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  Chapter 16

  Therapy in the Garden

  I landed in Savannah, moved by one country, only to be completely lost in my own.

  My family blanketed me with love and support, but the impact of life without my mom was still overwhelming and unreal to me several months out. I couldn’t get past the fact that I couldn’t pick up the phone to talk to her; I couldn’t catch the train to Convent Station, a short drive from her house. I missed her voice, her silly little jokes.

  My brain wanted to go north. An article that I had pitched and worked on vigorously disappeared, never finding the pages of Talk, but I still had a job there when I got back from Cuba if I wanted it. Tina had made that clear to me herself. After my exhaustive efforts at the Bacara conference, I had mini-impromptu conversations with a couple of the magazine’s senior editors, standing in the middle of the open office landscape, with discussion of me assisting one of them. I was finally touching the corner of my dream, to work in magazine editorial, and Tina Brown’s no less, but after my mom died, staying in New York became more difficult by the day.

  I was in the office on a late spring afternoon when my dad emailed to check on me. I told the truth. I was a disaster. My insides burned, the concrete hurt the undersides of my feet, nighttime was terrifying, filled with nightmares of my faceless mother, but it was especially harsh to wake up each morning and remember that she was gone. His response was simple: “Come home,” he wrote. And I did, only a few weeks later.

  I desperately wanted to return to New York after coming back from Cuba and felt pathetic for not mustering the strength to do so, but my heart told me no. I was still experiencing stress, which had rooted itself firmly in the city. The tsunamis were back, and on top of it, I began to wake in the middle of the night, gasping for breath, as if I had been forcibly held underwater thirty seconds too long. This strange new pattern took during the day, too. In the middle of ordinary activities, I caught myself holding, holding, holding followed by a desperate push of breath.

  I didn’t know what was going on, but it was unnerving. I missed my yoga teacher, Janti, and took to the deep breathing techniques he’d taught us. It helped a bit, when I focused heavily on it, but it wasn’t enough. I needed help. Yoga was the most logical answer to me so I flipped the pages of our local paper for classes.

  On a Tuesday morning I met a friend at a B&B on Forsyth Park, the Central Park of Savannah. By then it had been some time since I had last twisted and stretched, but my surprised muscles and arteries adapted and finally loosened enough to let me dig into the chaos of my body. I didn’t experience anything close to the intensity as I did in my New York jaunts, but I felt physically relaxed and emotionally drained following the class. I asked the instructor, who was named Judy, if she had a minute after everyone else had left.

  “Of course,” she said and sat with me on the floor, cross-legged, her hands resting on her legs.

  Judy’s energy was soothing and I enviously wondered how someone could be so peaceful. She remained quiet and waited for me to speak.

  “I’ve been having this weird thing happen over the last month or two,” I said finally.

  Her kind gaze held firm.

  “I keep holding my breath and then use the deep yoga breathing to try and shake it. But I don’t like having to think about breathing.”

  “First of all, don’t dislike thinking about breathing,” she said. “Most people don’t think about it and they should.”

  Very gently, she asked, “Have you been going through something recently?”

  I looked at her, I bore into her, and all of a sudden I couldn’t talk. I literally couldn’t open my mouth. She didn’t take her eyes off me and after some time, I nodded yes. Tears started to fall in large drops, welled up in full buckets behind my eyes, and then burst outright as if they had been stored up for years.

  “Melanie,” she said, as she put her hand on mine. “Breathing is a symbol. There’s something blocking you.”

  I stared at her.

  “Something you don’t want to move past.”

  I stared at her. I swallowed hard.

  “You’re not ready to move forward. There’s something you want to stop.”

  I nodded and tears streamed uncontrollably. I was a blubbering mess and I felt ridiculous.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK,” she said. “I don’t know if someone has died or a family member or friend is ill, but whatever it is, you’re not ready to move on and it’s OK.”

  These were Chopra’s signs and symbols, I just had to pay attention. I had no idea that my body was speaking to me. In fact, it was screaming at me. All I had to do was figure out what to do with this indecipherable language that beat its drums and screamed its anthem trying to communicate with me. I had punched it down for so long.

  Soon after, a dear family friend, who was my mother’s contemporary, invited me to her house. Quickly, she recognized the scorching fire inside me. Just before I left her house, she handed me a piece of paper with a therapist’s name on it. She didn’t push me on it, but mentioned she was going to call the woman’s office to say that I might make an appointment. For the first time, I considered getting professional help. This was huge for me. At that time, I didn’t easily accept personal defeat. I thought I was invincible.

  Following a quick trip to New York to gather the last of my things, I called the therapist’s office and confirmed an appointment. Overwhelmed, I sat hollowed and terrified of revisiting what I wanted so much to clear out of my mind.

  The counselor’s office, as I predicted, was uncomfortably foreign. She came out, shook my hand, introduced herself as Sue, and led me to a floral explosion. I sat on the flowery sofa, which sat against flowery wallpaper, and looked outside to a pocket of trees surrounded by flowers. A cat, looking frazzled and singed, rubbed up against the sliding glass door. We were all but distant cousins, sitting opposite each other.

  Sue was short and blond with large eyes and a skirt that fell above her knees. Her voice was raspy and distinctly Louisiana Southern.

  She sat down in a chair across from me and said that she wanted me to tell her why I was there. Quiet and still, she waited for me to begin. I thought, in my great twenty-five-year-old maturity, that I would be highly efficient. Dig in, get out. She was going to make an assessment, give me some tools, perhaps, and I’d resolve lingering issues. Really I was OK, I just needed a cleanup.

  Boy was I off-base. In a shot, my heart railroaded my brain, flinging all logical thought processes out the window. Wild and powerful tears poured from me like lava burning down my cheeks, following two choked words, at best.

  I was an idiot, a weak, weak idiot. Other people cried. Other people lost control. I was stronger, or should have been. And Sue, I didn’t even know her. At that time, I was insanely possessive of my mother’s memory and didn’t like to share her with many people. There was the blue leather Nike bag I snagged from Mom’s Morristown home and filled with the new size eight jeans she happily slipped on in the months before she died, her gray Yale Drama School and Florida Gators T-shirts, and her extensive Playbill collection, which was stationed in the northwest corner of my New York bedroom. The gold, six-paneled Japanese folding screen that once divided my mom’s first Manhattan studio acted as a barrier between her things and the rest of world when I was away. And her large, black dress coat, one size too big for me, only escaped the hanger in my closet for her memorial service. I wrapped myself in it like an adult-size swaddling blanket that she had left only for me.

  Yet, in spite of myself, I started to talk, in between my slovenly gushes of emotion, and apologized repeatedly for the endless waterworks. The more I spoke, the more I seemed to regress. Feeling like a large, metal plate was compressing on my chest, I was touching dangerous territory, falling into what again felt like deep, deep despair. The gauze I had put over my heart, just so, to fend off emotional invasion in the wake of my mother, was ripped off, reminding my just how exposed my wounds still were.
r />   I sat in the therapy garden, not wanting to talk, but I told myself I had to or it was pointless to be there. I was told that taking power away from my memories and from my mother’s illness was the way to win the war I never wanted to fight. So I began. I was scattered, bouncing from one point in time to the other. I didn’t know how to make my thoughts flow. I felt robotic and totally and completely erratic.

  It turned out that Sue had lost her mom to gallbladder cancer seven years before I did. Her mother’s experience had been similar to mine. The swollen stomach, disparately attached birdlike appendages, and the disturbingly sulfuric-tinted skin color that forced my mom to have to think about her looks for probably the first time in her life—it was all very similar. I know she told me this so that I might find comfort in her empathy, but I only felt worse.

  Half an hour in, I was completely gutted. Yet, I went in deeper. I touched on the moment—and the second I opened my mouth to say it, I wished I hadn’t, but it seemed there was no turning back—when I sat in the living room with Jim, as they rolled my mother off, zipped in a black, plastic bag. That image haunted me most.

  I meandered further into the deep blackness of the night that I thought I lost my mind. It must have been only a day or two after my mom died. The memorial service was a couple weeks away in New York and I was going to go home until that time, but Jim needed people around him and there were things we needed to take care of so I stayed a few more days. Together, we closed her bank account while acid burned inside me. We addressed envelopes for the service and cleaned her closets.

  I held firm until we hit her bathroom drawers, a rumpled mess of her makeup and half-used jars of concealer, brushes full of her blond hair, bobby pins sprayed in and around, and perfume that nearly sent me over the edge, with her scent so firmly embedded in the mash.

  I wanted to run and scream, get out of the house, but at the same time, I carried overwhelming guilt in leaving, as if I was going to make our good-bye final. It felt like abandonment. Somehow staying in her house and in the immediate bi-state area that included New Jersey and New York, where we spent so much of our time, I wasn’t really leaving her. I attached myself to her absence, her void, as if that was a real person in and of itself, with permission to exist only within Morristown, the theater districts of Manhattan, and the railways in between. This thing, this black snake, curled into me like a sick child, weaving a mutual existence.

  In my black hole, how was I going to find my way in the world without her or the void, that was, in fact, my lifeline? It was all I had left of her. So when that void attacked me, I didn’t know where to turn.

  One night, alone upstairs and unable to sleep, I crept down the stairs, presumably toward the kitchen for a drink of water, in almost complete darkness, save a sliver of light from the cracked door on the second floor. Jim snored loudly below.

  Down a handful of steps, my mother screamed at me. Actual, clear, real screaming, which sent me into a state of petrification.

  “MELANIE, MELANIE, MELANIE,” she wailed, her voice shrill, in pain and running from death, much like a real episode that occurred a couple of nights before she died. Lying on the sofa in the room adjacent to her hospice bed, I ran to her, as did my stepsister, Leanne, who was trying to rest with me.

  My mom sat up, her face horribly distorted, screaming for me over and over, gripping the bed’s side rail. She flailed her arms around, fighting demons that I couldn’t see or touch. She was fighting death, fighting not to lose us, and hurting in a way that I could never imagine. I tried to calm her with touch and the sound of my voice, but nothing could tame the force of nature that pushed her.

  Suddenly, she dropped back to her coma-like state and I was stumped, hanging in midair, without a landing strip for my torrential flight of fear and confusion and anger that compounded by the moment.

  Leanne put her hand on me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I broke, shaking so hard I could not steady my hands. I don’t remember the rest of the night.

  But on this particular night, the night she screamed at me in the darkness on the stairwell, there was no one to run to, as Leanne had gone back to Germany for two weeks. In my tunnel Jim seemed miles away. Only my mother’s hysterical voice in the dark and the void, that sharp-edged absence, was attacking me.

  “MELANIE, MELANIE, MELANIE!”

  My heart raced, yet I remained in total paralysis.

  She did it again—“MELANIE, MELANIE, MELANIE!”

  Boom, a voice of logic kicked in, directing me with internal militant instruction:

  GO BACK UP THE STAIRS.

  Still too scared to move, I was lucid enough to know I was teetering between the sane and the insane.

  TURN AROUND AND GO BACK UP THE STAIRS, my general directed, sternly.

  THIS ISN’T REAL, he said. THIS ISN’T REAL. GO. GO!

  I gripped the handrail, finding a brief moment of relief in the solidness of the wood under my hand.

  My mom screamed again: “MELANIE, MELANIE, MELANIE,” sending every membrane, cell, and hair follicle on my body into salute.

  The General: GO NOW, MELANIE. GO NOW. THIS IS NOT REAL. THIS IS NOT REAL. GO UP THE STAIRS! NOW!

  I took orders, snapped, and broke free of the rail, clumsily plowing up the stairs. In the bathroom I flipped on the light and turned the shower on. As scalding water ran over me, my eyes closed and I imagined a wax shield that would protect me, but it never formed. I sobbed, bent in half, not sure I was going to get through the night. How could something hurt so much?

  At some point, deflated of tears, of energy, and of emotion, I stepped out and slowly wrapped a towel around myself, in half an effort. In the bedroom, I put on soft clothes and turned on the overhead light, as well as a lamp, and fell into bed, soaking my pillow with a mop of heavy hair. I turned on the TV for an added layer of protection against the silence of the night. Finally, my exhaustion won and mercifully, I didn’t wake up again until there was full sunlight.

  As I digressed from that memory, I realigned myself to the bright room where I sat. I told Sue that I had no idea what had happened on the stairs, but I had touched the unimaginable. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced, next to losing my mother.

  Sue had remained completely quiet, a dedicated listener, as I navigated my way in and out of my personal war. When it was clear I had nothing more to say on the subject, she spoke. She began using words that could have come out of my own mouth: primitive, animalistic. “You’re amazed that you didn’t die feeling like you did.”

  I nodded in agreement, too tired to talk anymore. I knew I had to dig in to come out, but re-waging a battle I had barely survived the first go-round seemed counterintuitive.

  In my sudden overexposure, an immediate need to have soft things on my skin, to eat warm food, and to be enshrouded in hot water took over. Having none of these things near me, I fought the urge to pick up the cushion full of flowers next to me and put it to my chest.

  As I sat crumpled in front of her, Sue asked me how I felt then, eight months after my mom had died.

  We talked about my breathing issues that I still couldn’t fully decipher, despite the yoga teacher’s point about blockage. Why couldn’t I move on if I knew that Mom was gone and she wasn’t coming back? It had been eight months and I was a big girl, wasn’t I?

  Sue told me that often your brain knows the truth, but your heart can take a while to catch up.

  “I’m supposed to be the strong one,” I said. “Not my younger brother.”

  And I thought, but didn’t voice: I hate feeling so helpless, I hate missing her as much as I do, and I hate that she isn’t here to talk about New York, the Twin Towers coming down, and the beginning of the theater season.

  Carefully, Sue said that I could be dealing with post-traumatic stress or possibly even a mild depression.

  NO. This was an immediate auto siren, and I became very defensive of the latter. I didn’t want to hear that I wa
s depressed. My mom was dead. I was grieving and to me, in my nonlicensed opinion, there was a difference.

  She treaded lightly, noting that some people do well with medication for a short time, to even out everything in the brain that can go haywire under extreme circumstances.

  Sternly, I said no again. I’d rather talk, scream, and cry it out. She understood and didn’t say another word about it. The hour was up in a flash.

  I didn’t like or dislike Sue. The experience was difficult and scary, but good or bad I didn’t know how to assess. I left the room and made another appointment because I thought I was supposed to. I told myself I needed to follow up and push my way through the sludge. I needed to be OK with what had happened. I needed peace.

  On the way out, I made another appointment with the receptionist, who graciously noted that they could help me with the cost, since my insurance didn’t cover mental health. Those two last little words ignited a torrent of internal floggings; I berated myself for not being stronger as I signed a medical billing document.

  I never did go back, nor did I call to cancel the appointment.

  Chapter 17

  Gypsy

  Without any idea of what I was going to do, I picked up work at a restaurant through the summer months and into early fall. I still wasn’t brave enough to return to New York, and I didn’t want to be in Savannah long-term. My thoughts turned to travel.

  I’m project-oriented so I was happy to collect and save money I earned from long hours waiting tables and opening expensive bottles of wine, rather than spending it on after-dinner drinks of my own. I picked up more shifts at the restaurant with the idea of moving abroad.

  My family probably credited this to my semi-gypsy ways, but, also, it was a sort of last homage to my mother, who in the months before her death told me that her only regret was that she never lived in another country and never learned another language. Imagine, out of all life’s lessons, those were her missed opportunities.

  Much like my process before going to Cuba, I inadvertently latched on to the richness of another Latin city—Buenos Aires—through its music and dance, specifically the tango, which I find insanely luring. I rented movies, read articles, and was sold quickly. I booked a ticket for January 2002.