2003

"What are you running from?" asked the Long Beach therapist as she leaned forward in her ergonomically correct chair.  Her build was slight, her hair, blond, and she wore an argyle sweater, loafers and thin, black stocking socks. I was uncomfortable talking about myself on this my second visit to her office.  Her question was a fair one, but the answer was staggering.  I only had an hour!  "The truth," I responded.

"The truth?"  She let the repetition of my response linger in the air for a bit while she looked penetratingly, very shrink-like, into my face.  The answer, quite candidly, came out of my mouth, bypassing any clear signal from my mind.  I did not know what I meant.  "The truth about your father?"

"And life."  Coming face to face with all I had dealt with was like looking in the mirror to see such a horrific reflection, so different from what I thought I would see, as to almost depair of ever restoring it to its norm. "Afraid that if I really stopped to consider the mess, I would completely implode, maybe never stop crying."

"So you think you are running away from life?"

"I think I want to go to a place where none of this ever  happened.  Reach out to a new life and begin a different history."  I was wringing my hands, abashed and uncertain. "I'm sure that is why I reached out in the wrong direction, making my life an even more profoundly chaotic enigma."

"I see."  My therapist stopped to jot something down in her notepad, and I am surprised by the tears that wash my face.  I thought I was speaking rather impassively, but I recognized the emotion as shame.  I wished I had not come.  Shifting my body away from her, I looked out of the window, unable to control the crying.  Before I could resume cognitive conversation with the therapist, I had a wad of mascara stained, soggy tissues in my lap.  I honestly thought her next question would be, "Cried much?"

Had she posed the question, the answer would have been, "No."  Running from the impossibility of grief had no doubt been the catalyst for coping without crying.  Life was a puzzle I sought to understand; turned out it made no sense. Could not fix the life I was in; so, start over.  Then I had two lives and both were unspeakably messed up.

Maybe all I needed from my experience with therapy was that one question.  I never returned; it was just too uncomfortable.  However, almost daily I turned her question over in my mind.  A few weeks earlier, out of sheer panic, I left the house in the middle of the night.  Insomnia had made a permanent home in me, and I could not stand spending another entire night "thinking."  I had packed an overnight bag earlier that afternoon and placed it in the back of my car.  I wrote Bill a note I knew he would find the next morning telling him not to worry about me, but I did not know where I was going or when I would be back.  At midnight, I crept from the house, got into my car, and headed east toward Palm Springs.  I did not know what I was doing - but I was definitely running. Like a rat caught in a maze, rushing into dead ends, retreating, and rushing again, the scurrying was unsatisfactory in its vanity.

In Palm Springs at two in the morning, I got a room in a boutique hotel and just paced like a death row inmate waiting for the impending lethal injection.  How to fix my life - to get away from the demons chasing me.  I wanted to live backward.  To start again from 1985 and change history.  I wanted to be the woman I was before the "train wreck."

Whatever peace I was searching for was not in Palm Springs.  At eight o'clock that morning I washed my face, slathered on sunscreen, took the top down on my car and headed west.  By late morning, I was in Santa Barbara and hot!  I pulled in under the flashing "Vacancy" sign of a cottage motel near the beach.  Still the panic churned my stomach and beat a pounding rhythm in my temples.  I did not know how to go on living.  For years I had been able to reach down within myself and pull up the strength to move forward. 

I turned the air conditioner way down, filled the bathtub with hot water and undressed.  As I soaked, nearly fully submerged, I felt surrounded by a palpable despair.  Empty.  That reservoir of innate energy to go on was completely depleted and the soul "sonar" that had detected some small shred of hope before, now searched in silence for signs of life.  I had just enough hope in God to whisper the name of Jesus - hoping to find a searchlight in the darkness.

I toweled off and realized how hungry I was.  It was well after noon by then, and I had not eaten since...I could not remember when.  I threw on some shorts and a tee-shirt, put my hair up in a clasp, dug my sunglasses and some money out of my purse, and set off down the  pedestrian pathway which stretched for miles parallel to the Santa Barbara beach.  Walking eased the thumping in my head, and the steady sound of waves lapping on the sand seemed to calm my inner turmoil from panic to at least bearable.  Deep breaths. Sea gulls.  The cooling ocean breeze.  My senses began to come alive to something more profound than my own introspection.  An idea, only a germ at first, began to form. By evening it would become a prayer. "Let it be possible for me to change my life, God."

It was almost twilight when I arrived back at the little cottage.  I called Bill to let him know I was safe in Ventura County and imploding.  Of course, he had been praying for me.  Wanted to know when I was coming home.  Didn't know.  Needed to get a grip first.  I'm sorry I am such a mess.

In the early evening quiet I began to write, an exercise that has always been the saving of my sanity. Stream of consciousness.  Thoughts and feelings in ink, staring back at me, daring me to put them into some reasonable pattern.  Loss again.  How to pick up the detritus of loss, glue the pieces back in place.  Cracked and repaired is better than thrown away and gone.  Parents.  Friends.  Hope.  Understanding.  Faith.  Certainties drifting in evanescence.  Somewhere I had pulled up anchor and begun to drift, blown by an unfamiliar wind toward an unknown port.  I wanted to go home, back to Camelot where everything was golden, no one too human, and I had not been tested and found wanting in the crucible of pain. I was running away from ME.