Tragedy Plus Time

by Adam Cayton-Holland

  DESENSITIZATION AND REPROCESSING

  Three weeks later I was in a shitty hotel on the side of the highway in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had just headlined three shows at Dr. Grins on a Saturday, 6:30, 8:30, 10:30. That 10:30 show broke me. I had a migraine in the greenroom minutes before the show started. The white flashes crept into my periphery and I knew one was coming but I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do about it. This was my first time at the club, I was new to headlining nationally in general, and I didn’t want the word to get out that I was some head case. That I was too sickly to be relied upon. I already worried about what people knew about me, what they knew about Lydia. I worried that they saw me as some depressed ticking time bomb, capable of a tight 45 but bound to unload on an audience onstage one night.

  Was that the kind of comic anyone wanted to book?

  I was projecting. Bookers checked out my clips and my bio bullet points, maybe. They didn’t flesh out my backstory; they didn’t debate the state of my psyche. But I didn’t know any of that. I just knew I was in the throes of a migraine and I didn’t want to disappoint.

  The flashes of light in front of my eyes crept outward, then disappeared, as they always do; then my vision was restored but the pain began to nest. It feels like someone cracked you in the forehead with a tree branch. The ache starts in the temple and cascades all the way back to your cerebral cortex. Your head pounds, like the worst hangover you’ve ever had, except all centralized in your brain. I ordered a beer to the greenroom and pounded it. I ordered another and took it to the stage with me. I drank three more during the course of my set. I invited the audience to join in my debauchery, played the Saturday late-show party guy, but I was just trying to numb the pain in my skull, to punch that migraine right back. I did it. I did my time and survived. I got offstage and headed back to the hotel immediately. No sitting by the exit and thanking the audience for coming, no carousing with the other comics on the bill. I just wanted to sleep. I wasn’t even drunk. The migraine and the alcohol had met in the middle and both collapsed. I just hurt.

  Back in my hotel room, I sat on the edge of my bed and looked out the window at the cars on the highway speeding past in the dark. I felt so flat, so muted. I felt incapable of experiencing joy, like I didn’t deserve to anymore. I had broken up with my girlfriend Katie after Thanksgiving for that exact reason. I made up excuses for why, but the truth was I felt like I wasn’t dedicating enough time to suffering. So I selfishly cut her loose. I had to experience this pain with the totality of myself—not with some part of me hoping for a future with a wife and kids, but with all of me miserable, all of me feeling every last drop.

  It was more than I had bargained for. It was taking over. I felt done, over it all, more depressed than I had ever been. For the first time since college I wanted to kill myself. But I couldn’t even do that. I couldn’t take my own life, couldn’t join Lydia on the other side. I had seen firsthand what that does to a family. Lydia had shown me and in showing me she had removed the choice, forever. I could never do that to my mom and my dad, to Anna and Henry and Sylvie. Never. No matter how low I was feeling, they didn’t deserve to experience something like that. Again. The new realization made me feel trapped. Because as bad as things got, as miserable as I was right there in that hotel room, I could never escape it even if I wanted to. There was no out for me, no end to this. I crawled beneath the comforter and sobbed loud and long, gasping for breath that wasn’t there.

  The phone rang on the bedside table.

  “Mr. Clayton-Holland?”

  They never get my name right. Everyone adds a phantom “L” to Cayton. Everyone.

  “Yes?” I said, not even bothering to correct them.

  “We got a call about a disturbance coming from your room.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Is someone crying in there?”

  “Oh,” I said embarrassed. “I’m sorry. That was me. I’ll be quiet.”

  The front deskman didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you okay?” he stammered.

  I thought about the question, then answered truthfully.

  “No.”

  I had been bouncing from shrink to shrink since Lydia had died, hating all of them. I’d find various reasons for rejecting them. Most of their offices were located in sad, suburban office parks. If these were the type of insipid spaces they chose to conduct their businesses from, to spend their professional lives in, could I really trust them with my psychological well-being? Anna, for her part, critiqued her various shrinks based on their décor. Was some indigenous office art too goddamn much to ask?

  We sounded like Lydia.

  At an annual physical with my doctor he asked me about my emotional state. I told him the truth. Not good. He asked if I had heard of EMDR. I had not.

  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is an aggressive form of treatment used to help trauma victims, such as soldiers, affected by PTSD. But it can help anyone who’s been through some shit. I gave it a try. As I sat with my new therapist on my initial intake she listened patiently and thoughtfully to my sob story, but kept her distance. With all the other shrinks I felt this immense sense of pity. It was cloying. They flinched and sighed dramatically with every detail of my story; they emoted and tried to show me how sympathetic they were. And I resented it. I was tired of people feeling sorry for me. I didn’t need compassion. I needed help. This new doctor seemed relatively nonplussed. She wasn’t unsympathetic, she said the appropriate things, but her attitude was one of yeah, fucked-up things happen, let’s get to treating them. I would later learn that she’s a leading expert in the field, that she regularly works with people who have been sexually abused their entire lives, or tortured. And that she had suffered some trauma herself. My case was a sad one, but not the worst story she had ever heard, not in the least.

  I needed that. To not be babied. To be reminded that suffering is a huge part of the world, something that doesn’t need coddling, but treatment. And so we began our therapy.

  “It helps to try to envision the human brain as a filing cabinet,” she said. “The memory of finding Lydia dead that day has become like a loose file, one that keeps coming up at inappropriate times in the form of nightmares and flashbacks. EMDR is a way of filing that memory away, so that it’s there to access should you chose to access it, but it remains in a fixed, secure location until that point.”

  Sold.

  I sat in an oversized armchair in her tastefully appointed, centrally located office, closed my eyes, and went through the morning that I found Lydia, in painful, intimate detail. My therapist pushed and prodded me through it, urging me to recall every last thing. She kept asking questions.

  What did the dogs sound like in the backyard? Was the light on or off in the upstairs hallway? Did the sunrays come in through the window of Lydia’s bedroom that morning?

  While I answered her I clenched two buttons in my fists that pulsed electronically back and forth, left then right, left then right, like a metronome. This was meant to simulate REM (rapid eye movement), the state in which we best process information. My brain was essentially acting as it would if I were asleep. I was awake, dreaming.

  The process of EMDR can fast prove overwhelming so the patient must determine a happy place to retreat to when it all gets to be too much. I chose a sand dune in Cape Cod.

  We lived there for a summer. I was twelve, Lydia eight. Anna was fourteen. Her figure skating was taking off. So much so that Nancy Kerrigan’s coach had agreed to train her, provided we make our way out to the Cape for the summer. So we did. Packed up the cars and moved the family out to Chatham for three glorious months. It was nothing but baseball and fireworks, cranberries and swimming every day. And when I wasn’t doing that I was at the skating rink heartsick in love with Nancy Kerrigan. She wasn’t yet plagued by her run-in with that trollop Tonya Harding, she was just herself, Olympics bound, stunning and elegant, all legs and skates and teeth. A beautiful goddamn th
oroughbred out there on the ice. It was the best summer of my life.

  So when the EMDR became too much, my shrink would guide me back to that happy place and make me tell her about it, with the same level of detail and precision that I had talked about finding Lydia. I told her how I could see the ocean in front of me, hear the waves crashing on the shore. I explained how I could feel the house we had rented behind me, with my family in it, and I knew that everyone was in there, safe and happy and alive. I could sense it. I painted the image of me out there on that dune, listening to the wind through the reeds and feeling it on my skin, the saltwater and the sand. Everything felt tranquil. Everything was right in the world.

  And then the session was over.

  She cautioned me that the experience could be staggering but after that first EMDR session, I felt like I was on drugs. Sounds were louder, lights were brighter, smells were more intense. All stimuli came in full bore. I felt as if every receptor in my entire body was more open and attuned to the universe, like someone had stuck a master key in my brain, twisted it, and now all the doors were open. I wandered around the neighborhood for an hour before I felt comfortable driving home. I felt altered, like I was viewing the world in an entirely different way.

  EMDR was the best mushrooms I ever ate. It was also the most expensive.

  What was amazing about each session was how new details would emerge. There was nothing different about the treatment, it was the same exact process every time, but the memories became clearer. My brain was changing. I saw that morning from new angles, remembered tiny, insignificant details. What her cats were doing. What Lydia was wearing. Her laptop on the bedside table. The picture crystalized even further. Which was painful, but necessary. I needed to see it all before I could file it away. It had to be absolutely vivid. I began to crave going in for EMDR. As hard as it was, as much as I cried and hated revisiting the most painful experience of my life on a routine basis, something about the process satisfied me. It spoke to my obsessive-compulsion. It was rote and methodical, the same exact thing every time, the only variant my brain. When I grabbed those electronic pulses in my fists, and my therapist turned on the machine so that they would tick-tock back and forth, I couldn’t help but summon my old bedtime routine.

  04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04-09, 04.

  My toes are relaxed, my feet are relaxed, my ankles and Achilles tendons and shins are relaxed.

  And it worked. We did eight, nine, maybe ten sessions, I can’t really remember. But at some point I had just had enough. I didn’t want to go over Lydia’s death anymore. The memory felt sufficiently processed. I was done with it. I didn’t need to re-create it again. And it was no longer coming up inappropriately. After the third or fourth session the flashbacks and nightmares dried up. There would be glimmers of them: a hint of the memory, a frame from that horrible scene in the movie playing in my dream, but it was far better than it had been. The memory was filing itself away. I felt like I was starting to control it. Which was freeing. To not be plagued by it. It was there, and I brought it back out of the filing cabinet often. But I got to choose when I did.

  Shortly after stopping EMDR I had a dream. I was in my happy place, the sand dune in Cape Cod. I watched the waves lap against the shore, listened to the cry of the seagulls. I could feel the wind through the reeds on my skin. I knew that my family was safe in the house behind me. I could sense it. Everything was as it should be. Everything was calm and quiet. Then I felt a presence sitting next to me. Lydia. Not eight-year-old Lydia. Grown-up Lydia. Twenty-eight-year-old Lydia. Happy and well. Beautiful. She smiled at me. I smiled back. We both turned and stared out over the water together, toward the old world where our ancestors came from, far across the sea. Brother and sister, side by side. Alive.

  I LIKE TO REMEMBER HER CONSTANTLY; I TRY NOT TO THINK OF HER AT ALL

  I started writing about Lydia. I had to. I wasn’t talking about her onstage, and the desire to express my feelings about everything that happened was overwhelming me. I felt like my continued silence was a roadblock to my creativity. And yes, I’m aware of how fucking pretentious that sounds, but stand-up comics are allowed to write sentences like that. We’re insufferable.

  I wrote out of necessity more than anything. I had spent the last eight years of my life in the public sphere, the Denver version of it anyway. But always growing outward. And now, after the defining moment of my life, I was silent. I needed to talk about it in a public way. Call it vanity, call it mourning. I felt like I really didn’t have a choice. Plus, some part of me sensed that if I put my thoughts down in a public sphere, I would no longer feel guilty for not talking about it onstage. Because I would have this signature piece that I could point people to.

  See, everyone?! I’ve dealt with it. I’m not hiding from it creatively.

  Of course, no one was accusing me of anything remotely like that. Everyone was just letting me mourn however I needed to. But I was feeling that pressure. Every fucking day. So I sat down and penned a screed about all that I had gone through. It was the most painful thing I had ever written. But it felt so cathartic, as beneficial as any therapy or EMDR.

  I put the piece out on my website. I hit publish and immediately felt this enormous emotional purge. Like something shifted in me. It was done with. I had talked about what happened. I had incorporated it in some small way into my creative world. That inner pressure I had been putting on myself vanished.

  I shared the piece online and drove into the mountains for a hike. I needed to clear my head. I left my phone in the car. Left it all behind for a few hours. When I got back there were hundreds upon hundreds of responses. My comic and writer friends had spread the piece widely across the internet, share after share, retweet after retweet. The reaction was immense and immediate. My inbox filled with touching messages from people who had similarly awful experiences, or had known someone who had. Mostly they thanked me for sharing and told me that it helped them in some small way. One girl wrote that it literally saved her life. That she could see herself in Lydia, could see her family in the depiction of my family, and that she didn’t want to do to her family what Lydia had done to ours. I didn’t know how to feel about that. Of course I was happy some stranger on the internet had not killed themselves because of something I put out there, but all it really made me think was lucky you. Lucky family. I wish my family was so lucky. I wish Lydia had read an article like you did and saved herself.

  I had no idea how to deal with the reaction I got. Despite wearing my heart on my sleeve as a child, as I grew older I became more reserved. Grief, despair, those were personal and private. Overt displays of emotion embarrassed me. That’s why I turned away at the beach in North Carolina to cry. That’s why I kept it together until I reached my hotel room in Grand Rapids. This thing I was carrying around with me was my burden. I didn’t need any outside observers. At the same time, I had to share it because to not do so felt so dishonest. Maybe this was because I am a Gemini. Maybe it was because my mother was a dry introvert while my father was the most outgoing person in the room. Maybe that’s why after spouting off for forty-five minutes from a stage like the life of the goddamn party, I have the hardest time making small talk with anyone that comes up to me. I want every eye in the room on me and then I want everyone to leave me alone. The same was true of what I was writing about Lydia. I wanted everyone to know how I felt but I also didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. I certainly didn’t want to commiserate. I wasn’t trying to take on any more suffering.

  And yet suddenly I couldn’t shut up about Lydia. I talked about her in storytelling shows. Not stand-up, per se, but closer. I started my own podcast, My Dining Room Table. Which was Lydia’s dining room table that I inherited. Or took. There was no will. I just moved it to my house. And started broadcasting to the world from it, or at least a couple thousand listeners a week. While that podcast was initially a means for me to interview creative people I found interesting, it quickly became an outlet for m
e to talk about Lydia. Every few episodes the conversation would inevitably pivot that way, and discussing it openly felt not only right, but necessary. Meanwhile I kept writing, continued publishing pieces on my website and in magazines. And people kept reaching out to me, in larger numbers than ever before.

  I started responding to them.

  At first I was terrified I would say the wrong thing. But I couldn’t just ignore them. So I began firing off a different answer based on how I was feeling at the exact moment.

  I like to remember her constantly; I try not to think of her at all.

  I focus on helping my family members; I avoid them for weeks on end.

  I think about people who have had it far worse than me; I rage because no one’s ever had it this bad.

  I cry until I hurt; I don’t allow myself to cry.

  I never watch any TV show that Lydia and I loved together; I binge on them for weeks.

  It was knee-jerk, but it was always honest. If one were to collect the advice I’ve offered to the people who have reached out to me, it’d be a contradictory mess. You name it, I’ve tried it, am trying it, will try it. I don’t know what to tell people about coping because the hurt is never gone. I never tell them there’s hope or a timeline for overcoming such deep sorrow. I tell them matter-of-factly that it sucks and it will always suck and that the sooner you recognize that as the new reality, the sooner you’ll adapt to it, whatever that looks like for you. Whatever defeated new landscape your life takes on. It’s all very Russian.

  But whenever people write to me concerned that someone they love is suicidal my advice is unflinching: it’s not enough. What you’re doing right now, it’s not enough. Do more. Ask more questions. Drive them to more shrinks. Spend more nights watching them sob. I regret every time I rolled my eyes because Lydia was having another bad day. So much. I’m ashamed of myself for it. We all are. No matter how much we know it’s not our fault, it doesn’t matter. In our hearts, we feel guilty. I look back at Lydia’s life and I’m sickened that we couldn’t see it coming. A preternaturally intelligent girl who speaks backwards regularly, is sensitive and socially awkward, obsessed with dark literature and music and television, overdoses on sleeping pills and we thought she’d turn it around? What pills were we taking? “Deliberate indifference,” I believe Anna and my dad would call it, borrowing a term from one of their many briefs taking down nursing homes or prison officials. As smart as we all are, as goddamn magnificent, why weren’t we smart enough to see this sooner? Why couldn’t we do anything to stop this?