Neither of my friends Ana and Jim,survived in the end, although they both lived a long time trying.On Valentine’s Day, 1991, Ana put a plastic bag over her head, lay down on her bed, and suffocated. She was 39. In the winter of 1992, Jim put a gun to his temple and blew a hole in his brain. He was 59.
Technically, they aren’t “survivors,” but how long does one have to struggle on to qualify as having survived? Does thirty years count? Forty? Is it only how we die that matters, only at that last moment that any of us can be said to have made it, to have “survived”?
Consumed by overwhelming flashbacks, Ana often lost all sense of her real-time life and the present-day people in it. She wandered into heavy traffic, bought sleeping pills with the idea of overdosing, and was repeatedly hospitalized.
Jim used to drive wildly, fantasizing about having an accident. He smoked, took drugs, and worked in an OSHA-violating machine shop where he was constantly injured.
As a young man, Jim had lost a wife and baby daughter to heavy drinking. He let his anger out by abusing those he cared for and starting fights until he bottomed out on the street, living only to drink. He later described himself as a hard, nasty man--a racist and a bigot. That is a story we have all heard too many times. What was different about Jim was that after two years on the street, he woke up one day and said, “I have got to change. I have got to find a way to live.”
Jim checked himself into VA detox, then got a job and an apartment. He saved money and saw a therapist. By the time I knew him ten years later, Jim was a model of gentleness and compassion. Absolutely trustworthy, he felt other peoples' pain as deeply as his own. He took in psychotic cats and offered support to injured women without the slightest hint of wanting anything in return.
When Ana’s demons first took her life, she was on the way to success. She had a good marriage, her Ph.D. in a hard, physical science was almost completed, and she had the respect of her peers. Then the long-buried memories of childhood abuse burst out.
Ana was institutionalized for schizophrenia. What else could explain a woman screaming, muttering to herself as she stomped down the street, or breaking into churches? But an amazing psychiatrist asked Ana to describe her hallucinations and realized they were actually flashbacks. The easiest memory came out at that time. It was of her father's one-time sexual attack.
Unfortunately, the first was not the last. Over the years, new triggers brought up new memories, each more awful than the ones that went before, but despite the times her past rose up to drown her, Ana finished her degree. She landed a hot, government, research position in a tight job market where most science Ph.D.s went unemployed or underemployed for years, published often, and traveled the international, academic circuit arguing for her ideas.
Jim worked as a machinist, but he dreamed of being an artist. At the Toledo Museum's art school, he studied drawing, painting and metal sculpture. He exchanged care of the metal shop for studio hours, and when students needed help they came to him first. He was never too busy, and unlike so many art professors, never needed to bolster his ego by putting students down. He was as kind and humble with students as he was with injured women and cats.
Finally, Jim felt secure enough in his new self to take the big risk. He quit his job and spent his life savings to be a full-time artist. Jim had taught himself to blow glass. Because he had no money, he traded his help for glass colors and scrounged color scraps that richer students threw away. With only bits of any one color, his glass pieces were streaked with swirling rainbows.
Jim had picked himself up from the gutter and changed his life--something few can do. He grew into the fully feeling, creative person he was born to be. But his demons--born in childhood beatings and a mother's insistent, sexual abuse--never slept. Like Holland with its dikes against the sea, his life needed to be constantly defended against their attacks.
After a year, his money was gone. Jim had gotten paid work on some local civic sculptures--welding parts or fixing patinas--but didn't make much. He had to return to the machine shop. It was the beginning of the end.
Jim abandoned therapy, hid from friends, and sank beneath the numbing waters of drugs and drinking. Then one dark dull winter night, he shot himself . He was so isolated by that time that his body lay for five days in his apartment before anyone noticed.
What is it that lets one person out of thousands find the will to change? What greater achievement could there be than to rise up out of your inner hell and the literal gutter, give up the numbing blanket of drugs, and grow into yourself despite the hurt that consciousness brings? What could be more admirable, whatever the final outcome?
At times Ana faced her past. She let herself remember pain that had been so intense her soul vacated her little girl's body tied to a bedpost, floating up to watch from far away. She let herself feel the betrayal inherent in parents' and grandparents’ abuse, a betrayal that hurt worse than the most terrible physical pain.
At other times Ana refused to deal with her past, angrily shoving those memories away. She WOULD NOT let them devour her creative energy or her ability to love. Yet this was a failing proposition. Left to act out of her unhealed trauma, there were days when she could not enter a room of men, although she worked in a science where almost everyone was a man.
Ana's rigidly rational male-scientist co-workers had nothing but contempt for extended medical leaves and intermittent phobic outbreaks. Of course, they never knew what the problem was. It was enough that she lacked their prized, competitive edge. Besides, her lack was their gain. In the spirit of laissez-fare, zero-sum, scientific competition, others gleefully built their reputations by trashing hers.
Still, between one psychotic break and another were long stretches of calm. Then Ana read widely, cultivated interesting friendships, and spent weekends leading school children through science adventures. She explored Zen, took snapshots of everyone and everything, and loved to walk in a local beaver marsh.
The last calm before her death had lasted several years. Her husband began to hope that, maybe, the worse was over. It wasn’t. When her past re-asserted itself, it demanded her whole attention. She was mentally lost for weeks.
Ana came to herself in a psych ward. There she finally faced the truth: no mental walls are thick enough to block the past. She would not be free until she faced it, all of it. Only if she worked through her childhood trauma could she truly heal.
For many years, Ana had found ways to live injured while healing only lesser hurts. Finally, she committed to the last dangerous trial. It might take years, even decades, and there were no guarantees.
Severe childhood abuse is like a terrible burn covering most of the body. The injury hurts in a way that cannot be imagined by those who haven't experienced it. The cure hurts just as much and goes on longer. Sometimes, burn survivors beg to be allowed to die instead. At every step of healing, abuse survivors risk being swallowed by their desire to escape through death.
What greater courage could there be than to choose to put oneself through the torture of healing? To keep going when it would be so much easier to hide, and when it is only your own stubborn will that keeps bringing the pain down on you? Only the very brave and very desperate agree to such a cure.
My own experience of being raped as a child was like being burned on no more than my hands and feet. That was bad enough. I teetered on the edge of suicide for years as I uncovered and healed my past. I'm lucky. I survived long enough to discover how great life can be.
Ana started that journey. She didn’t make it out the other side.
At her funeral, her husband said, "In her life, Ana had to climb a high range of mountains. She'd made it through the foothills. She'd climbed the lower slopes. Along the way she found people who could help. Others had gone before and pointed out trails. Then she reached the last assent before the top, but it was the steepest--a sheer cliff. Again there were people to help. Others were in front and to either side offering their hands, ready to guide her to the next toehold. She started up. But a fog came down and engulfed her. She couldn't see the other people and forgot they were there. Alone in the fog on that cliff, she lost her hold, slipped and fell."
Strangely, at her funeral one of Ana's hatefully competitive scientific colleagues wept and begged for forgiveness. He hadn't realized how much she was suffering.
In the end, both Ana and Jim killed themselves. But is that failure? After all, they survived for years-- more than survived. They lived and loved and gave and created, despite the terrible gaping wounds they carried. After years of struggle, they lost their grip. Do they not still deserve the admiration of those who admire survival? Can they not still claim the highest badge of courage?
When we heal ourselves, we heal the universe--whether we manage a little or a lot. Our motivation may seem selfish, but our work serves everyone.
Ana and Jim, my loves, thank you for the great gifts you gave us.
You both deserve the richest and warmest of Valentine's hearts.
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