Madness and Method, Part 2

Passages
by Gail Sheehy

(Page 2 of 3)

If I tell you about the week, six months later, if I report the observable facts — while dashing out the door to catch a plane to Florida to cover the Democratic National Convention, a healthy, divorced career mother finds one of her pet lovebirds dead and bursts into uncontrollable tears — you might say, "This woman was cracking up." Which is precisely what I began to think.

I took the aisle seat in the tail of the plane so that when we crashed, I would be the last one to see the ground.

Flying had always been a joy to me. Plucky one that I was at 30, I had taken to parachuting out of bush planes for sport. It was different now. Whenever I went near a plane I saw a balcony in Northern Ireland. In six months the fear of airplanes had blossomed into a phobia. Every news photo of a crash drew my attention. I would study the pictures in morbid detail. The planes seemed to split at the front; I made it a rule to sit in the tail. From the safety of the entrance canopy I would call in to the pilot, "Have you had experience with instrument landings?" By now I had no shame.

I did have one comfort. The upsets of the first half of my 35th year were vaguely classifiable. I could attach the anxiety to real events. My flight phobia fell under the convenient umbrella of conversion reactions (the process by which a repressed psychic event is converted into another symptom). The sense of uprooted- ness could be explained by the fact that I'd had four different addresses in the previous two years. All my life-support systems were in flux.

By that July, however, I had put on the brakes. Things appeared to have quieted down. On the contrary, very little was going on near the surface, but no less than everything was shifting below it.

An outburst of weeping over a dead lovebird was the signal. What was wrong with me that I couldn't even keep a lovebird alive? Somehow, I connected this loss to the unexpected departure of my housekeeper. Could I ever replace her? If I couldn't, my own work would have to cease. How would my daughter and I survive?

For the moment Maura was safely installed with her father. Despite our divorce, or perhaps as a result of it, we had the kind of long-running love that transcends pettiness because it is built on a shared conviction. Even in the raggedness of pulling apart, we had agreed that we would know each other forever as the mother and father of a child. Together we had made this contract; it was unalterable; it superseded all others. And so we had come to enjoy the special qualities of respect and friendship that grow out of putting another's well-being first. There was nothing out of the ordinary in Maura's spending a week with her father, but I missed her severely. The power to discriminate between a temporary sepa- ration and an absolute ending had abruptly left me. A dark thought took its place: Whatever it was that had ruptured inside me had released a sinister force that threatened to destroy my whole jerry-built world.

On the flight to Miami, no sooner had I single-mindedly willed the 727 to clear Flushing Bay than the intruder was back, rummaging around in my psyche and sniffing at the value of my resources: You've done some good work, but what does it really add up to?

Too nervous to eat, what I didn't know was that a combat between two opposing medications had begun in my abdominal zone. One had been prescribed for a lingering intestinal flu; the other, by a different doctor, after the Ireland trauma. Onto the angrily separating oils and waters of that digestive system, I threw cognac and champagne.

Once inside the hotel room, to be mindlessly mechanical seemed the best idea. Fill the closets. Clear a work space. Set up, as they say, a new "home base." Open the suitcase. But right there, opening my suitcase: paralysis. I had thrown in on top of a white skirt a new pair of red leather sandals. They had bled into the skirt with a blazing stain. I shrieked. Suddenly I couldn't coerce myself into making schedules, taking phone messages, meeting deadlines. Which story was I writing for whom anyway? Unknown to me, the clash of medications had begun to register. The dizziness, the gouging stomach cramps. My heart lurched into manic rhythms and began leaping around inside my chest like a frog in a jar.

The room was on the twenty-first floor. Walls of glass opened onto a balcony. The balcony hung recklessly over Biscayne Bay. Beneath it was water, nothing but liquid. There was an eclipse that night.

I was drawn out onto the balcony. With morbid fascination I monitored the eclipse. Even the planet was suspended in an un- stable condition between intervening forces of the universe. I watched the heat lightning spark off the towers of Miami Beach. The impulse was to let go, float with it. Parts of myself buried alive with an unreconciled parent, severed husband, misplaced friends and loves, even my unexplored ancestors, broke the surface and heaped on me in a mass of fractured visions, all mixed up with the bloody head of the boy in Ireland. I sat through the night on that balcony in Miami, trying to get a fix on the moon.

The next morning I called both doctors who had given me pills. I wanted a nice, neat medical explanation that would make sense of this free-floating fear. Once I had the diagnosis, I could lie down and make it all go away. They confirmed that the two drugs (one a barbiturate and the other a mood elevator) were colliding in a violent chemical reaction. I should stay in bed for a day. Keep stimulation to a minimum. Rest. Yes. But the medical diagnosis did not make it go away because "it" was much bigger than a day's illness.

Then I tried an old technique. I would write the demon out of me. Writing had always served as a way of understanding what I was living. For what seemed like no appropriate reason, I had brought along notes for a short story. In fact, I felt almost compelled to write this particular story while I was in Miami. It was taken from an incident described to me by an intern ten years before. These were the notes:

An exceptionally alert and active woman of 60 had lived a long and comfortable married existence in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her husband died. She found herself, overnight, without the funds to carry on. She had no choice but to leave her home and all her friends of forty years. The only relative who could take her in was a disagreeable sister-in-law down South. Despite this abrupt and total dislocation, the widow went gracefully about closing up her New York life. At dinner the night before she was to leave, her minister and friends praised her remarkable strength of character. The next morning they came by to drive the widow to the airport; no one answered the door. They broke in and found her sprawled on the bathroom floor in her underclothes. No bump, no bruise explained it as a slip. She was simply unconscious.

Baffled, her friends drove the widow to a hospital. The intern found nothing on preliminary examination. The widow, by now conscious, had to be set to one side of the busy emergency room. Her freshly coiffed hair became disheveled. Her eyes grew vacant. She let the johnny coat fall open. Her friends sat patiently, waiting for those with knife wounds to be cauterized; but confronted with life in the raw they were wholly out of place. They were nice silk-print-dress people, as was the widow — before this. Now she began to alter even beyond the recognition of her friends. She fumbled over simple questions, confused names and dates, and eventually lost her orientation altogether. Her minister and friends retreated in polite horror. Within a matter of hours she had disintegrated into a babbling old woman.

I couldn't write a word of the story.

Watching television was about all I could do. At midnight I snapped off the TV. For what happened next there is a simple mechanical explanation, but at the time, the steadying handle of cause and effect was beyond my reach.

I passed in front of the TV and bent over to pick up a metal belt. A hissing sound escaped from the set. With head over toes I looked back, and saw an apparition. A jellyfish of fiendish hues was spreading across the screen, eely blues and poisonous greens, stinging hairs of sulphuric yellow — stop! I bolted upright, reeling, and felt an explosion go off inside my head.

"That's it," I said aloud, "I've come unstuck."

The phone was in the other bedroom, beyond the window wall with its balcony hung over the water. The sliding doors were open. Wind sucked at the curtains, teasing them out over the bay. Suddenly, I was terrified to walk past that window wall. If I so much as went near that balcony, I would lose my balance, go over the edge. I crouched down. Crablike, clutching at the feet of furniture for handgrips, I edged across that gaping room. I tried to tell myself this was ridiculous. But when I stood, the simple fact was that my limbs collapsed. The thought persisted: If only I can reach the right person, this nightmare will go away. I was hanging on to shreds and I knew it.

Ireland could be explained simply: Real bullets had threatened my life from the outside. It was an observable event. My fears were appropriate. Now the destructive force was inside me. I was my own event. I could not escape it. Something alien, horrible, unspeakable but undeniable, had begun to inhabit me. My own death.

Copyright © 2006 by Gail Sheehy. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

www.gailsheehy.com
Bestselling author and cultural observer Gail Sheehy made history with the publication of Passages, which was an international bestseller, appearing in twenty-eight languages. She followed up with The Silent Passage, New Passages, and Understanding Men's Passages. Sheehy is also the author of Hillary's Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, and Middletown, America, about a New Jersey town devastated by the World Trade Center attack. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, Sheehy is the recipient of the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America.