Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

  “Listen, you can handle him,” Liddie told Dartanyon, while looking up at this mountain of a man and hiding his own sweaty palms behind his back. “It’s just another round.”

  Oleg couldn’t see Dartanyon, but his coach, Vitaly Gligor, could. He had watched Dartanyon compete in Finland earlier that year. “The American is strong, like a bodybuilder, but he doesn’t have much technique,” Gligor told Oleg. “He doesn’t move like a judoka.”

  Dartanyon strutted out of the chute like a prizefighter, like he had grown ten judo years since his morning match against France. Both Dartanyon and Oleg attacked off the hajime, with Oleg gripping so aggressively that he reached over Dartanyon’s shoulder and held him by the back of his gi. Oleg yanked him. Dartanyon yanked back. But it was no use, like trying to drag a tree stump out of the ground. This guy is stupid strong, Dartanyon thought about a minute into the match. And that’s when his body overruled all other voices, his bones rattling with the early words and techniques Hudson had drilled into him: Go toward the energy, don’t resist it. And then it happened. As Oleg jerked at Dartanyon’s sleeves, Dartanyon changed gears and exploded toward Oleg. Minimum effort, maximum efficiency. With Oleg stumbling off balance, Dartanyon used his right leg to sweep both of Oleg’s legs out from under him. Oleg crashed to the ground in a moment that both moved in slow motion yet passed in a blur. Dartanyon had defeated the decorated Russian with a most perfect and basic ouchi gari—the very first throw Hudson taught him as a white belt and insisted he make his own.

  Dartanyon leaped around the mat in disbelief, pointing up to his mother, pointing to Leroy, pointing to me. The overhead screen flashed: “Winner, Crockett,” sweeping us up in a staggering miracle that had quietly begun on a beat-up wrestling mat in an inner-city high school in Cleveland. Minutes later, in the media zone, Dartanyon and I stood before each other, thunderstruck. “I did it, Lisa,” he cried, letting his head fall onto my shoulder.

  “You did it. You did everything,” I said as I wept. “I am so proud of you, Dartanyon.” He’d begun the day as a judo infant and blossomed into an elite medalist before our eyes. He had encountered every style of fighting, from the Frenchman’s stubborn persistence to England’s street style to Brazil’s technical proficiency to the Russian’s brute strength. Dartanyon had risen above them all with a style of his own: indomitable spirit.

  Leroy and I watched from the edge of the mat as Dartanyon took his place atop the podium, the bronze medal draped around his neck. Once forgotten by the world, Dartanyon finally stood on top of it.

  THE NEXT DAY, Dartanyon, Leroy, and I rollicked around London, still trembling with joy. We decided that if you can’t win gold, bronze is the next best thing—even better than silver. In judo, silver medalists end their day on a loss, at the hands of the gold medalist. Bronze medalists, however, end their final matches on a win. They earn the right to celebrate on the mat. “You win bronze. You are given silver,” Dartanyon explained.

  Dartanyon was not done surprising us in London, for there was one more honor to bestow. He learned that the US Olympic Committee provides American medal winners the opportunity to recognize the coaches who propelled them to the podium by presenting them with the Order of Ikkos medallion. This distinction, named for the first recorded Olympic coach in ancient Greece, acknowledges the countless hours of training and teamwork involved in achieving the athletes’ success.

  Dartanyon could have given this recognition to Coach Liddie, for taking on such a risky investment. He could have given it to Shane Hudson, for teaching him the throw that brought down the mighty Russian. But Dartanyon broke tradition. He didn’t select a coach. He chose me. So on a sunny London morning, in the center of the Athletes’ Village, with his teammates gathered around, Dartanyon carefully hung the silver medallion around my neck. And we understood that we had won, together.

  “You know, I am leaving London with silver and you only got bronze,” I teased as we posed for a photograph.

  “Yah, but I earned bronze,” he said. “You were given silver.” I smiled, knowing that Dartanyon had given me more than a medallion that day. He’d given me the unexpected gift of love returned. “Although I think you earned it too,” he added. “You worked just as hard these last three years.”

  We celebrated at a posh restaurant in Stratford. Dartanyon ordered salmon with an arugula salad, along with a prosciutto and sage flatbread—a million miles away from the syrup sandwiches and steam-ironed grilled cheese sandwiches of his childhood. We talked about the upcoming presidential election and a book he’d read while on the flight over to London. “How did you get all grown up, with your fancy food and politics, when I wasn’t looking?” I asked.

  He smiled playfully. “Occasionally I do something that you don’t know about. And by the way, I want to go back to school next semester. I’m ready to take it seriously.”

  The years leading to London were mired in complexity, and our daily conversations were so often centered on problem solving. I hadn’t had the time to step back and appreciate how those conflicts had refined Dartanyon. I stared in amazement at the young man who now sat across from me. Then I thought back to the unseasoned high school boy I’d met three years earlier, when I asked him which of his wins were particularly memorable to him. I wondered what his answer would be now.

  “Dartanyon, how much of your bronze medal match do you remember?” I asked.

  “Every second of it,” he answered. “Like I could reenact it for you right here.”

  “Interesting, because the first day I met you, you said that you only remember the losses. Do you remember telling me that?”

  “I do,” he said. He looked up from his plate, thoughtfully considering the shift. “I guess the time for sadness is finally over.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE REAL EDUCATION

  Leroy may have resuscitated Dartanyon’s Paralympic debut, but he was having a difficult time saving himself. Once back in Phoenix, his fights with Kayla escalated. Though they were no longer romantically involved, they lacked the financial means to live apart, and as a result, their animosity grew with every passing day. Leroy’s grades began to dip again. He self-medicated by excessively purchasing electronics and gadgets, compounding his stress. His conversational skills regressed; with his short, detached answers, he sounded like the boy I’d sat beside in the basement three years before. I had hoped that Dartanyon’s performance in London would be the rallying cry Leroy needed to take his own steps toward betterment, and that our shared experiences in London would serve to deepen our connection. But instead, Leroy became unreachable for weeks at a time, refusing to answer my calls and texts.

  When Leroy retreated into these black holes, it launched me into a vortex of emotions—first concern for his well-being, then anger at his obstinacy, then faked indifference, which led to reverse-psychological attempts to beat him at his own apathetic game by not reaching out to him for several days. I was certain he would wonder why I stopped caring. He didn’t. So I circled back to concern, grave this time, fearing he was suicidal.

  Only after I left messages threatening to call the police to check his whereabouts did Leroy respond. “No, I was fine,” he said. He offered no apology, no acknowledgment of his peculiar behavior. He played off his detachment as tiredness, and excused his lack of communication by saying he was asleep when I called, or his phone was off, or he meant to call me back and forgot. The miles between us left me exceedingly helpless. I couldn’t grab him by the shoulders, look him in the eye, and say, “I know you’re not okay.”

  Kayla reported that Leroy stayed at school until midnight most nights. She was irate that he was not spending time with Alani; Leroy countered that he had no choice; if he brought his work home, Kayla would sabotage him with another argument. The school said that either way, Leroy was not studying. “He plays cards all day,” his adviser told me. “We can hear him laughing clear from the student lounge during times when he should be in class.” His professors were not uti
lizing the portal to track grades and attendance that term, so I chased them down myself. I discovered that Leroy was rarely attending class or engaging in the work. He carried Fs in all three of his courses.

  I began setting alarms to call Leroy before every class and make sure he was going. Sometimes he answered, usually he didn’t. Always, I hung up feeling like I was standing in quicksand. I e-mailed his teachers for extensions and submitted my own ideas for extra-credit opportunities. Fortunately, they were supportive. Yet Leroy continued to drop every ball we handed to him. The harder I pushed him, the deeper he burrowed into his black hole.

  “He seems to have given up,” I said to Navid. “I don’t know if I just let him get kicked out and learn his lesson the hard way, or if I keep fighting until he decides to fight for himself.” If Leroy failed, the opportunity for that elusive lightbulb to click on in his head would be gone. But by continuing to intervene, I was enabling his shenanigans.

  “My inclination is that you should keep the train on the tracks, so to speak,” Navid said. But by November 2012, Collins College blew the whistle. They no longer believed Leroy was serious about his education and sent notice of expulsion. He had the right to a second and final appeal, but only if his plea was different from the original petition that we had made on financial grounds two years before. Leroy asked me to help write his letter. I said I could not; his behavior was as egregiously inexplicable to me as it was to the school administrators.

  “You spend sixteen hours a day on campus, yet you’re not turning in any work,” I said. “If you can’t tell me what’s going on, you have no grounds to appeal.” Was he depressed? Was he lazy? Was he on drugs? My mind ventured to the shadowy corners of his past.

  “I don’t know. When I can put the words together, I’ll tell you,” he said.

  Three days later, he called. “There are parts of my days that I don’t remember,” Leroy said. “Like I’m conscious, and my friends tell me I was in class or in the lounge, yet I have no recollection of it.” He equated it to a blackout, where sizable chunks of his time went unaccounted for in his memory. We went through events from the week and found them missing from his mental Rolodex. “And sometimes it’s like I’m watching myself talk to people, but I’m not actually in my body.”

  This sounded like a problem beyond my pay grade. I couldn’t fix this with a to-do list. I handed the phone to Navid, who questioned Leroy for twenty minutes before emerging with a diagnosis. “Leroy has post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “It’s a textbook case.” I was familiar with PTSD, but thought it was a condition one suffered immediately following a trauma, not eleven years later. Navid postulated that because Leroy had not been treated properly at the time of trauma, he had been left with compromised coping mechanisms for subsequent stress.

  Navid compiled academic literature on pediatric trauma to refresh his training and to educate me. As we pored over it together, I felt like I was reading the owner’s manual that should have been sewn into Leroy’s clothes so that anyone meeting him could interpret his behaviors: May shut down entirely in stressful situations, seeming unresponsive or detached. Problems expressing and managing emotions. Easily overwhelmed. Difficulty thinking clearly, reasoning, or problem solving. Unable to plan ahead, anticipate the future, and act accordingly.

  Leroy’s accounts of feeling detached from his body and watching his own experiences from somewhere else in the room had a name too: dissociation. He had likely learned as a child to dissociate as a defense mechanism, and now found himself automatically disconnecting when he felt unsafe or ill-equipped in demanding situations.

  Leroy aligned with nearly every symptom of PTSD. His life had been a continuous reel of traumatic events: “hit him or I’ll hit you,” his accident, neglect, drug abuse, abrupt school transfers, gang exposure, bone reduction surgeries. Since early elementary school, Leroy had known just one trauma-free year—the year he relaxed in Big Ma’s basement and rode on Dartanyon’s back. Both places served as safe havens where Leroy’s system could begin to recalibrate. But before any significant healing could take place, he was thrust into fatherhood, domestic disputes, and an academic environment for which he was woefully unprepared. With all of the disruptions to his emotional, mental, and chemical development, Leroy likely had the coping mechanisms of a ten-year-old.

  Over the years I had known Leroy, I had grown to understand his trust issues and his academic deficiencies. I had also suspected that many of his issues were rooted in his accident and neglect, but I did not understand those roots could continue spreading like serpents beneath the surface, angling to throttle his future.

  My heroic husband wrote a convincing appeal letter, describing how Leroy suffered from paralyzing anxiety attacks, and that his dissociation, misinterpreted as “spacing out” or ambivalence, was having adverse effects on his learning and classroom participation. Navid recommended behavioral therapy, and Collins agreed to give Leroy a final chance.

  Leroy had never heard of post-traumatic stress disorder. “It’s kind of a relief,” he said after Navid described the condition. “I was starting to think I had some kind of mystery psychosis and would end up in a padded room.” Now that he understood the cause of his symptoms, I assumed he would embrace the help he needed. And initially he did. He went to four weeks of therapy sessions and genuinely liked them. But when his counselor got to the hard stuff—the part after she moved beyond telling him that he was a remarkable survivor and began probing his emotional wounds—Leroy stopped going.

  “I feel better already, and besides, you’re my counselor,” he would tell me.

  “This is about more than feeling better,” Navid and I told him. “It’s about learning the tools to cope with stress.” Still, we could not convince him to return. I was going to have to step up into this role, somehow, someway. I was in this place, for this time, to fill this gap. And while a television producer is a far cry from a trained psychologist, my best was going to have to suffice. I had to settle into a new mind-set, though. I was not mentoring a college-age young adult; I was parenting a damaged adolescent who happened to be in college. My expectations needed to be different, and my approach needed to adapt. His progress would not adhere to timelines or deadlines.

  I continued reaching out to Leroy, but gone was the tension and the pushing on my part. Whatever he accomplished in a day would have to be enough, and if he accomplished nothing, I made sure he knew that he was still deserving of care. Behind the scenes, I continued working with his professors and advisers to get him through the last few months of school, for I couldn’t bear seeing Leroy fail out six months from graduation. Leroy viewed himself as powerless, perceiving the world as a meaningless place in which planning and positive action were futile. I learned to guide him gently, without overtaxing his stress responders. With every detectable step of accomplishment, I showered him with praise. With every misstep, I affirmed my care. He needed a love free of strings and full of patience.

  When I reached out to Dr. Norman Christopher, who had worked with Leroy at Akron Children’s Hospital, he lamented how Leroy’s family had slipped through the system’s cracks. “Leroy experienced much of his life in toxic stress,” he told me, “and when tough, adult things happen, his ability to rise up and overcome is based on his life experience and the faith he has in himself. Leroy learned to endure his challenges, but nothing and no one in his life showed Leroy that he could overcome them.”

  “Can a child who goes untreated for multiple complex traumas ever go on to thrive?” I asked.

  “There are a lot of factors at play, but what we believe matters most is the nurturing, and particularly the relationship of the mother,” Dr. Christopher said. “If Leroy’s mother had been equipped to properly care for him, you and I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation today.”

  Dr. Christopher told me that it was difficult to know if the outcomes could be reversed. But he emphasized that caregivers, at any point in one’s life, have the greatest inf
luence on a person’s sense of self-worth and value. “I’m not aware of any data on it, but common sense suggests that you have a better chance of reversing the effects if you keep trying than if you give up.”

  IN MAY 2013 KAYLA was given a plane ticket to visit a friend in Hawaii. She took Alani with her and the two did not return to Arizona. “They didn’t get on their flight back,” Leroy said. “I’m not even sure they had one.” He had cleaned their apartment and was dressed to fetch them at the airport when Kayla called, still in Hawaii. He was fighting back tears, stung by another loss and another failure. I wasn’t sure how Leroy would recover from this blow, until later that month—on Mother’s Day—when I received this letter.

  Dear Lisa,

  A few years ago, I never would have thought I would be writing to anyone for Mother’s Day, but now I see that being a mother is more than having kids. It is sitting through the good, bad, and ugly with your child, which you have done with me. You are the steady rock with whom I can share my love, hate, pain, and sorrow. As you watched and helped me through transitions in my life, you proved to me that I could trust more than myself. Every moment I have cried, or that we have cried, those are the moments that drove me to love you. Those are the times that I labeled you mom. After years of disappointments, you have been the constant light in my life. You gave me faith in the human existence. Our bond is a bridge that links me to a home in your heart. Not much can make me believe in prayer . . . but you. So on this day, I pray . . . “Please let her continue to love and care for me like her own.” I love you with every part of my soul.