THE NEXT MORNING, lying awake in my new, greige bedroom, I noticed something on the table by the door. My birthday present from Ian. He’d left it, anyway.
It made me angry to see it. Hadn’t I told him not to do that? Didn’t I get any say in anything?
I resolved to throw it away in the kitchen trash.
I should probably have gotten up and gotten dressed. But I didn’t. I found myself thinking about Kit’s comforting thought. Kit’s expert said to give it a year. Would I be back to normal in a year? It seemed utterly impossible.
But then I had a comforting thought of my own.
I’ll give it a year, I thought, and if I don’t feel any better, I’ll kill myself.
It perked me up quite a bit.
All I had to do for one year was make it through the day. I’d ask my mother to get me a big wall calendar, and then, at the end of every day I successfully suffered through, I’d mark a big X. Things would get better, Kit’s mathematician had promised. Great. I hoped so.
But if he was wrong, I had a plan B.
One bit of good news: It was not as hard to move back home as I’d feared.
Though my dad did not come home.
The “little time” he was taking turned into a lot of time.
My parents talked on the phone some, going through the details, my dad trying to get a handle on the story. Sometimes my mother cried and begged, which was disturbing because my mother never cried. Or begged.
But he didn’t come home.
In fact, within the month, he called to tell her he was going to take a trip for a “personal project.” He was going to donate his woodworking and construction skills to a help restore a historic whaling ship in a museum in Connecticut. He’d rented a little house up there, and he wasn’t sure when he’d be back. If.
“Your father is moving to Mystic, Connecticut,” my mother told me, before bursting into tears. “He’s going to volunteer as a woodworker.”
I had never seen my mother fall to pieces in the way she did in the weeks after my father left town. Her jobs died on the vine. She just didn’t show up. She wandered the house crying, or staring into space. She’d forget to eat. Or she’d make a meal and then sit staring at it until it was cold. I’d find her sitting in my father’s favorite chair, staring at the rug or rubbing at the chocolate stain he’d smeared on the arm.
“I snapped at him about this once,” she said quietly, when she noticed me watching her. “I waited to reupholster that chair for years, and we hadn’t had it back a week before he melted chocolate on the arm.”
She didn’t seem so mad about it now.
As bad as this time was, it was good, too. It let me see her differently. It let me see her story in a much wider context. It let me feel, for the first time ever, almost protective toward her. She had always been so strong, so in control, until now. I’d only ever seen her as invulnerable—but now she was the opposite.
There was another bonus to this time, too: Worrying about her gave me something to worry about other than myself.
I took to emailing my dad every few days, just “checking in” casually, trying to ascertain when, if ever, he planned to come back. I also called Kit with updates on the home front and—because she went out to visit him a couple of times in Mystic—gathered intel on his state of mind.
They never officially separated. My dad was just “taking time.” Kitty promised us he wasn’t dating anyone. And, she said, he didn’t seem particularly out of sorts, either. Just eating way too much canned soup.
My time with my mom turned out to be a surprise. Something shifted in her after my dad left. At lunch, back in in the hospital, she had barraged me with advice and opinions and half-baked inspirational stories. She’d pushed me the way she’d always pushed me. She’d been relentless, and critical, and judgmental.
But now that the window had closed, and she’d accepted that, she’d become much calmer. If there was nothing I could do, then she didn’t have to make me do it. She could relax and give us all a break. Of course, it turns out that the window never truly closes. I found a bunch of articles saying there’s always potential for neurological plasticity, long after that initial healing period.
But my mom didn’t know that. And I sure as hell wasn’t telling her.
Adjusting the curve for how crushingly depressed we both were, life with my mother was surprisingly pleasant.
Once she’d recovered enough to get back to work, she reduced her workload by half. She made sure to be home for lunch, when she made us sandwiches and smoothies. In theory, I was responsible for dinner—but lots of nights we wound up getting takeout from the Italian place down the road. After dinner, almost every night, we worked puzzles and sipped wine, and half-listened to the news.
We were both miserable, and grateful for the company.
Of course, everything I might have expected to be hard was, in fact, hard.
It was hard to be back in that house as a broken version of myself. It was hard to compare the past to the present at every turn. It was hard to see my old clothes, shoes, keepsakes, photo albums, Rollerblades—not to mention a shelf of diaries filled with all my old assumptions about how my life would turn out. It was hard to glimpse ghostly memories at every turn of what it was like to run and skip and hopscotch and bicycle and shoot hoops. I even missed utterly ordinary things, like walking out the front door, or leaning on the kitchen counter, or standing in the shower. It was hard not to regret everything I’d lost. The abilities I’d taken for granted. The time I’d wasted.
I am not going to lie. Everything that happened in the hospital before I moved home? That was the easy part.
My situation didn’t truly feel real until I was out of the hospital.
Without Kit, and Priya, and Nina—and, okay, fine, even Ian—it was like I didn’t have anyone to keep me from sinking.
So I sank.
I went through a long, deep period of grief that involved bitterness, anger, mourning, judgment, rage, self-pity, fear, longing, and loneliness—usually more than one in combination, and often all together—as well as nightmares, insomnia, fits of temper, anxiety attacks, and dish throwing. In fact, after accidentally dropping (and smashing) one of my mom’s favorite saucers, I got so enraged that I hauled a whole stack out into the backyard and smashed about ten more on the driveway.
Then I cried in the backyard until my mom came home and found me.
She should have yelled at me. But guess what she did instead?
She marched back into the kitchen and brought out her own stack of dishes to smash.
That weekend, she made a trip to Goodwill and brought back crates of unwanted dishes that we could smash at will. We didn’t even clean them up afterward. Just left the shattered colors all over the driveway like a great mosaic homage to crazy-town.
“It’s pretty, actually,” my mom said one day.
In a way, it was.
Years before, I’d seen a video taken by a security camera that went viral on the Internet of some kids playing on a beach where they weren’t supposed to be. The tide came roaring in, and the three of them got pulled into the waves. The beach was long and flat. Watching it, you just rooted for them to stand up, get balanced, and run back up to higher shore. But the tide was so strong, they couldn’t get their footing. They just washed out to sea and then back in, over and over. They started to stand and then tumbled backward, lifted their heads for a good breath and got pummeled by a giant wave, tried to outrun the waves and were overtaken. You thought, “Those kids are going to drown five feet from dry land.” In fact, even though you knew they weren’t going to drown—because the title of the video was “Miracle of Survival”—you felt certain they were going to drown anyway.
That was me, during those early months after leaving the hospital. I was all three of those kids at the same time. A miracle of survival—but drowning anyway, all the same.