Still, it was painful to have a psychological intervention like this have such a helpful impact on me when the mental health profession had had such a vicious impact on patients with ME/CFS. I couldn’t help but feel like I was betraying my fellow patients. I also felt extremely vulnerable: If I allowed any crack in the imagined door separating mind from body, I worried that I (and the entire illness) would get shoved through it, locked onto the wacko side. And I felt uncomfortable arguing, “I am not a wacko!” It had an uncomfortable resonance with “I am not a crook!”—once I started defending myself from that accusation, I’d already lost.
Ultimately, I simply didn’t believe in this division of mind and body. I considered that whole model deeply unscientific. It makes no sense to imagine our minds floating freely outside our bodies, occasionally screwing up and creating illness. The mind and body aren’t just connected, they’re aspects of the same thing, heads and tails, yin and yang, utterly inextricable.
Dealing with illness skillfully, I thought, required analyzing that yin-yang relationship in a nuanced way. Psychology and physiology weren’t opponents in a winner-take-all game. They were partners in a dance. And it was my job to help them move to the music with more connection and grace.
About a month after Timmy’s bewitchment, I got a call from Troy, one of my half sisters on my father’s side, saying that she was going to be in Denver. Would John and I like to meet for dinner? I of course said yes.
She looked the same as she had when I’d first met her and my other half siblings a decade earlier, dressed in a crisp white shirt and pearls, with platinum blond hair and a soft Texas drawl. She embraced us warmly, and we talked about our lives. I told her about my health, and she told me she’d been dealing with similar health issues, though she was convinced that mold wasn’t at the root of it. She cooed over the story of our courtship.
I wasn’t sure that we would talk about our father. I didn’t know what to ask—I’d asked all the questions I could think of a decade earlier, and my half siblings had each been generous in sharing him with me. Still, my knowledge of him felt flat, two-dimensional. It made me feel like a bad journalist. Shouldn’t I be better at coming up with questions?
When we finished our food, she asked me if I’d like to hear about our dad, and then stories poured out of her. Most of them were familiar from before, but I felt the stories clicking together in my mind for the first time.
Like me, our father, Don, had grown up without a dad. He was the youngest of seven kids, deserted by their father during the Depression in tiny Palestine, Texas. At eight years old, he was working in the fields to help support his family.
After a few hard-earned years of college, he started the first of a long string of businesses: a burger stand, then billboards, then insurance.
In the early 1960s, he moved to a bigger stage when the Federal Communications Commission decided to release the last AM radio frequency in Texas, KEYH, to the person who would use it to best serve the public interest. He beat out the richest families in Houston to get it, selling himself on his then-unheard-of vision of an all-news radio station (despite his complete lack of experience in news). His reporters won awards for their investigations, but all-news radio was so novel that the station never made much money.
In the meantime, he’d become deeply involved with minority communities in Houston, starting an Optimist Club for black people and a chapter of the Special Olympics. Houston had hundreds of thousands of Hispanic residents, with no citywide radio station to serve them. He converted his to all-Spanish language, and it became the number-one radio station in Houston.
But his greatest successes were followed by great failures. Though he loved inventing businesses, the daily work of running them bored him. He got in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service when he traded radio advertising for goods and didn’t count the trades as income. His insurance company did well until a series of natural disasters in Texas in the early 1980s. He won the legal battle that ensued when the bankruptcy liquidator claimed he’d used money from that business to prop up another, but it exhausted him.
He looked like a typical Texas man with his 10-gallon Stetson, Cadillac, and cowboy boots, but he lacked a taste for hunting or golf and remained on the outside of the good-ol’-boy clubs. The Christian Science church was his only community—as a smart, ambitious, penniless boy, he had loved both its intellectualism and the wealth of its members—and he became one of its leaders.
Before I came along, Don and his wife would see my mother and her husband at church every Sunday. Don and my mother worked together to establish a new branch of the church in Texas City, walking from house to house as they passionately discussed how to appeal to its poor black population—all the while, falling in love.
Don had, of course, never told Troy what the secret relationship meant to him, but she said that from her memories of the two of them, she thought they were well suited, perhaps even sharing a great love.
Here, I jumped in to tell Troy the small bits my mother had told me about their relationship. During the three years of their affair, she’d reworked her life, intensely seeking God. Before meeting Don, she had dropped out of college to marry at 18, working as a secretary until my sister, Robin, was born. When she couldn’t get pregnant a second time, she adopted my brother, Ty. She kept house and tended to the children. The confines of her proper life cut deep, and she was convinced that a clear-sighted, principled search for God was the way out.
Don was the first person she’d met who thought as deeply as she did, who believed as passionately that principle and spirit underlay the world. She longed to become a Christian Science healer, guiding the sick to health through prayer. My father promised to use his influence to help her succeed. When my mother became pregnant with me, she felt I was her “answer,” the outcome of all her seeking and prayer.
Troy told me that after my birth in 1972, she would come to our house with her parents and assorted siblings to play with “the baby”—me, who, unbeknownst to the rest of them, was Don’s baby. Troy babysat me and made pralines with my mother, awestruck by how my tall, dark, glamorous mom resembled Jackie O. During that time, my father spotted a cradle at an antique auction with his wife. “That would be the perfect gift for Susan Rehmeyer!” he cried, and bought it, stunning his poor wife. (The story brought a shock of recognition for me: I had loved that cradle so much that long after I outgrew it, I would oust its stuffed-animal occupants and climb in, my legs splaying over its wooden sides.)
When I was six months old, my mother left her husband. But my father stayed with his wife, who learned of the affair a couple of years later. Don denied I was his child, and she believed him. Still, she insisted that they move a distance from my mother to a ranch in the country. When I was almost five, we moved to San Diego, after my mother’s relationship with both the church and her family had become strained when she refused to hide my origins (especially, rumor held, as I grew to look more and more like my half sister Tricia).
Halfway across the country from us, my father was always working on projects at his ranch, hauling his kids up at seven each Saturday morning, crying: “Time’s a-wasting! We’ve got lots to do!” He’d sit on the porch swing with Troy for hours and talk, planting ideas. “Ever thought of holding a horse show?” he asked her when she was a teenager. “What steps would it take to start one?” And then a couple of weeks later: “Thought any more about that horse show? What about a series of horse shows? What about putting together a brochure for them and selling advertising?” Troy ended up doing all of that, running horse shows at 16. This story left me looking down at the table blinking hard, imagining an alternative reality with my own young legs swaying on that porch swing, my voice singing out answers to my father’s questions.
I told Troy about how I had talked to Don exactly once that I remember, when I was 18 and my mother was dying. I’d called Information, and the operator had rattled off my father’s number. My hand shook as I wrote it down
.
I dialed it over and over, hanging up two digits short, then one digit short, then just after finishing the number. Finally, I allowed the phone to ring.
“Hello?” a man’s voice answered.
“Is this Don?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Julie Rehmeyer.”
“Unnnh-huh,” my father said. I wasn’t sure what kind of response I’d expected, but it wasn’t that.
“I’m, uh, Susan Rehmeyer’s daughter.”
“Unnnh-huh,” he said, his voice as flat and closed as the first time.
I struggled for something to say next. Then, to my relief, he asked me a couple of questions, banal things like where we were living. I mentioned that my mother was sick, maybe dying.
Silence. I worked up my gumption. “I was just wondering, if you might like to . . . um . . . have some kind of relationship?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay, bye!” I squeaked, hanging up the phone as fast as I could.
A few months later, I heard that he’d died. He was 61.
Troy told me that around the time I’d called, his life was falling apart. His latest businesses had failed and he was trying to win back his wife, who had finally left him. Still, he had new business ideas that were, as usual, ahead of their time: For one, he unsuccessfully tried to sell the idea of cogeneration power plants to Kenneth Lay at Enron, a decade before they made Enron millions upon millions of dollars. He also had a non-paying project, a plan for businesses to provide at-risk kids with mentors throughout their school careers.
In December 1990, my father remarked to Troy’s husband, “If I die now, I’ll die a happy man. I’ve already lived the life of seven men.” A week later, he had a seizure, and he insisted on no doctors, no ambulance, no hospital. He was ready, he said, and he died that night. He might have felt complete, Troy told me, but he was also just tired.
Of course, that meant he felt complete without having ever known me. Troy’s view was that my father had an impossible problem: He saw himself as an upright man, but he had fathered a child from a long, intense affair. He was committed to his five previous children and his wife who had stuck by him for decades, but she could neither connect with the parts of him that my mother had nor handle my existence. What was the moral thing to do? He made his choice.
Had he lived longer, Troy said, she was certain he would have gotten in contact with me. When I called him, his desire to reunite with his wife made my very existence dangerous for him—but Troy’s mother was done, not coming back. And if we had gotten to know one another, Troy said, my father and I would have taken great pleasure in one another. “You have the same kind of mind.”
When Troy wrapped her arms around me at the end of the evening, I felt as though the hug were being transmitted across death and time and space from my father.
A few weeks later, when we next returned to Boulder, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling poisoned, unable even to sit up in bed. John had to help me get to the shower. I hadn’t felt like that since before Timmy’s bewitchment. We resumed our familiar routine: John pulled off the sheets while I showered, and then I made the bed with fresh sheets. But even while making the bed, I started feeling poisoned again. The bed, it seemed, was contaminated.
Even worse, we’d left our camping pads in Santa Fe. I’d been doing so much better that we’d gotten less careful about such things. We ended up squishing together to sleep, rather miserably, on the couch (John refused to sleep apart from me). A friend from Berkeley—Berkeley of the dreaded ick—had stayed in the house while we’d been gone, and I figured that the extensive precautions we’d given her must not have been enough.
I managed to get in to see Timmy the next day, hoping for a repeat performance of his miracle cure.
He had me lie once more on the single bed in his office, and this time, he asked me to think back to the first time I’d felt sick. I told him the story about the day after our plaster party, when we were building the house and Geoff was falling apart and I could barely walk up the path to the house. That was when I thought for the first time, “Maybe I’m not just tired. Maybe I’m sick.”
He asked me detailed questions about it, reimmersing me in that moment. I again felt as though I were losing everything—my husband, my life, and most of all, my sense of my own potency. I again felt that desperate, disoriented incomprehension closing in on me, the sense that I could no longer hear God’s voice, that the currents I’d oriented myself to my whole life had dried up. I felt all alone in this impossible situation, determined to save my husband and get my house built but slowly recognizing that the task was way beyond my capabilities. I could feel my poor exhausted body sagging against Geoff’s arm as I looked up the path, fighting the urge to dissolve into the pine needles at my feet.
“Now bring in your higher spirits,” Timmy said. “What would they say to you? What would they do?”
I felt those spirits pulling me out of my leaden body, raising me up to hover above the scene with them. All the stress and difficulty stayed down in that poor exhausted body, and I was free to float above the lush stripe of the valley that swept down the mountain and out across the desert, a miracle of green and plenty amongst the dryness. The straw of my house gleamed golden against the brown patches of mud plaster, as if the house were the love child of the sun and the earth. I felt as though I were seeing the house for the first time, no longer obscured by the miasma of the endless list of tasks it represented. It took my breath away, gorgeous even in its incompleteness.
Next, the image came into my mind of the spirits of my parents joining us, floating above the valley. My mother looked at me with a love I’d forgotten in all those years since she’d died, a love that had vanished from my understanding of the world. Even my father wrapped his arms around me, claiming me as his own. In my mind, I stayed in his arms a long time, feeling his hard, round belly against my own, my head resting on his shoulder.
A long line of ancestors joined us, a huge tribe of people whose blood and lives and loves flowed through me, many of whom had devoted their lives to ensuring that I might live. I felt as though I had an invisible army standing behind me, not just at that moment but all the time.
The idea that I was alone suddenly seemed laughable.
This whole clan lifted that poor heavy dead body of mine up from its heap on the ground, whooshing and glowing all the death and heaviness out of it, suffusing it once more with my spirit. I was restored to my body, but I knew I could choose which of my burdens to pick up along with it. None were mandatory. I didn’t have to build this house. I didn’t have to stay with Geoff. I didn’t have to be a professor. I didn’t have to redeem my mother or be a success at anything.
I returned to my house, bouncing up and down the temporary staircase made of straw bales, spinning around the great open upstairs, which felt like a big dance floor with its internal walls still unbuilt. I can’t know, at this moment, if I’ll be able to finish this house. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s beautiful, just as it is.
I would keep working on it, but only with a sense of ease and pleasure. If I was lucky, those unburdened labors would lead to its completion. But that, I accepted, was beyond my control. Nor could I know what would happen to Geoff. I can’t save him, no more than I could save my mother. All I can do is love him and let him find his way.
A rush of something like joy filled me, an awe at the beauty of my life at that very moment, living in those moldy trailers with my crazy husband, breaking body, and half-built house. I felt as though I had been clutching on to him, my hand exhausted. I let go, I turned to him, and I bowed.
As we wrapped up the session, my body felt purified, light, spacious. Timmy told me that before bed, I should visualize a force field of protection around myself. I should remember my parents and all those ancestors surrounding me, supporting me, defending me. I should think of the man who had molested me in the park and again say “No!” from deep in my belly, imagi
ning my family saying it with me. I am connected. I am supported. I am protected.
That night, I slept through the night in the bedroom. The next morning, I felt better than I had in ages.
As much as I appreciated Timmy’s help, I didn’t want to be dependent on a psychic every time I had a nasty reaction. Plus, the problem with a bizarre, incomprehensible cure is that it wouldn’t be especially bizarre or incomprehensible for it to just stop working. So I began to think about more direct ways that I could, on my own, convince my nervous system that mild exposures to mold were not a catastrophic threat and to teach it to respond calmly.
And that made my thoughts drift back to training Frances.
When I taught Frances to get along with John’s cat, Lao, the precise thing I was doing was rewiring her nervous system so that she responded to him calmly. When she first met Lao, her excitement so overwhelmed her that she couldn’t take in any information. Her brain had exploded. When she was frantically scrabbling and whining to get at the cat, her nervous system was overloaded—just like mine when I was screaming and convulsing. The first step in training her had less to do with teaching and more to do with reducing her brain overload.
The tool I had employed in this neurological intervention had been cheese. When I’d crammed cheese into Frances’s mouth as Lao appeared, I’d sent her brain firing along a different neural pathway, focused on the amazing windfall that was raining down upon her taste buds. So then the question was, what was my version of cheese? What would my neurological system find sufficiently compelling to distract it from a freak-out? I didn’t know, but I figured I’d just try everything I could think of.
Through the Shadowlands Page 32
