All the Things We Never Knew (34 page)

The rest of the questions came effortlessly, fluidly. I peppered him for a full thirty minutes with no notes or prompting. At the end, he calmly took his headphones off and said, “Thank you. You're very good at what you do.”

I swallowed. The avocado pit was gone. I'd been tortured by my own thought process, my own guilt, my own belief that David's death proved nothing and meant nothing. But thirty minutes with Chopra had liberated me, at least temporarily. He'd at least offered a different way of reacting to the pain.

I looked Chopra in the eyes, and the boredom was gone, replaced by something so soft and beautiful my heart fluttered. “Thank you,” I said. “This was so helpful to me.”

Chopra rose, straightened his gold jacket, and extended his hand. “Good.”

Inessa led him to the exit. He shook a few hands on the way out of the office. The last thing I saw were those red tennis shoes rounding the corner, swooshing off to his next interview. Nike, the goddess of victory. I smiled to myself, a radiance that must have seemed oddly timed to the rest of the world.

 

HEALING FROM TRAUMA

Dr. Bruce Perry is one of America's foremost experts on trauma. Perry has treated children faced with unimaginable horror: genocide survivors, witnesses to their own parents' murders, children raised in closets and cages. His work has revolutionized the methods used to ease the pain of traumatized children, allowing them to become healthy adults.

In his book
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog,
Perry says,
“About 40 percent of American children will have at least one potentially traumatizing experience by age eighteen. This includes the death of a parent or sibling, ongoing physical abuse and or/neglect, sexual abuse, or the experience of a serious accident, natural disaster, or domestic violence.”

In 1996, Perry founded the Child Trauma Academy, an interdisciplinary group of professionals committed to bringing treatments to traumatized children. Perry and his team are reporting phenomenal success with somatosensory activities such as yoga, meditation, deep breathing, singing, dancing, and drumming. The repetitive, rhythmic nature of these activities soothes a traumatized brain and sets the stage for healing.

Perry uses the neurosequential model of therapeutics (NMT), which includes making a developmental map of his patients' brains. Trauma healing, according to Perry, requires the patient to feel safe, and the activity must be developmentally matched to the individual. A nine-year-old girl whose father has just committed suicide is not a candidate for biofeedback therapy, but she will gravitate to the calm and repetitive nature of music. The rhythmic component of music allows the child's brain to decompress and begin to relax. After David's death, Sophie resisted traditional counseling and psychiatric intervention, but she turned her attention to music and songwriting, a creative outlet that allowed her to self-soothe in a way that is very similar to NMT.

There are few practices that engage our hearts and spirits
as successfully as listening to music. Perry's work as a clinician and researcher at the Child Trauma Academy has led many governmental agencies to consult him. He provided psychiatric care to traumatized children following the Columbine school shootings (1999), the September 11 terror attacks (2001), Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I waited for a sign, any sign that David's soul had moved on. After Chopra's visit, I read everything I could get my hands on about mindfulness and the afterlife. I thought the teachings might allow me to intercept any messages David might send.

It didn't happen. David didn't make as much as a cameo in my dreams. I didn't feel his presence behind me when I was scrubbing the kitchen counters the wrong way. I never got the sense that he was looking after us or intervening to keep us from harm. Once, I purposely ran a yellow light to see if his spirit might stop me. The light flashed red as I barreled through the intersection, untouched by angels.

One night, as I tucked Sophie into bed, I asked her, “Do you ever feel Daddy's presence, like he might be in your room?”

She looked at me, confused, her green eyes completely engaged in the question. “You mean, like a memory?”

“Yes, like that,” I lied, wishing she'd felt or witnessed something miraculous, something that might make me believe David's spirit would be there to always watch over her.

“Sweetheart,” I said tenderly, “how would you feel about visiting the Dougy Center?” I'd told Sophie about the center soon after David's death. It's an extraordinary program for grieving children.

Sophie lowered her chin, defiantly. “Seems like you want to go there more than I do, Mom.”

She was right. Sophie was coping much better than I was. The grief counselor had told me to be prepared for this. Kids often don't want to process their loss until years, sometimes decades, later. But bedtime was always hardest for Sophie, the time of day when her defenses dropped to their low point and fatigue gave way to emotion. I put her to bed the same way every night, lying down beside her, with my arm around her waist, talking about the day's events.

“So what was the high point of your day?” I asked, trying to find space for myself on her new full-size bed. Colin had helped move out her old mattress and box set after she complained she needed a grown-up room. We painted the room a shade of red that Sophie loved and drove three hours to Seattle to buy an Ikea bed with a ladder. Her desk and files and computer fit below, along with a hangout space for her and friends. The only weird part was when I awkwardly climbed the ladder at night to tuck her in.

“I dunno,” she said softly, her shoulders turned away from me. She hugged Bear tightly, his ears ragged and worn, the fur on his belly missing entirely.

“Are you doing okay?” Her tone worried me. The nightlight in her room illuminated the side of her face. The ceiling glowed with a warm white light. We'd stuck what seemed like a thousand fluorescent stars up there when we first moved in, Sophie handing me the tiny plastic shapes one by one and pointing at the place “in her sky” they should go. It was the one thing in her “little kid room” she didn't want to let go of, the comfort of those stars, and her Bear.

“It's not the same,” she said, curling in tighter to herself.

“I know.”

I breathed steady and deep, ready to listen, conscious of the importance of hearing, not judging or trying to make it better. As my therapist had said, “It's as much as you may get from her for now. Take what you can get.”

I lifted her T-shirt to scratch her back, something she'd loved since she was a toddler. “Get the chicken bones,” she'd usually say, “yeah, that's good, right there!” But this time, instead of oohs and aahs, she whimpered, and the whimpers turned into a sob.

“I miss him,” she said. “I miss Daddy.”

“I know, baby, I know,” I whispered. “I'm sorry you are hurting.”

“He never even said goodbye!” she said louder, her sobs turning into wailing, a sound that echoed up to the fluorescent stars and back again, ringing in my ears. I tried to remember a time I cried like that as a child, and couldn't. I had forced my sadness or isolation inside, sobbing silently into a pillow at night. Growing up, there was not much space for my emotion in a household as fragile as ours. I remembered developing the keen sense of gauging everyone else's moods to avoid causing more trouble. It was a coping mechanism I had carried through to my marriage, getting out of the way instead of confronting problems head on. My contributions to our family's failures were never far from my mind.

“Sweetheart, you have been through so much,” I said.

She sat up in bed, suddenly struck by a thought that stopped the crying. The tears spotted her cheeks, and her nose needed to be wiped. I didn't move to get a tissue. I wanted desperately to hear her out, to not interrupt this moment. I sat up with her.

“I can't remember him, Mommy. I can't remember for sure what he looked like. I know what he looked like in the pictures and everything, but I'm worried I will forget him.” The thought terrified her—her chest rose and fell quickly, and she squeezed Bear until I thought his worn head might pop from his body.

“Baby. You will always have Daddy in your heart. You will have the memories of him making you breakfast, and making you a fire, and reading to you. Remember how many books Daddy could read in a week?”

She nodded.

“Those memories are yours to keep forever. They won't ever go away.”

She turned her chin down. “But what about Colin?”

I braced myself for something painful. “What about him?”

“I'm worried he will replace Daddy.” The gravity of her insight hit me like a fist. My body recoiled, a sudden shock moving through my spine and neck, until I had to force myself to stay sitting up.

I spoke slowly. “Sophie, Colin is a good man.”

She nodded.

“But, you have a daddy. David. You have his cheekbones, and his lips, and his long legs, and David will always be your dad, forever.” I held her hand, sweaty and soft, in mine. “I don't want you to replace Daddy—ever. Colin wouldn't want that either. But your heart is big enough to love again, honey. You'll see. It's like you'll have a huge place for Daddy in your heart. And then, maybe you'll grow more room for Colin. Or not. You always get to decide who you want to love and how much. Nobody decides that for you. But when you do fall in love, and you will, you'll grow more room in your heart for your husband and your kids. It never stops—our capacity for love is limitless.”

“Like infinity?” Sophie said.

“Just like that.” I curled up next to her, lost in my thoughts. I had ignored the truth of David's illness so that Sophie could live with her father. Now, he was gone. I felt the burden of my illogical thinking every time I held Sophie.

“Hold my back, Mama,” she whispered.

I spooned into her, breathing in her smell. Her hiccupping breathing pattern quieted after a while, into an even flow of air, in and out, in and out.

The most visible sign of David's death was the toll it had taken on me. After months of watching his mental health decline—months when I operated under maximum stress, doing everything at hyperspeed—my body felt poisoned and sluggish. David's death had started my own body's deterioration: for the first time, the skin on my arms and
legs was so dry it itched at night, I had dark rings under my eyes, and my hair was thinning.

I ignored my condition until one day at work, in the middle of chatting on the air with my cohost, I couldn't find the word I needed. The topic was the stock market: “Negative territory, again,” I said. “The . . .” My mouth was open, the word “Dow” was on the tip of my tongue, and uh, uh, uh, nothing. It was gone,
whoosh.

My cohost looked at me, horrified, and then quickly filled in the blanks. “The stock market has left Sheila speechless,” he quipped, before breaking for a commercial.

“What happened?” he asked, pulling the headphones from his ears.

I shook my head, dumbfounded. My career had been built on having the right word at the right time. I knew I needed help.

C. S. Lewis wrote about his wife's death from cancer in the book
A Grief Observed
: “Grief is like a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

The acupuncturist squinted while she looked at my tongue, then
mmmed
and
aahed
while I described the mysterious symptom that had plagued me. She reached into a cupboard and pulled out more than two dozen sterilized needles. Expertly, with little more than a flick of her wrist, she placed needles in my wrists, near my elbows, in my earlobes, stomach, and legs, and all along the inside of my ankles. When she finished, she told me calmly, “Rest, relax. This is going to take a while.”

I don't have a while,
I thought, my mind racing like a tiger in a cage.
I'll be late for work.

I'd been happy when she said she'd fit me in the schedule, even though I hadn't been in for regular visits in more than a year. Calming woodwind music played in the background. The sheets were pure white and clean smelling. But something still felt wrong. For one thing, it was too hot. The acupuncturist had politely cracked the window when I mentioned it.