given her just twenty-four hours to make her decision. “I’m fine,” she first said. “I’m pretty settled now.”
Ellie and I encouraged her to think it through and give it a little more time.
“What would you do?” Emma asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but on my last trip, I met this soldier. He was pretty fragile, with a dozen different medical conditions. Each one of them should have been enough to take him out. He almost didn’t apply. When he was accepted, he said he was actually shocked. Then, on the second day, he almost quit.”
“What made him stay?” Emma asked.
“I’m not sure how to describe it,” I answered, “but I guess you could say he had a kind of open-heart policy. Every time something happened on the trip that should have made him close his heart, he opened it more. Sometimes, you need to trust and just give it a whirl.”
The next day, Emma came to Ellie and me to weigh her options. “Well, I’m in classes now with some of my friends. The courses seem okay, and I’ve got all my books already. The honors classes are in a totally different wing, so I’d have to change my locker, and I’d be way behind the other honors students … I think I’ve made my decision: I’ll give it a whirl.”