The microwave dings: my lunch is ready. I need a fork, and the one I select is more than 20 years old. I’m smiling at the choice, smiling at myself for allowing a fork to make me happy. I have become someone who cares about silverware.
Sure, there is a certain pleasure in newness, the satisfaction of adulting done right, finally, at age 56. Buying myself household items like sheets that actually fit the mattress I am now sleeping on, or new wool socks, is self care. Adjusting the physical space I inhabit to insist it fit me is new. Sleeping alone is new. But the fork – that’s old. Retrieving my silverware from storage and using it, I reach back across decades to a version of me I had all but forgotten. She wasn’t that special, the woman who bought someone else’s cast off kitchen items. But I’m happy to see her, feel her once again. I’m happy to welcome her back to the fold.
The fork was purchased along with its brothers and sisters when I left my first husband. I was nesting, creating a home for my daughter and myself, and needed everything: silverware, bedding, towels, furniture. I ordered a bed frame and futon online. I remember struggling valiantly to assemble it alone. Each time a side rail fit with the headboard or footboard, the other end would fall out. I was sweating, exhausted, laughing and crying at the impossibility of this task, and setting my jaw in determination: I was going to put that godforsaken thing together if it killed me.
For the past 15 years I have been telling myself that I don’t care about silverware. Remarried, I acquiesced to using the set my new husband owned, my kitchen items relegated to storage. I couldn’t care about silverware once we moved to the yellow house, a crumbling, mouse-infested A-frame with broken windows. The first week we lived there, we discovered the wastewater pipe was disconnected, rotted out. There was no septic system, per se. The toilets simply emptied out into the ground under the house. Thus we began our relationship with the yellow house in a state of emergency, not so much putting out fires as cleaning up shit. We found a muskrat latrine in the basement; a porcupine moved into the soffit. Red squirrels chewed holes in the board and batten siding. I couldn’t care about silverware. Home felt temporary, like I was a squatter. I couldn’t attach or connect; I couldn’t even unpack. It was all too ghastly, too broken and fouled, even then. Three years of living with five dogs in the yellow house proved to be our maximum: we began building the new house, the house we now camp out in – naked sheetrock and exposed insulation, and a never-ending list of projects everywhere we look.
The problem with working on a home while living in it is that you are forever doomed to be making room, clearing away the debris of one to make room for the other, constantly compromising. Because neither is ever in its fullness, both remain in a protracted, seemingly infinite process of getting in each other’s way.
Moving out of one house and into the other house over a period of years is such an odd process, such a strange way to live. Neither here nor there, the old house a tragedy and the new house a mess, best summarized by the unpainted yet already stained-by-dogs sheetrock. Almost everything that was left behind in the yellow house is garbage, but garbage that is testimony to a different life. Ethernet cords and floppy disks. Baskets of yarn now dotted with white walnuts, brought in by the red squirrels that have taken over the second story.
I run rescue missions into the yellow house, seeking physical reminders of past selves – Maya’s childhood books and stuffed animals number among the refugees. I give myself permission to throw away enormous chunks of my life. I allow jettisoning without triage. Overturn the basket directly into the dumpster. No turning back. Whatever was hidden in there with the knitting patterns and that half-finished scarf can go. I can’t allow one shred of sentimentality over lost selves unceremoniously dropped off at the dump. I can’t risk that particular dam breaking.
The commitment was to not move all the way into the new house. “It’s so much harder to finish if it’s full of stuff, right?” Year by year, box by box, all of my possessions that could become vermin-fouled or impregnated with mold and mildew did. I have thrown away almost everything I own.
I bought the silverware along with several sets of bed sheets I don’t remember, towels I disliked, a wicker elephant with a detachable tray top, and a few other household items. It was before Craig’s List, before Facebook. The Pennysaver classified ad was a godsend. I drove to a woman’s home to pick up the stuff. Fifty dollars took everything. She was selling her newly divorced son’s items. I bought his unwanted memories and welcomed them into my newly single life.
I “got sick” in ’04 or ’05. It started with pain that woke me up at 2 a.m. or so, crushing pain in the center of my chest. The pain was severe, easily a 10 out of 10 on the smiley face pain scale taped to the wall of every hospital room I’ve ever been in. It came in waves, each crest radiating to my jaw and down my arms, lasting about 2 minutes. The waves came about 4 or 5 minutes apart, and these episodes – flare ups, I called them – lasted hours. Some nights I didn’t get back to sleep at all. After a barium swallow test, I was told it was acid reflux and prescribed medications.
None of the medications ever stopped the pain. Pain is aversive. Living beings use pain to guide behavior – we make decisions and move purposefully to prevent or avoid pain. If severe pain is random, unpreventable and unavoidable, the result is depression. Lab rats, when unable to learn how to avoid or prevent shocks, shut down. They give up.
For me, giving up and shutting down looked different: I didn’t appear to be sick at all. I hid the pain as much as possible, and hid what I felt was failure – failure to get well, despite proton pump inhibitors and chiropractic adjustments, hopeful and confident doctors, and my own ebb and flow of efforts to figure it out. I hid from my daughter, my colleagues, and my husband. I would slip out of bed when the pain started and pad silently downstairs. I hid in the darkness, in the corner of the couch, sitting up against the arm, my head leaning against the back. I believed I had GERD – the chronic form of acid reflux. I believed being vertical helped, that lying down would make it worse. But being away from everyone, being alone in the dark, being silent and still – these all felt critical. I couldn’t bear the thought of being witnessed.
Sipping ice water didn’t help, but it gave me something to do. At the height of each wave, I would take a tiny sip. Some nights, I went through 32 ounces of water, sip by sip. The next day, no matter what the flare up had been like, the most I would say to explain my face-splitting yawns was “I had a flare up. Tough night.” Some mornings, my husband hadn’t noticed my absence.
Being in pain like that made me twitchy. Lack of sleep made me nasty, fragile, and irrational. I survived by becoming self-absorbed and deeply superstitious. If something was correlated with the pain once, it became etched in stone as toxic, a terrifying threat to be avoided. If something was correlated with the cessation of pain even once, it became a cure. It may never help again, the correlation pure coincidence, but the magical thinking that connected the two held fast. Soft chew Tums and cold water were my talismans. The rituals and superstitions bolstered the illusory sense of control. They were all lies, and I knew it, but I continued to search for the one sign, the one superstition that was not a lie, that held real power, that would make a difference.
Eventually it was not superstitions or magical thinking that helped me. It was science. It was doctors. I still struggle with disbelief. I keep screenshots of the surgical report on my phone, and look at these words every few months, to confirm: yes, that’s me. That happened. I still ask myself “do I really have this rare disease? How did this happen? Why did this happen? Why me? What does it mean?” That’s the crux of it right there. I want my suffering to have meaning, but I know it doesn’t. Underneath it all, I know that there is no meaning. It just happened and there’s nothing to be done, but to move on, to get over it, and to live life now, this way, with this set of challenges instead of some other set of challenges I would have had if it wasn’t achalasia.
The party line in psychotherapy is that current losses disturb the earth where all past losses are buried. We feel our current situation in a body that has survived an accumulation of prior losses. We also experience fresh trauma in the here and now, with tentacles reaching back to prior trauma. Prior losses, prior traumas pile up like driftwood, dead fish, and seaweed at the tide line, and it seems all too often we don’t credit ourselves for prior survivals. We feel more tired than triumphant.
On June 1, 2020, one of my dogs killed another of my dogs. More accurately, there was a fight among the pack members on our morning hike. The pack shot down a hill after a chipmunk and then turned on my elderly female. Redirected prey drive: she died as a result of those injuries. Up until that moment, I was so thickly entwined – merged even – with my dogs, my entire identity was bound up in being adept at all things dog. My writing was all dog-focused. My social media presence was completely dominated by the pack. All my friends were dog friends. I had gone so far as to incorporate dog care into the building of the new house, insisting that the very design and construction of the downstairs accommodate a multi-dog life. And in a heartbeat, I lost all of that. I felt unveiled as the fraud I had always feared I was -- an imposter. The thing that had been so central was in a moment transformed into something completely toxic. Cinder’s death, I believe, was avoidable. It was my fault. I should have been there; I should have stopped the fight. Indeed, my very presence may have prevented it.
My illness progressed. In addition to the pain (I learned those “flare ups” were esophageal spasms) my esophagus became paralyzed. I couldn’t swallow, literally and figuratively. I didn’t get over that fight and losing Cinder. I still haven’t. One does not get over such a thing; we learn to endure it.
Somehow, inexplicably, we go on. Hawk killed Cinder. And that night I made dinner. I continued on; I lived my life. I struggled through years of not being able to swallow, and did the laundry, kept dentist appointments, dumped the compost and rinsed the bucket. We just muddle through, surviving. Enduring. The accumulated losses of multiple selves, identities created and then ripped from my very bones by illness, tragedy and trauma, and by bad luck are strewn about in my unwritten memoir. By the time I was rescuing forks from oblivion, I was shipwrecked and the joy of recovering this shiny bit of metal, now safely ensconced in my silverware drawer, is no small miracle.
These old items, and the memories of old selves – selves that existed before the wars, so to speak…. This process is not simply nostalgia. It’s rescue and reclamation. It’s archeology, excavation. It’s shards that remain of selves that bear no resemblance, no common ground with the self that now uses the pronoun “I.” I don’t know if these retrieved selves will stay, if they’ll be reintegrated, or if they are just here for a brief visit to tell me I’m doing ok. I pretend that they are telling me that despite feeling like it’s stalled, this journey I am on is moving, imperceptibly perhaps, in the right direction.
I have survived much of late. Illness, losing Cinder, in all too rapid succession losing three more of my dogs, and my husband’s diagnosis of rectal cancer all chip away at selves I thought I could rely upon. Notions of who I am are under attack, it feels, from all sides. I feel my mother’s eyes reading this page and want to immediately erase everything I’ve owned, saying “but it was also fine. There are also good times. I was also a happy child. My life is really good.” This is echoed in my relationship with my husband -- whenever I speak my emotional truth, he counters with “but look at everything I did right.” I do, and then I feel shame. How could I indict them – any of “them” with my truth? For shame.
I thought I wanted or needed to write about the original wounds. I thought I had to go all the way back to the beginning, to the losses of childhood, to trot out the litany I’ve repeated so many times: “my father died. I was raped. More than once.” I thought I needed to write that story, that these ancient wounds were the ones that needed airing. But I’m finding that I’m wrong, or at least that it’s not that simple. Telling the story of my illness may be telling the story of the rape in a symbolic way – the paralysis and the loss of safety. My body became an unsafe place to live. I’m less curious about the eleven year old who shut down and hid inside her dissociated silence while an adult man did things to her than I am about adult me, the woman who lived through everything all at once – loss, pain, love, beauty, trauma, and fear. I feel warmth and sadness for the eleven year old and the fourteen year old and every other moment of me that was pierced in some way or another by the unfairnesses of life, especially the life a girl child without a father is at risk of facing. But the story that bubbles up in my chest, seeking an exit through my funky, surgically altered throat, is not her story – not any of her stories. It’s my story, present tense.
The strange truth of it is that surgery healed my body enough that I can reclaim a physical self that functions. In the months since that surgery I have been reveling in this physicality, running, rowing, weights, yoga. But I can see now from a relationship point of view, from the perspective I try to adopt by looking through my husband’s eyes, it must be mystifying that now I am better, I am so much worse. Now I am no longer paralyzed or in pain, I am gone from him in a way that he could not have predicted. He must have thought my getting better would fix us, but getting better has just given me the ability to see us. The lens I look through has been ground by my experience of illness and loss, the terror of pain that did not feel survivable, the professional intimacies of medical treatment, and the profound losses I racked up along the way. And compassion for a woman who hid and isolated, who hardened to the point of brittleness. I am softer with her now.
I drove past the rail trail parking area, then hit the brakes. I backed up on County Route 18, whipping my head side to side to see who, if anyone, was witnessing this risky and impulsive move. I run on the rail trail regularly but never starting from this access point. Today is a day for trying new things. I had just come from a coffeehouse up the road; I brought my laptop and faked it like I was a Writer, working in a coffeehouse. Writing. The barista gave me my latte for free because he had run out of cow milk and offered to make it with oat milk. I gave him a huge tip.
I’m running. My calf hurts. I think I pulled a muscle. I stop, walk a few steps, then change my mind and decide to try running through it. Why do I deem this pain acceptable? Why do I seek out and embrace pain? Why do I believe pain is part of healing? But I do. I lean into it. I know how deeply I am pierced by painful emotions and yet I keep diving deeper. With a nod to Adrienne Rich and her beautiful poem, Diving Into The Wreck, I am indeed bringing up relics, and not only from the bowels of the yellow house. I scavenge flotsam and jetsam, treasures and junk, from every past self that is willing to be laid bare.
A few more steps and my calf starts to feel better. Better enough to run a few miles, it just feels dully tight and uncomfortable – under a 5 on that pain scale I mentioned. This section of trail, totally unfamiliar, is becoming my new favorite with each step. The trees on the hillsides flanking the trail are ablaze; peak foliage is here. Alongside the trail they are pleached, creating a pointillist tunnel of green, yellow, and red. I run in awe, ignoring my calf. The pain of loving the beauty that surrounds me is bigger, deeper, richer. I manage to stay this side of weeping – running helps with that. But the beauty is arresting. It kicks me in the chest. It tells me that my shame, my invisibility, my efforts, my love, my trauma, my illness, my hiding, my story are all nothing. The only thing that is real is this moment, these colors, and the man riding his bicycle, coming up behind me with a tinkling bell.
I don’t know what will happen next. I am not at the end of the chapter; forget about the end of the story. I am falling; we all are. Of that I am certain. We are falling at 32 feet per second squared, whether we feel the rush of the wind screaming past us or not. I believe there are two possible outcomes. One is that the end will come much like getting bucked off a horse: the ground rushes up most rudely and brokenness is all but guaranteed.
Option two – a circus net (not entirely unlike a slingshot) catches and tosses me back up, with the chance to right myself, however briefly, and regain my feet.
Heather Rolland is a writer, hiker, amateur wildlife photographer, who was diagnosed with a rare chronic illness. She lives, hikes, writes and stalks coyotes in the western Catskills region of upstate NY.
