Fireflies (22 page)

My treatment was a combination of visits to a psychiatrist and a drug called Xanax. Part of a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, Xanax (a cousin of Valium) works by affecting the ability of neurotransmitters to relay stress messages. Put simply, the drug stops the brain from sending out panic signals. It’s an effective drug. It works. The trouble is, its side effects include foggy thinking and short term-memory loss. These inadvertent results aren’t good for anybody, but for a writer they’re disastrous. One reason I wrote little for two years after Matt’s death is that I’d get to the middle of a sentence and not be able to remember how it began or how it was supposed to end. So the task became to use as little Xanax as possible while struggling to come to terms with Matthew’s death and get the broken part of me to heal. The trouble is, Xanax is addictive. I later discovered that only about a third of the people who take it for a considerable period of time ever manage to stop. There’s a phenomenon called “rebound.” If you take enough of it, your body gets so used to it that when you reduce it with intentions of stopping altogether, you reach a point where your body says “Wait a minute, what’s going on, I need that stuff,
where is it?
” In other words, you’re addicted; and when you try to stop you experience withdrawal, a stress that weakens the already weakened stress valve you’ve been trying to repair. The consequence is a panic attack caused not by the original trauma but by reducing the treatment for the trauma. What a mess. I started with four milligrams of Xanax a day. I reduced it to three and a half. Waited. Reduced it to three. Waited. Two and a half. Two. One and a half. One. And bang, I had clusters of panic attacks that forced me back to taking four milligrams of Xanax a day. I went through the process six times before I finally overcame the effects of withdrawal.

Don’t misunderstand. If someone close to you has died and you’re suddenly overwhelmed by panic attacks (the two frequently go together), there’s nothing wrong with taking Xanax if a psychiatrist prescribes it. I’ll say it again: a psychiatrist, preferably one with experience in grief counseling. Anxiety/panic disorder is an emotional illness with physical/psychological causes. A family doctor can temporarily treat the physical part by prescribing what amounts to a tranquilizer. But if the psychological causes aren’t also addressed, the source of the problem will never be solved, and the risk of getting hooked on medication is high. Indeed, not everyone who needs counseling requires drug therapy. In that regard, psychotherapists (they’re not physicians) can be as helpful as psychiatrists, and if they conclude that a drug like Xanax would be helpful, they can get a psychiatrist to prescribe it.

I’ve met many people so impaired by panic attacks that they need counseling, but for various reasons they refuse to use that resource. Their motive is often fear of what people will think if word gets out that they’ve been to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist. This attitude goes back to an intolerant time when various emotional and physical diseases (depression and cancer among them) had a social stigma. My response is this: Anybody who thinks less of someone for getting psychiatric help isn’t anybody whose opinion has any value in the first place. A further excuse for not getting help is the notion “What do shrinks know? It’s all fake. I’m as smart as they are.” There’s an old joke that an attorney who tries to represent him- or herself in a court of law has a fool for a client. The same applies to anyone with an emotional disorder who thinks that he or she can handle it without the help of an expert. I’m proud to say I spent three years going to a psychiatrist (once a week to start, then once a month). My panic attacks had so aggravated my despair that I contemplated suicide several times, and I credit the psychiatrist for saving my life. After a four-year respite, the panic attacks returned, and without a second thought I immediately sought more help. What does a good psychiatrist or psychotherapist know that the patient doesn’t? Plenty.

I still have a bottle of Xanax in my medicine cabinet, but, knowing my illness better and knowing about alternative methods of treatment (breath control and biofeedback, for example), I’ve learned to use the drug the way I would an aspirin to subdue a headache. The last time I had the prescription refilled, I was pleased to discover that thirty pills of one-milligram strength (which I break in half) had lasted me two years. In the meantime, believing that knowledge is power, I continue to educate myself about the disease. There are many good books on the subject, but for me the most useful is
The Anxiety Disease
, by Dr. David Sheehan, a former director of anxiety research of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. If you know someone who has suddenly become a victim of panic attacks, get that person this book. If you yourself are the victim, do what Dr. Sheehan tells you. Sometimes, when I feel an attack coming on and I don’t know which is going to kill me first, the “coronary” or the “stroke,” I reread several well-thumbed chapters of
The Anxiety Disease
, and remind myself of the true nature of the attack I’m having. That’s often enough to calm my symptoms.

When I was a professor of American literature, one of the novels I most enjoyed teaching was Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel.
It’s one of the few classic American novels that isn’t pessimistic. Wolfe embraced everything in life, its tragedies as much as its triumphs, managing to find all of it ennobling. The epigraph to the novel (I’m condensing it somewhat) announces its theme.

Judged only on its tone, this passage might not seem optimistic, but in the context of the book it is powerfully so. Wolfe says that we existed in another state before we were born. It’s not such a radical idea. Plato had several things to say about this. So do most Eastern religions. We come into exile (birth) and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember where we came from (“the lost lane-end into heaven”). Anything in this existence (“a stone, a leaf”) is worthy of study because it might be the trigger that frees our repressed memory and allows us to recall the perfect existence from which we were separated. If we’re alert, we should always be looking for the unfound door that will take us back to where we began. The “angel” of the title is our soul. The “home” it is looking for is the ideal existence above this illusory physical one. From that ideal world we once knew, something calls to us, our ghost, our spirit, to return: “by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

I find this theme eerie and profound. It addresses the loneliness that even the most optimistic of us feel. At the same time it gives us an answer to that loneliness by urging us to grasp every aspect of life, no matter how insignificant something might seem or how painful it might be, because all experience leads to an understanding that takes us to a higher level and an even higher one after that, eventually to the perfection from which we came. That’s a hard notion—to accept the grief that comes our way. Lord, do I know. But I keep thinking of that universal spiritual force I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming transcendental spirit that Emerson and Thoreau wrote about and that van Gogh depicted in his paintings. Whitman said it well:

Whitman’s words are basically what
Look Homeward, Angel
is about. Life doesn’t begin and end. Like energy, it only changes its form. In the years after Matthew’s death, constantly remembering my vision of the fireflies, I have come to think of life at its ultimate as a speeding point of light and that Matthew has been translated into one of those points. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But one of the lessons I took away from this horrid experience is that as long as I refused to accept Matthew’s death, my mind and my body rebelled. Oh, I admitted that he was dead, but I kept fixating on the past, on events
before
he died, telling myself how wonderful life had been before he got sick. And life indeed
was
wonderful back then, by virtue of being life. But my refusal to put my mind in the present was a form of denying that he was dead. Another American novel I enjoyed teaching (this one pessimistic) is John Barth’s
The End of the Road.
In it, a character observes that reason and logic can’t account for the world. There’s no ultimate reason for Cleveland Stadium to seat a specific number of spectators. That number could have been more or less. The number it does seat just happens to be the way things are. “There’s no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn’t be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn’t happen to be the case.
The world is everything that is the case
, and what the case is is not a matter of logic.” Why is gold yellow? Why is there one moon? Why are there two sexes? No necessary reason. Things just turned out that way. Why is Matthew dead? Same answer. But as long as I refused to accept what was the case, I was in terrible shape. One day, about four years after his death, I surrendered. I stopped dwelling on the past. I accepted the present, the after-Matt present. The day I came to terms with the fact that life would never be as it was, that it had changed and transformed—that was the day I began to heal. Because I came to believe in what Wolfe and Whitman had written about. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed.” E=mc
²
.

But I had another reason for thinking about Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel.
Its hero is Eugene Gant, a version of Wolfe. The novel depicts his preadult experiences, including the death of his brother Ben (one of the most famous deaths in American fiction). In the book’s climax, Eugene is about to leave his hometown of Altamont, North Carolina (in real life, Asheville), and to embark on the continuing great adventure of his life (Wolfe’s point is that
every
life, its pain and glory, is an adventure). Eugene stands to the side of the town square and has a kind of mystical vision in which he sees himself in the equivalent of a filmic double exposure multiplied by thousands. Every version of himself at every age crisscrosses the square. To Eugene’s continuing astonishment, multiple versions of his dead brother also appear, chronicling Ben’s life in the square. Eugene rushes to him and calls him a ghost, which Ben denies. “But I saw you die,” Eugene objects. Ben replies that he isn’t dead, that he isn’t a ghost. “Then what are you?” Eugene insists, adding, “You are dead…. Or do men die?” It’s a Whitmanlike moment, followed by Ben’s asking Eugene what he expects to find by going away. Eugene’s answer is, “Myself.” He says that he hopes to find himself in the larger world. But where
is
the world? he wonders, to which Ben replies, “Nowhere….
You
are your world.” A new significance of the title now presents itself. “Look homeward” now means to look inward as well as outward, that the inside and the outside reflect on each, both leading us to the ideal otherworld from which we came.

These thoughts were on my mind when, after Matthew’s death, my wife and I started having multiple-exposure visions similar to what Eugene saw in the town square. To us, Iowa City was so synonymous with Matthew that virtually every street and principal building reminded us of him, gave us images of him. The library, the record stores, the movie theaters, the ice cream shop, the pizza parlors, the grade school down the street, the junior high a few blocks away. I can still see him coming down the steps of that school, where I picked him up to drive him to the hospital for more chemotherapy. In spirit, he peopled the area, but the memories were a bittersweet refusal to accept the after-Matt present, to deal with what was the case; so finally, in 1992, Donna and I decided that we had to move on. Iowa City had been a wonderful home for twenty-two years. We had raised a family there. We had also lost a son there. The city represented a lifetime. Now, somewhere else, we were going to attempt a new one. Look homeward, angel.

But where to go? One thing was certain—the landscape would have to be different from the lush rolling hills of Iowa. Ocean or mountains were obvious alternatives. By chance, we watched a PBS show called
This Old House
, which depicted the distinctive adobe pueblo architecture of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I later wrote about this moment in a novel,
Extreme Denial
(an appropriate title, given my former psychological state). The flat-roofed, sprawling houses with their thick walls, deeply recessed windows, and rounded corners were so unusual that we felt we were looking at buildings in another country. Their clay-colored stucco blended wonderfully with the orange, red, and yellow of their high-desert surroundings. Mountain foothills were covered with junipers and piñon trees. The mountains themselves were rich with aspen.